Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
17.10.16
An easier to read, self-upadating site is available
The Cognitive Dynamics newsfeed
This auto-updating RSS and Atom feed is part of the lift off of the scientific revolution driven website: Cognitive Dynamics
You may also find our project via its Facebook group and via Twitter, among other options.
Enjoy!
23.2.16
How many Democracies are there today?
The way that we currently refer to governments was largely defined by Aristotle in the 4th century B.C.E. Unlike his predecessors whose demarcations were limited and grossly incomplete, such as occurs in Plato's idealist The Republic, Aristotle clearly defined in Politics not only the different types of governments that exist but also the vast array that could be generated by combining features of the different types of main configurations; moreover, it also provided the mechanisms through which each government gained its character. Most of this work would be later paraphrased during the Enlightenment, in a simplified manner, with The Spirit of Laws published in 1748 by Montesquieu (whose full name was Charles de Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu). These works, along with the political writings of John Locke, were greatly influential throughout Occidental culture, both in the Old and the New World.
In the case of Locke, his influence was such that he is often referred to as "the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution" of 1688 in England when King James II was overthrown via invasion by a Dutch fleet and army that without much initial pushback managed to institute William III as King of England, Ireland, and Scotland, leading to the Bill of Rights of 1689, one of most important documents in U.K. politics still today. The Glorious Revolution marks the end of the specter of absolutism in England, and the Bill of Rights cemented the status of the country as a parliamentary system in which the powers of the monarch would be heavily constrained. The Constitutional Monarchy thus established has continued uninterrupted from 1689 until the present day.
Still, John Locke's notoriety, in contrast to Montesquieu, did not arise out of his political demarcations but rather because he articulated the conditions for what would become the Liberal State; for example, he wrote about checks and balances of power, the rule of law, the right to due process, and the necessity for Life, Liberty, and Property, which Thomas Jefferson rephrased as Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness in the Declaration of Independence for rhetoric effect, that is, naming property would not provoke a similar rise in the passions underlying public sentiment, passions that were extremely needed at that time as independence from British rule only enjoyed about one-third support from the colonist even though the war between imperial forces and the colonies had already been ranging for over a year, thus you can imagine how much the support for independence was prior to the start of the conflict.
As will be seen further along, it is actually the Liberal State that people refer to as democracies, with countries that do not abide to its tenants being labeled as nefarious or failing states even though their actual governments and political processes are identical to those of countries considered democracies. This is, of course, a grave error, but if political debates centered around Liberal States, they would be unable to garner support for the position because of the unyielding opposition that exists to the term liberal. Democracy and democratic, therefore, are nothing more than euphemism for the correct term that people no longer want to use or rather, because some no longer wanted to use it, most people in our societies no longer understand what it means.
Be that as it may, it was Aristotle who provided the definitions that have stood the test of time. He did not create the terminologies, of course, as these were already widely in use long before his birth; rather, he properly compiled and defined them in a systematic manner, demarcating their mechanisms and also showing how these could be meshed to create mixed republics that combined qualities of the different sorts.
 |
Portrait of Aristotle, the man whose succinct arguments
allowed his copious written production to leave a
significant mark on almost every subject.
|
Defining Political Systems: Aristotle's Advantage over Modern Theorists
Today, our modern societies and even some of the world's foremost scholars find it hard to define the types of governments, a fact that often becomes a bit embarrassing when a nation's institutions are overthrown and a newly formed government takes over. An underlying debate often rages on how to refer to the new political system. That debate is always messy and, when it continues for a long time, borders on humiliating. Why is it so hard for us to define what form a new government takes? It isn't actually, but political loyalties and affiliations stand in the way of participants stating the correct terms outright, sometimes to the point that these affinities prevent people from even discerning what the proper nomenclature is.If it is so problematic for us today, how could Aristotle do this task in an exacting way millennia ago?
Setting aside the power of propaganda that permeates politics everywhere at present, the answer to the aforementioned question is surprisingly simple. All the places where Aristotle lived are circled red in the map below.
 |
Imagine how many city-states Aristotle must have seen through his journeys.
|
Ancient Greece had long been a loose collection of city-states, each with its own unique government. The Greeks still had this fluid arrangement when Aristotle was born, and it was still thus throughout most of his life until the rise of his most illustrious pupil, Alexander the Great of Macedonia, who as an adolescent accompanied his father Phillip II of Macedon as they conquered the mainland Greek city-states using soldiers on horse's backs to route the famed formations of Greek infantries. This marked the first end of the city-state arrangement and first rise of an actual Greek Empire. But expansion beyond mainland Greece had not taken place, and upon Phillip and Alexander's return to Macedonia, a bitter family quarrel over succession took place that led to Alexander and his mother having to flee into exile. Soon thereafter, while at the wedding of his daughter, Phillip II was assassinated by the captain of his own bodyguards.
Alexander was proclaimed king, with support from the army and the Macedonian nobility, at the early age of 20. His subsequent military incursions into Egypt, the Middle East, all the way to Iran (then Persia), stopping at the natural border of the Himalayas Mountains that had always protected the Indian subcontinent from invaders. This march East is considered one the most culturally significant events in world history, and it also marked the beginning of a Greek Empire, asserting Greek culture as the new dominant force in the known world. Though the Roman's would later conquer the Greeks, Greek culture nevertheless remained as the clear victor insofar as the cultural realm is concerned.
Prior to Phillip II and Alexander, though large alliances or leagues would form where one city-state such as Athens or Sparta often enjoyed overwhelming influence, each city-state still retained their own particular government. Since these governments ruled a city and some surrounding farm lands, there was ample margin for the different states to experiment with all sorts of political mechanisms and government configurations. As a result, the geographically tiny Greek territories arguably enjoyed a larger variety of types of governments than does at present the entire Earth.
Aristotle didn't have to guess, infer, theorize or speculate; he was a witness and observed. He saw the different types of governments at work. For further information, he would consult then recent historical documents as testimony for how configurations had shifted and changed - and why. As an avid reader with an analytical mind, this wasn't a particularly daunting or consuming task. He simply needed to create another taxonomy - a political taxonomy - and he was quite skilled at developing taxonomies; for instance, our current classification system for living beings owes its origins to the taxonomies that he developed. He wrote most of these and of his great works, including Politics, upon returning to a changed Athens under Alexander's rule, that is, after having traveled Ancient Greece more extensively than most. He would only move once after that long stay, to his mother's family estate, fleeing an Athenian populace that was hostile to him after Alexander's death not only because of his close ties to the imposed viceroy but also because he was Macedonian himself. Though he died within the year, he fled the city because he would not accept Socrates' fate, stating - "I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy."
The Definition of Democracy
The basic typology in Politics divides states along two axis: quantity of political decision-makers and whether the specific configuration was good (i.e., correct or virtuous) or bad (i.e., perverted or vicious). These two parameters generate the following table.| Correct | Deviant | |
| One Ruler | Kingship (Monarchy) | Tyranny (Dictatorship) |
| Few Rulers | Aristocracy (Meritocracy) | Oligarchy (Plutocracy) |
| Many Rulers | Polity | Democracy |
Since Monarchy and Tyranny remain pretty much self-explanatory, a brief observation regarding rule by the few ought to be made before delving into the systems of rule by the many.
Aristotle argued that, wherever a talented, skilled and virtuous subset of the population exists, the government that yields the best results is Aristocracy, which literally means "rule of the best" qualified citizens. Currently, such configurations are typically called Meritocracy instead because the concepts aristocrat and noble were erroneously and arrogantly conflated for centuries in Europe. This mistaken entanglement has been so frequent and constant for so long that it has made it into most English dictionaries as the standard and only definition of the word, thus shamefully disregarding the word's etymology altogether. Nobles, to be sure, are almost always oligarchs, that is, rich landlords and business owners, with very few among them qualifying as aristocrats in the original sense of being among the best, given that greatness in skill is obtained through relentless practice and hard-work, that excellence cannot be bought or inherited. Thus, Sparta was a crystal clear Oligarchy even though it was governed by elected noblemen alongside two kings in charge of the military that counterbalanced one another at home and during military campaigns (a trait later replicated, it is worth noting, by the two consul system of the early Roman Republic in a similar though not exact or hereditary manner).
 |
Click to Enlarge.
Main types of governments and their defining
characteristics according to Aristotle's Politics.
|
Though it is obvious that a benevolent, unselfish, and capable group of highly skilled rulers would be the most likely to articulate and successfully implement policies that would benefit and further the interests of a society as a whole, not being naive Aristotle recognized that these ideal conditions are a rarity in reality and, therefore, considered mixed republics as the most optimal systems regardless of the peculiarities of a specific society. A mixed republic combining mechanisms of all the types in the table above could presumably be successful anywhere because it could satisfy the interests of all sectors of society. Today, it is this recommendation that conforms our governmental model, not the creation or preservation of Democracies.
Returning to the topic of the rule by the many, please note that Democracy is placed as the deviant form of the many rulers category because it is the configuration where the majority overpowers the minority. By etymology, Democracy means "rule of the people". Most frequently the majority ("the people") consists of poor citizens owning little property or none at all; given the opportunity to decree via majority-rule, these would typically proceed to oppress or dispossess the wealthier classes. This Aristotelian argument is the very same offered by then would-be President of the United States, James Madison, in the Federalist No. 10, widely considered the most important among The Federalist Papers, a collection of newspaper articles that disseminated arguments in favor of the ratification of the constitution still in place today and was published under the pseudonym Publius, being written mostly by Madison and Alexander Hamilton, with only 5 out of the 85 articles having been penned by John Jay who fell ill soon after the project began.
The 4th President of the United States, widely considered the "Father of the Constitution", made explicit the claim that the proposed system of government would wipe out the democratic tendencies that could take hold in the smaller states by federating them under the regulation of a Republic, thereby vanishing the specter that some -- or all! -- states could eventually reconfigure into democracies. Setting that aside, the question of concern here is whether democracies (or even polities) exist in our contemporary world.
"Democratic", Propaganda, and the Republic
Many of us alive today are bombarded daily with the frequent use of the word "democracy" and its variants, such as democratic society or democratic principles or representative democracy or electoral democracy, ad infinitum. It isn't just politicians and media repeating these terms endlessly; we even do it to ourselves, and our friends and acquaintances often employ them too. Unless you tune yourself out completely, it is unlikely that you will not hear some variant of the word "democracy" today, or any other day for that matter. It's everywhere!The following map is an example of how the global stage is prototypically painted to people living in the Occidental (and Occidentalized) world.
 |
Political world map characterized by propaganda displaying countries by government types
in the fashion typically portrayed to people in the Western world.
|
This map is brimming with the propagandized view disseminated nonstop throughout Western nations, a fact that may be readily appreciated by considering the definition of Anocracy. Even if the map above strikes you as all-too-familiar, it is very likely that you've never heard that label used before, but this shouldn't faze you one bit. The word "Anocracy" is so recent and of such infrequent use that it isn't even recognized as a real word by most English dictionaries; in fact, the word was first used in 1946, appearing in a reprinted translation. Anocracy allegedly refers to a state configuration that blends democratic and autocratic principles in a way that is incoherent and hence ineffective, leading to political instability.
In the map above, both Russia and Venezuela are stated to be closed Anocracies, which one may guess is the worst form of Anocracy. You may not agree with the policies of Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chávez, and you may also object to the means employed by their governments to enforce such policies. I feel the same way. Nonetheless, is this cause enough to label those states "closed anocracies"? To find that answer, we ought to ask ourselves the questions that relate to the proposed definition of the made-up word considered.
Is Russia politically unstable? Not at all! The opposite is true. In 1999, when President Boris Yeltsin nominated Vladimir Putin to be Prime Minister, he became the Russian Federation's fifth Prime Minister in 18 months. Now that is political instability! Putin actually became president, also in 1999, because Boris Yeltsin was forced to resign, which is another sign of political instability. Since then, Putin has won 3 presidential elections with such overwhelming support that a second round of voting to achieve a majority has never been necessary. For his second term, he received an awe-inspiring 71% of the vote.
Since in the Russian Federation a person can only be president twice in a row, Putin backed Dmitry Medvedev for that office, who received 70.28% of the vote in the first round with his closest opponent garnering only 17.72% support. Under Medvedev, Putin was nominated and confirmed as Prime Minister, completing a four-year term before running for president again, winning easily once more. He currently enjoys approval ratings that his Western counterparts can only dream about. Does this sound like political instability?
What about Venezuela? The map above is from 2011, that is, before Hugo's cancer-related death in 2013, the first year of his 4th presidential term. He held the highest executive office for almost 13 years, from 2000 onward. Though a presidential term in Venezuela now lasts 6 years, Chávez was elected four times because he unseated himself during his first term after only two years in office by creating a new constitution that required new elections to be held. Autocrats aren't known for giving the populace extra chances to take them out of power, but Chávez did just that and he did so early in his first presidency, way before he could have successfully coerced the population into reluctantly supporting him.
Immediately after becoming president on February 2, 1999, he called for a referendum on whether to create a Constitutional Assembly, referendum that took place on April 25 of that very same year and in which the proposal garnered 88% voter support. That extremely high percentage evidences that a new constitution was seen as necessary, and that fact ought to give you some idea of the political instability that Venezuela had been suffering up to that point.
Another referendum to choose delegates for the assembly was held as soon as possible, on July 25; an overwhelming 900 out of the 1,171 nominated candidates did not support Chávez. Even with this numeric disadvantage, the candidates he supported won 125 seats, that is, 95% of total assembly, including all the seats that were reserved for indigenous groups that have historically been excluded from the political process altogether. This inclusiveness and support from marginalized group indicates a "closed anocracy", right? The citizens voted on whether to adopt the resulting constitution in December 1999 with 72% of the voting citizenry casting their ballots in favor of constitutional change. A mega-election that included all possible offices was held on July, and 60% of the participants cast their ballots for Chávez.
In 2002, a military coup d'etat took place and Chávez, having himself tried to overthrow the government a decade earlier, agreed to be arrested by the high-ranking officers spearheading the charge. A pro-business oligarch was immediately sworn in as president, and his first order of business was to decree the new constitution as null and void. However, just mere days later, popular backlash forced him to step down amid nationwide protests. Hugo Chávez returned to power in less than a week. Autocrats aren't known for giving themselves up; they usually fight to the bitter end and prolong civil strife as they cling to power, like the autocrat Bashar al-Assad of Syria is doing now, and he is winning thanks to both Russian and "Allied" Western military support. Does any of this sound like "anocracy"? Hugo won the next presidential with an even larger majority and higher voter turnout.
Again, you may not agree with the policies of Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chávez. There is no shortage of solid reasons from which to raise objections, particularly regarding policy implementation and enforcement. But is that sufficient ground to classify entire nations as "closed anocracies"? No, it is not. Personally, I am highly suspicious of all political personalism because of the immense potential danger involved; I also abhor populism, deeming it one of the worse forms of pandering, since time after time populist agendas have provided little in the way of long-term benefits - at great costs! Most of the strategies of both Putin and Chávez are counterproductive, and some seem just not right. (Not to mention that the historical and international law implications of Russia's almost overnight annexation of a piece of European soil scares the bejeezus out of me.) Nevertheless, propaganda is propaganda and ought to be called out whenever it's spotted. The fact remains that Putin heads a semi-presidentialist republic (i.e., one that has both a President and a Prime Minister, like France's current Fifth Republic), and Chávez governed a presidentialist republic (i.e., where the highest executive is endowed with both foreign and domestic policy powers, like USA). Though we may have our qualms with the particular choices of a nation's citizenry, do we really need to unleash disrespect over their entire state?´
[For those interested in the previous line of argument, please note that Ecuador is also listed as a "closed anocracy", and this categorization is entirely due to the developmental economist Rafael Correa having won the presidency in 2007 as an independent candidate without any party support and offering no legislative candidates. That case, more than those above, illustrates the propaganda. Correa quickly brought political stability to a country that had had 7 presidents in only 10 years, an extremely political unstable situation. I urge you to research that case.]
In contrast to the typical map above, the one below - from the List of Countries by Government System Wiki - uses more accurate terminology and sheds most of the propaganda (sadly, a footnote was added to let the propaganda back in). It is worth observing that neither Democracy nor the nonsense term Anocracy is used once in its entire legend, yet Monarchies are listed, as these very well should, despite the fact that these are nowhere to be found on the prior map.
 |
| A more accurate political world map. Countries are depicted by the constitutional form of their current government. |
Democracy is by definition a system of government, so why isn't the term employed in the map above? The short answer is that it would be inaccurate and misleading. There are no democracies in the world today - none, zero, zip, nada, not a single one.
Why are most people told on a daily basis that we live in democracies? I will not address the propaganda purposes as I am sure that you can figure those out by yourself; however, it is useful to address the common justifications that have led the vast majority of the population to believe that some democracies do exist. There are two main justifications.
Against Two Justifications of Why Democracies Exist Today
- Justification #1: Citizens vote to elect their leaders; therefore, everyone is free to participate in determining the fate of their nation, a trait that is obviously democratic.
 |
Click to Enlarge.
Diagram depicts the institutions of the Democracy in Athens
during the 4th century B.C.E., what these institutions did,
their makeup, and how the officials in each were selected.
|
Having explained what the mechanisms of a democracy are, let's return to the topic of voting and elections, which is the principal justification offered nowadays for "representative" democracy.
What is an election?
By definition, an election is a transfer power from the voters to the elected individual or, differently stated, from the many to the few. Throughout Ancient Greece it was recognized that elections virtually always favor the rich and those with long-standing known family names that were raised in privileged environments. It is easy to deduce by logic that people with such traits cannot possibly represent the bulk of the citizenry because their life experiences do not resemble even slightly that of the rest. Given these facts and remembering the Aristotelic table presented earlier, it is clear that elections are the defining mechanism of oligarchies. Aristotle states -
"That all offices are filled by election and none by lot [lottery] is one of these oligarchical characteristics; that the power of inflicting death or banishment rests with a few persons is another; and there are others. In a well attempted polity there should appear to be both elements [democratic and oligarchical] and yet neither" (Politics, Book IV, Part IX)
In this quote Aristotle opens the door to our being able to consider a polity instead of a democracy, polity being a more mixed and balanced form of government. Are our current "democracies" in fact examples of polity? This question is easy to ask now that exact conditions were provided. Three simple questions need to be answered.
1) Are all important public offices filled by elections?
In most contemporary Liberal States, juries are the only exception, but some contemporary "democracies" do not even have juries, such as the Republic of Chile in which judges are not elected but appointed; moreover, in some countries that do have juries, there are also military tribunals that do not use juries or that use juries not chosen via lottery. It could be further argued that our current systems are even worse, or more oligarchic, because the vast majority of public positions are not elected at all but rather appointed by elected officials or, more problematic still, chosen by civil servants appointed by elected officials, and that chain actually goes on several more degrees in a way that promotes favoritism, clientelism, and even nepotism, a tendency that if taken to extremes straddles the line that demarcates Fascism. And I didn't even mention the mechanism of a Court of Appeals where a judge may overturn a jury's decision without using or even consulting a jury.
2) Is the power of inflicting death in the hands of few people?
Yes, it clearly is. Even if someone were to make the case that juries have that power in some places (not most) -- conveniently ignoring the power of the police, armed forces, and intelligence agencies to inflict death with impunity -- it perhaps may be sufficient to note that the least amount of people that an Athenian jury may have had was 201 jurors, a number that would climb as high as 1501 jurors on really important cases like those involving murder. Even the lower number is quite far from the contemporary 12 juror system, and the democratic nature of the larger number becomes clear when we consider that the Athenian Democracy included around 30,000 to 50,000 citizens throughout its history (about 10% of its total population. And no, that low percentage is a null issue, even if it included slavery. If you had a country largely populated by immigrants, like Luxemburg, Qatar and United Arab Emirates, would you say that non-citizen immigrants need to be given the right to vote in order for democracy to exist? No, you would not. The demarcation issue rests on citizen power and participation, not on who are citizens or the ratio of citizen to residents.).
3) Do contemporary "democracies" appear to have truly democratic alongside oligarchic elements in such a way that these do not appear to be either democracies or oligarchies?
Not only are there no meaningful democratic elements in place, current systems appear thoroughly oligarchic to anyone that studies them to any significant extent. The oligarchy and current oligarchic policies are out of the open for anyone to see. Thank you Internet!
- Justification #2: Universal suffrage (i.e., no gender or race conditions on eligibility to vote) and the elimination of property and education requirements for voting and to hold elected offices transformed Liberal States that tended towards oligarchy into de facto democracies.
Consider the United States of America for example. USA natives do not say or want to say that their democracy began in 1920, but that is when a constitutional amendment guaranteed women the right to vote. Yet that may be giving too much credit since it wasn't until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that discrimination based on race really began to be enforced. People there say (and are frequently taught in school) that the Declaration of Independence gave birth to their democracy. Most USA natives aren't even aware that their current national system is in fact their second one because the original Articles of Confederation failed miserably, being unable to pay the outstanding debt from the Revolutionary War amid a constitutional powerlessness to collect taxes. "Americans" want to believe the foundational myth that their forefathers created a most perfect union from the get-go, a union that will last forever.
That country's elimination of property requirements is a more complex story because prior to the 20th century each state had the right to place their own restrictions on the right to vote as they saw fit. Creating a federation, not a centralized government, the Constitution of the United States of America did not originally state anything about voting rights, requirements, or qualifications. Only when faced with the death of their nation via fragmentation did that change, with the Civil War of 1861-1865 triggering a process of federal encroachment on state self-determination that continues its march to this day.
Regardless of the dates, is there a basis to accept the justification? Did the expansion of the voter base and of those qualified to hold public office bring about the existence of democracy (or polity) in the modern world? Aristotle writes -
"On the other hand, that some should deliberate about all is oligarchical. This again is a mode which, like the democratical has many forms. When the deliberative class being elected out of those who have a moderate qualification are numerous and they respect and obey the prohibitions of the law without altering it, and anyone who has the required qualification shares in the government, then, just because of this moderation, the oligarchy inclines towards polity. But when only selected individuals and not the whole people share in the deliberations of the state, then, although, as in the former case, they observe the law, the government is a pure oligarchy." (Politics, Book IV, Part XIV)
As can be appreciated from this excerpt, the issue of demarcation is not about the size or breadth of the eligible voter pool but rather about how many elected officials there are in relation to that constituency. This is a matter of proportions. It was already explained above that the mechanism of election is prototypically oligarchical. However, if there are a lot of elected officials in relation to the total quantity of citizens, then the balance tilts in favor of a government of the people. On the contrary, when the quantity of people in charge of making the decisions that guide a state and its government is small when compared to the overall population of the citizenry, that is an oligarchy. Do current ratios of voters to elected officials reflect a rule of the many? No, they clearly do not, even in small countries. Most people do not feel represented by their elected officials, and the reason they feel this way is... well... because they aren't being represented.
Oh, the Irony!
What eliminating indirect elections and formal requirements accomplished
Most of us agree as a matter of principle that landownership and amounts of property shouldn't be requisites for elected office. If a citizen has the will and talents to labor towards the common good, he or she ought to be able to so... possessions or no possessions. Similarly, that the highest positions steering state policy and action be appointed by career politicians and apparatchiks instead of chosen by the general public is a proposition that many feel uneasy with. Yet these judgments, as categorical as they may seem, display a gradient structure of degrees. Should high offices require a minimum age, perhaps to discourage lack of experience and temperamental attitudes? Should the ability to read and write be required? Surely, few object to the currently standing literacy constraint or to the age minimums; therefore, the moral qualms do not rest on having conditions beyond citizenship and adulthood, but rather with the content, in particular the property requirements. Even the Founding Fathers of the United States had their issues with such stipulations, which were rampant in England around that time, so they did not postulate them formally but rather delegated the right to set conditions to each member state for their federal high offices. Still, does this mean that the Founding Fathers thought that the states would not pass similar requirements to the English? You'd have to be delusional to think that they were not well aware that strict barriers to entry were going to be erected, and this did surely did not bother them; hopefully, the states would formulate qualifications that were less excessive than the English standard, but even if these chose to be harsher, it wasn't their problem, avoiding political responsibility or blame. There is a saying for that - it's like having your cake and eating it too.Even today, a lot of the most powerful roles around the world are assigned through appointment. Setting aside the pivotal higher offices of the European Union, in both parliamentary and semi-presidentialist republics, the Prime Minister in charge of domestic policy is chosen by legislators, not by universal suffrage. Still, that is a far cry away from, say, the United States in the 19th century, when the eligible, literate, male property owners could not choose not only the President (which voters still don't elect, it is done by delegates that ordinary folk don't even know that they really exist, or who the delegates are, or the fact that there is no law forcing them to vote for the candidate that won the popular vote in their state; see the comic video below), they also couldn't elect their senators, supposed representatives that used to be handpicked by each state's legislature. Were these mechanisms an encroachment of political power? Yes, of course they were, but they were also something else.
"Adam Ruins Everything:
Why the Electoral College Ruins Democracy"
(Mobile user: if the video isn't embedded, follow the link above.)
The video's title is a prime example of how even those
who criticize current systems have become just as blinded
by the frequent repetition as uncritical individuals.
The title of the video implies that direct elections
would be a democracy; however, this is nonsense.
Elections transfer power from the many to the few.
Why the Electoral College Ruins Democracy"
(Mobile user: if the video isn't embedded, follow the link above.)
The video's title is a prime example of how even those
who criticize current systems have become just as blinded
by the frequent repetition as uncritical individuals.
The title of the video implies that direct elections
would be a democracy; however, this is nonsense.
Elections transfer power from the many to the few.
Given the advantages of the rich, powerful, and famous
in garnering votes, elections ultimately generate
Oligarchy as the form of government.
in garnering votes, elections ultimately generate
Oligarchy as the form of government.
The aforementioned mechanisms were - and still are - intended to tilt the balance a little towards Aristocracy by placing conditions on mechanisms that have been known to otherwise ultimately lead to pure Oligarchy. The success of constraints has been, of course, partial at best and futile at worst, or we wouldn't be in the strange, dire situation we are in today. Varying conditions from country to country and sometimes from district to district were influenced by what constraints others had implemented and also by many other factors like popular sentiment, civic culture, and in some cases the high ethical values of some influential individuals. For example, those non-technical factors were key to the early success of the Republic of Chile in the 19th century, a republic that emerged from a reputation as "the land of anarchy" acquired shortly after independence and became the most stable state in Latin America for over a hundred years, a stretch that ended with the election of the Communist Party's Salvador Allende and the subsequent overthrow by - and two-decades long dictatorship of - General Augusto Pinochet. With different conditions came disimilar levels of success; nevertheless, the oligarchic nature of the mechanism itself will always overpower whatever brakes are placed, and once that is achieved there is no going back short of regime change or rewriting constitutional law. But these options seem to be futile too considering the historical track record of not having had a democracy in millennia. Besides, how would current citizens create a democracy if they no longer know what it means? Prior to the 20th century a vast majority of the people articulating new forms of governments for their countries did indeed know what democracy was, and they still chose against it!
The elimination of many of the constraints set during the 19th century, supposedly in the name of democracy, has translated to a surrender of the keys to power to the oligarchy. The irony is not lost on me, and I hope it is no longer lost on you. At least aristocrats are highly skilled people, with intelligence and wisdom, and many care wholeheartedly about the common good. In contrast, oligarchs, with few notable exceptions, work tirelessly to grow or preserve their own wealth, status, and power, to secure the passing of their privilege to their children, and to repay other oligarchs that supported them during their rise by furthering the specific special interest these deem important inasmuch as politically feasible.
With oligarchs in charge around the world, it is not surprising for mass media outlets to bombard the general public through repetition, turning democracy into a mere public relations spin campaign, or to actively disseminate propaganda labeling any country with a government that disagrees with the precepts of the Liberal State, such as the republics of Russia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, as autocratic, undemocratic, anocracies, as threats to democracy that must be dealt with harshly, and so on. The very existence of oligarchy necessitates the motto: the more things change, the more they stay the same. The recent leaders of those "undemocratic" states have taken actions that threaten entrenched interests and sometimes even the very foundations of the Liberal State, and it doesn't matter if they abide by the laws and the constitution in place.
Chávez wanted to create communal property, a concept adversarial to the private property foundation of the Liberal State. Putin has arrested billionaires and nationalized their conglomerates, strengthening state power and its role in the economy, contra the 'leave everyone to their own devices' perspective that oligarchs favor. [Digression: The rise of the so-called Welfare State is a progressive continuation of the Liberal State and, thus, did not change this. What exists now is more or less a 'leave everyone to their own devices and provide basic support when many fail such that they don't starve, freeze to death, or crowd our lovely streets, mainly because that is bad press and also bad for business.]
As for Ecuador, one of the first actions of Correa's government was to analyze International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank debt contracts and the conditions under which those negotiations and signings took place, and what was found were many cases of obvious fraud, bribery, coercion, traffic of influences, and numerous violations of the stipulations of the Ecuadorian constitution. Those contracts were the authorities managed to gather sufficient evidence of wrongdoing were, naturally, declared illegal or sometimes unconstitutional, unchaining the nation from a significant portion of the external debt that had crippled prior administrations into doing the bidding of World Bank and IMF structural reform "recommendations" (though these practices have been going on for around four decades, currently the most salient example of this type of international blackmail is Greece where the "Troika" formulates reforms that the Greek government must make into law or else face default, economic isolation, and have very large segments of its people fall into ruin almost immediately) . Other countries do this kind of auditing and investigating all the time and we not only do not treat them harshly and neither does the mass media; in fact, we praise them for the courage to undertake these necessary yet politically inconvenient efforts. However, Ecuador is not awarded similar treatment because their president openly admits his disdain for liberalism as a political and socio-economic philosophy and what its framework entails in practice, that is, growing social inequality, the rise of corporativism and clientelism in public service, debt-slavery, and the growing social costs that inevitably result.
An enormous and respected scientific literature exists within economics and political science that overwhelmingly shows that all of the issues mentioned are real and widespread. There are even plenty of studies that provide evidence that the framework of liberalism has detrimental effects over the elections processes (an area of research that is mistakenly framed in terms of liberalism being incompatible with democracy). Correa knows this and has surely read a lot of the related work, having earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the University of Illinois. Considering Ecuador's political instability and the dire economic conditions of the majority of its citizens at the time he returned to his country of origin, it is not surprising that his road to power had few stepping stones and was as short as they come. [Note: I have chosen not to link to scientific articles on the aforementioned topics because the existing literature is too large to list even as an approximation and I do not want to give the impression that the linked peer-reviewed papers are more important than other similar works. Please, do you own research responsibly.]
These leaders we are being asked to hate rule over Liberal States, the same as the leaders we are supposed to like; they have not changed this fact, nor have they changed the systems of their republics into something different or new. The fact that undemocratic is an insult hurled at any leader whose policies most Occidental leaders do not like is, in itself, evidence of the propaganda role that this term has been made to take on. By repetition, as soon as the term undemocratic is emitted and repeated, an emotional reaction is triggered in vast swaths of our citizenry that is followed by the categorization of the thing being referred to as an evil that must be neutralized, isolated, crippled, or destroyed outright. Yes, Operant Conditioning works like a charm, and it is so easy and fast to carry out that it can be done on a society, a set of societies, and even entire civilizations at costs far outweighed by its benefits.
The word Democracy needs saving. It has been mutilated and made into a mockery of itself. The meaning of democracy is, I regret to report, basically dead.
Luckily, unlike organic bodies, words, concepts, and meaning may die but they may also be brought back to life. The first step is to understand what the term means, what mechanisms lead to its existence, and to visualize what governments like that would look like. The second step is to share your newfound knowledge with as many people as possible. Even if you wouldn't like a democracy, you should still share what the term means, at the very least to help those around you be less manipulated. Democracy is dead, but it can be brought back to life.
Why this discussion matters for your Cognitive Dynamics
Language is the greatest tool human beings have ever developed or will ever develop. Language massively augments our inborn cognitive capacities. They allow us to better remember things that we would otherwise forget. They help us make fine-grained distinctions that allow us to think about things that would otherwise never pass through our heads; more important still, the fine-grained distinctions each of us has managed to accumulate directly affect the way you perceive the world, such that the more accurate concepts you gather, the richer and livelier your surroundings become. That cognition and perception are separate things is a myth. To avoid getting technical and give the simplest example possible, Chinese people can distinguish speech sounds that you are simply unable to, and you can distinguish speech sounds that they cannot no matter how hard they try. If you hadn't learned a language, how many less sounds would you be able to perceive? A richer lexicon that refers to more concepts and makes slight distinctions inside a concept greatly increases your cognitive abilities and even increases the size of your brain. Thus, a fully bilingual individual is far less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease later in life, and, were they to develop that condition, the onset would be on average 5 years later than a person that speaks one language. However, if the bilingual speaker starts mixing both languages, using them in tandem such that code-switching between the two effectively means that they supplant the concepts of one with those of the other, melding both into a single entity, that speaker has effectively wasted his linguistic knowledge and future benefits to health via sheer laziness and convenience, as happens to a lot of Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United States.The shared, public, externalized, and externalizing nature of any language means that we use words as clothe hangers or anchors. Words become places that connect meaning and particular thoughts and specific emotions and detailed attitudes. It is through concepts that we are best able to bring all these pieces together, pieces that our brains would find it difficult to associate without words. Moreover, because words are external and tools for communication, these anchors are crucial throughout our decision-making, planning, and the execution of courses of actions.
Most of us have been taught to believe that intelligence is a natural trait, like height or feet size, and the amount of intelligence you have is a gift or a curse that you received just by being born. Except in the cases of genetic mutations producing gross mental deficits, the nativist conception taught to us is wrong, and not just a little wrong. Your intelligence may go up in time and it may go down. IQ scores can fluctuate wildly if a few years have passed. The scores of the aptitude tests that you take to get into college can also fluctuate wildly. Though these scores often do not fluctuate that much, that reflects the fact that your habits and your internal cognitive dynamics probably did not change that much during that amount of time, not that there is something genetic keeping you in your place. That view is highly convenient to the people selling the tests, and it is also convenient to the people that do not want to change or grow. But the fact remains that intelligence is not a trait, it is a skill - the ability to discern, to make what happens around and inside you intelligible - and every skill can be vastly improved with practice and proper materials. What would be proper materials, in this case?
I find it odd that people speak often of others being intelligent, but rarely do people say anymore that someone is wise or unwise. The fuel for intelligence is accurate knowledge, and that is wisdom. The better information you have gathered, the wiser you are, the better distinctions you can make, and thus the more accurately you are able to weave the distinctions you have made and the information associated with these. Intelligence without wisdom is like owning a private jet that has no flaps or landing gear. Sure, you have this wonderful tool at your disposal, but you can really use it properly, and then the jet just sits there (because you were told throughout life that having the tool is enough) until the gears start to rust and the components begin malfunctioning. Suddenly, your tool is all but gone because you did not acquire what you needed for it to work properly. Well, losing your intelligence because you failed to gather variety in your information or because you did not check to make sure that the information acquired was accurate is already bad enough. But isn't it worse to have a massively important word, denoting a concept with a long, rich history, a word that has been made to have such far-reaching implications that it often means the difference between war and peace, between living or dying for an immense number of people... to have this beautiful word and hear it all the time and have the concept be taught to you incorrectly every single time? That borders on the criminal. The result is warped perspectives that actually guide people to making important decisions and take defining stances. That is democracy today.
If it serves to console you, go ahead and blame the French historian and sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose book Democracy in America, published in 1835, began the trend of misrepresentation that now stands as an inherited semantic error that grossly distorts both history and etymology. Or blame vanity, because if calling United States of America a democracy had not been used to distinguish it from European societies with their strict class system, perhaps people would have not been so flattered and would have seen the description for what it was, a mistake. Since the United States had basically the same government system as most other emerging republics, it is no wonder that the flattery spread like wildfire. But this is here nor there; it is irrelevant now. Save democracy or let it die.
A dead meaning for democracy means that it is unlikely that you, your children, grandchildren, and so on, will ever have the opportunity to see one in action, much less live in one. If you want to go ahead and keep calling an oligarchy democratic, you are free to do so; the Liberal State grants you that right and no one can take that away from you. But if you want clarity, a more accurate perspective, more detailed awareness, and you want those around you to discern and partake of that understanding in order to avoid conditioned responses, please, I beg of you, go out and tell anyone willing to listen what the word democracy actually means... go out and tell as many people as you can, as often as you are able to, and do so to the best of your human capacity. History may thank you one day.
23.10.15
Ressentiment in the Present Age, by Søren Kierkegaard
Excerpt from - Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, translated by Alexander Dru with Foreword by Walter Kaufmann, 1962, pp. 49–52.
It is a fundamental truth of human nature that man is incapable of remaining permanently on the heights, of continuing to admire anything. Human nature needs variety. Even in the most enthusiastic ages people have always liked to joke enviously about their superiors. That is perfectly in order and is entirely justifiable so long as after having laughed at the great they can once more look upon them with admiration; otherwise the game is not worth the candle. In that way ressentiment finds an outlet even in an enthusiastic age. And as long as an age, even though less enthusiastic, has the strength to give ressentiment its proper character and has made up its mind what its expression signifies, ressentiment has its own, though dangerous importance. […]
The more reflection gets the upper hand and thus makes people indolent, the more dangerous ressentiment becomes, because it no longer has sufficient character to make it conscious of its significance. Bereft of that character reflection is a cowardly and vacillating, and according to circumstances interprets the same thing in a variety of ways. It tries to treat it as a joke, and if that fails, to regard it as an insult, and when that fails, to dismiss it as nothing at all; or else it will treat the thing as a witticism, and if that fails, then say that it was meant as a moral satire deserving attention, and if that does not succeed, add that it was not worth bothering about. [...]
Ressentiment becomes the constituent principle of want of character, which from utter wretchedness tries to sneak itself a position, all the time safeguarding itself by conceding that it is less than nothing. The ressentiment which results from want of character can never understand that eminent distinction really is distinction. Neither does it understand itself by recognizing distinction negatively (as in the case of ostracism) but wants to drag it down, wants to belittle it so that it really ceases to be distinguished. And ressentiment not only defends itself against all existing forms of distinction but against that which is still to come.
The ressentiment which is establishing itself is the process of leveling, and while a passionate age storms ahead setting up new things and tearing down old, raising and demolishing as it goes, a reflective and passionless age does exactly the contrary; it hinders and stifles all action; it levels. Leveling is a silent, mathematical, and abstract occupation which shuns upheavals. In a burst of momentary enthusiasm people might, in their despondency, even long for a misfortune in order to feel the powers of life, but the apathy which follows is no more helped by a disturbance than an engineer leveling a piece of land. At its most violent a rebellion is like a volcanic eruption and drowns every other sound. At its maximum the leveling process is a deathly silence in which one can hear one’s own heart beat, a silence which nothing can pierce, in which everything is engulfed, powerless to resist.
One man can be at the head a rebellion, but no one can be at the head of the leveling process alone, for in that case he would be leader and would thus escape being leveled. Each individual within his own little circle can co-operate in the leveling, but it is an abstract power, and the leveling process is the victory of abstraction over the individual. The leveling process in modern times, corresponds, in reflection, to fate in antiquity. The dialectic of ancient times tended towards leadership (the great man over the masses and the free man over the slave); the dialectic of Christianity tends, at least until now, towards representation (the majority views itself in the representative, and is liberated in the knowledge that it is represented in that representative, in a kind of self-knowledge); the dialectic of the present age tends towards equality, and its most consequent but false result is leveling, as the negative unity of the negative relationship between individuals.
It must be obvious to everyone that the profound significance of the leveling process lies in the fact that it means the predominance of the category ‘generation’ over the category ‘individuality’.
---------
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like:
16.10.15
How do human minds work?: The Cognitive Revolution and Paradigm Change in Cognitive Science
During the first half of the 20th century, empiricism permeated most fields related to the study of human minds, particularly epistemology and the social sciences. The pendulum swung toward empiricism at the end of the 19th century in reaction to the introspective and speculative methods that had become the standard in disciplines like psychology, psychophysics and philosophy. Based on technical advances mostly achieved in Russia and the United States, behaviorism took form, threatening to absorb philosophy of language and linguistics (e.g., respectively, Quine 1960, and Skinner 1948, 1957). In reaction to that movement, Cognitive Science emerged as an alternative for those discontent with the reigning versions of empiricism, that is, as a rationalist alternative.
When Chomsky (1959) pounced upon Skinner's Verbal Behavior, he later reasserted his victory as a vindication of rationalism in the face of “a futile tendency in modern speculation”, stating that he did not "see any way in which his proposals can be substantially improved within the general framework of behaviorist or neobehaviorist, or, more generally, empiricist ideas that has dominated much of modern linguistics, psychology, and philosophy" (Chomsky 1967). Noam Chomsky’s assault, backed by the research program offered alongside it (Chomsky 1957), would be followed by twenty-five years of almost completely uncontested rationalist consensus. Thus, the Cognitive Revolution is best understood as a rationalist revolution.
Researchers in the newly delineated interdisciplinary field coincided in arguing that the mind employs syntactic processes on amodal (i.e., context-independent) structured symbol, some of which must be innate. The computer metaphor guided the formulation of models, whereby mind is to nervous system what software is to hardware. Conceived as a new scientific epistemology, Cognitive Science built bridges across separate disciplines.
Models that abide by the aforementioned rationalist premises are known as classicalist or as having a Classical Cognitive Architecture (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988). It wasn’t until the mid-80s, with the resurgence of modeling via artificial neural networks, that the rationalist hegemony began to crack at the edges, as increasing emphasis was placed on learning algorithms based on association, induction, and statistical mechanisms that for the most part attempted to do away with innate representations altogether. This resurgence threw Cognitive Science into what Bechtel, Abrahamsen & Graham (1998) called an identity crisis, which they date from 1985 until the time of that publication. Almost two decades later, the identity crisis remains unresolved, as this new approach has been met with fierce resistance, displaying the unnerving, painstakingly slow characteristics of a Kuhnian paradigm shift (Kuhn 1962).
In Hume Variations (2003), Jerry Fodor, the most prominent and radical rationalist philosopher of Cognitive Science alive today, rescued the Cartesian in Hume along with his naïve Faculty Psychology at the cost of sacrificing his associationist view of learning. And of course Fodor did this since that maneuver would render Hume a rationalist and also Cartesian linguistics and reason are central to the inaugural program of Cognitive Science, a framework that Fodor helped construct from the very beginning. Chomsky's (1966) Cartesian Linguistics traces many of the developments of his own linguistic theory, including the key distinction between surface structure and deep structure, to the Port-Royal Grammar published by Arnauld and Lancelot in 1660. The Port-Royal Grammar and the Port-Royal Logic (Arnauld and Nicole 1662) were both heavily influenced by the work of René Descartes. However, the evidence is quickly mounting in a way that suggests that the maneuver needed is the opposite of Fodor's, that is, to rescue the associationist theory of learning while discarding the Cartesian aspects and the folk Faculty Psychology present in Hume's philosophy of mind.
A brief comparison between the prototypical rationalist and empiricist stances is provided in the following table.
Of these positions, the rationalist / empiricist distinction in philosophy of mind rests squarely on the issue of representational nativism. The other facets (listed in mind, processes, and representations above) seem to follow from what would be needed, wanted or expected of a cognitive architecture if there were either some or no innate ideas.
That there are no innate ideas is the core tenet of empiricist philosophy of mind. Hume believed that the mind was made up of faculties, a modular association of distinct associative engines, but he left open the question of whether the faculties arise out of experience (or ‘custom’) or are innately specified (and to what extent). There are two main reasons that suggest the former option to be the case. First, uncommitted neural networks approximate functions, both of the body and of the world, paving the way for functional organization through processes of neural auto-organization. Second, committed neural networks bootstrap one another towards the approximation of more complicated functions; as this occurs, the domain-general processes of neurons give way to domain-specific functional organizations. However, though the representations that constitute these domain-specific processes can become increasingly applicable to variable contexts, these do not become wholly amodal, that is, context-independent, because domain-specific functions are anchored in domain-general associative processes that are inherently context-dependent or modal. (See How You Know What You Know for a review of scientific research that supports the two aforementioned reasons.)
Having said this, it must be noted that neither rationalism nor empiricism actually constitute a theory of anything at all; their core is only one hypothesis – either there are some innate ideas or there are none. There is the third possibility, however, that ideas do not exist, at least not in minds, making the rationalist/empiricist debate obsolete (cf., Brooks 1991). This third option notwithstanding, even though neither empiricism nor rationalism is actually a theory of mind, it is possible to build one in the spirit of their corresponding proposition. That is what Locke, Berkeley and Hume did; it is also what Noam Chomsky did, and what Lawrence Barsalou is doing now (whose research program is stated in Barsalou 1999).
Be that as it may, the rationalist consensus that dominated Cognitive Science's first thirty years cannot be explained by mere technological or technical factors. While someone could argue that connectionism did not appear until the mid-80s because neural networks could not be artificially implemented, this claim would be historically unfounded. Bechtel, Abrahamsen & Graham (1998) pinpoint September 11, 1956 as the date of birth of Cognitive Science. Though one may be reluctant to accept such a specific date, it is clear that the inter-disciplinary field emerged around then, plus or minus a few years. However, already in 1943, McCulloch and Pitts proposed an abstract model of neurons and showed how any logical function could be represented in networks of these simple units of computation. By 1956, several research teams had tried their hand at implementing neural networks on digital computers (see, e.g., the project of Rochester, Holland, Haibt & Duda 1956 at IBM). By the early 60's, not only had the idea been explored, Rosenblatt (1962) had even tried building artificial neural networks as actual machines, using photovoltaic cells, instead of just simulating these on digital computers.
When Cognitive Science emerged, the technological tools existed so that research could have gone the rationalist’s or the empiricist’s way, or at least remained neutral on the matter; however, as the Cognitive Revolution is best understood as a rationalist revolution, nativism was hailed, construction began on a Universal Grammar (a project that failed miserably, by the way), decision-making processes were construed as syntactic manipulations on explicit symbol structures (Newell, Shaw, and Simon 1959, Anderson 1982), and neural networks were taken as simple instruments of pattern recognition that could serve to augment a classical cognitive architecture or, at most, to implement what would ultimately be a rationalist story. Fodor & Pylyshyn (1988) were surprisingly blunt on this last point by stating that the issue of connectionism constituting a model of cognition “is a matter that was substantially put to rest about thirty years ago” when the Cognitive Revolution took place. It took thirty years of work for frustration to set in with rationalist approaches; only then would connectionism reappear, augmented by the tools of dynamical systems theory, as a viable alternative to the rationalist or classicalist conception of cognition.
Paradigm Change in Artificial Intelligence
The term ‘connectionist’ was introduced by Donald Hebb (1949) and revived by Feldman (1981) to refer to a class of neural networks that compute through the connection weights. Thousands of connectionist nets, similar to some degree or other to the schematic below, have been created since the 1950s. The wide variety of artificial neural networks is due not only to the function each has been created (and raised) to carry out, which constrains the type of inputs and outputs to which the system has access, but also to their specific architecture—the number of neuron each layer contains, the kind of connections these exhibit, the number of layers, and the class of learning algorithm that calibrate its connection weights.
A clear and very simple example of a connectionist net (seen below) was developed by McClelland and Rumelhart (1981) for word recognition. The 3-layer network proceeded from the visual features of letters to the recognition of words through localist representations of letters in the hidden layer (for a richer discussion, see McClelland 1989). Given its function and the use of localist representations, both the mode of presentation of the input and the mode of generation of the output was constrained by the features of written language, which in turn delineated the network’s design.
Borrowed from the Empirical Philosophy of Science Project at the Natural Computation Lab of the University of California, San Diego, the graph below evidences the transition from the classicalist paradigm to the connectionist by presenting the frequency of appearance (by year) of the lexical items ‘expert system’ and ‘neural network’ in peer-reviewed academic journals of Cognitive Science. It can be clearly seen that the interest in neural networks supplanted the 1980's craze for expert systems.
For those lacking knowledge on the matter, an expert system is a decision-making program that is supposed to mimic the inferences of an expert in a given field; basically, the shell of the program is an inference engine that works logically and syntactically, and this engine must be given a knowledge base, a finite set of "If X, then Y" rules the sum of which ought to allow it to perform its target function correctly most of the time. Typically, an expert system asks you either questions or to input specific data, and using those inputs, the inference engine goes through its knowledge base to provide you an answer. Expert systems may be created for purposes of prediction, planning, monitoring, debugging, and perhaps most prominently for diagnosis, among several other possible purposes. WebMD's symptom checker, which you may have used once or twice, is perhaps the most well-known example; you click on what symptoms you have, its inference engine passes your data through its knowledge base, and it provides you with a list of all the sicknesses you may be suffering from. If you have used that symptom checker more than twice in your life, you probably know how inaccurate it tends to be, even to the point of being ludicrous at times. In stark contrast, many artificial neural networks have been created for detecting all sorts of cancers and can do with 99% accuracy, that is, better than almost any doctor, like this one for breast cancer created by a girl during her junior year of high school. This is just one out of countless domains where empiricist approaches vastly outperform their rationalist counterparts.
As a funny digression, I once had to make an expert system for a graduate class and built a program that would ask you 16 socioeconomic and political questions, from which it would diagnose your preferred political philosophy (e.g., anarchism, liberalism, republicanism, communism, constitutional monarchist, fascism, and so on). My artificial intelligence professor took it with him to the School of Engineering to test it out on his students, and when I saw him again, he commented that he was impressed by how accurate it was. It was definitely more accurate than WebMD but, then again, medical diagnosis is a way more complicated knowledge domain that contains many more possible outputs so that is an unfair comparison. On an unrelated but also funny note, my other artificial intelligence professor told the story of how he had lost faith in artificial neural networks while at grad school when he created a system that would either approve or reject a bank loan application. He would input the demographic and personal income data as well as the loan information, and the network would respond a simple Approve or Reject. But he created the network with a twist; he deliberately trained it with a racist data set in such a way that the network wouldn't give out any prime loans to anyone that wasn't white. He wanted to see if the network would ever learn the error of his ways or at least acknowledge its racism, but it never did, and he said that at that moment he lost all faith in connectionist networks. When he finished telling the story, I immediately raised my hand and said—"You do realize that that is exactly what happens with many bankers in real life, right? You network didn't fail; it behaved like a human would."
Reframing Cognitive Science
The seeds of empiricism have been sprouting almost everywhere. The last thirty years have seen an ever-increasing portion of scientific research dedicated, even if reluctantly, to proving some of the central tenets of empiricist theory of mind or attempting to articulate mechanisms to augment it.
In artificial intelligence, connectionist architecture emerged in the 80's as a clear and feasible alternative to symbolic approaches (a.k.a., good old-fashioned artificial intelligence or GOFAI; Haugeland 1985, Dreyfus 1992). The tools of dynamical systems theory, widely used in the field of physics, bolstered connectionism to provide for a robust account of a system’s ontogenetic evolution through time (van Gelder 1999). Connectionism provided that which behaviorist lacked, powerful learning mechanisms that could account for not only how intelligent agents derive knowledge from experience but also how we can surpass that limited amount of information to conceive an unlimited amount of possibilities; furthermore, the tools of dynamical systems theory opened the possibility of seeing what goes on inside the ‘black box’, while also helping psychology get in sync with physics and neurology. In this sense, connectionism ought not to be confused with behaviorism because neural network architectures permit an agent to surpass the limited stimulus-response patterns that it encounters (Lewis and Elman 2001, Elman 1998). It should be noted, however, that connectionist computation is not synonymous with empiricism, that it is, in fact, entirely compatible with rationalist postulates, as exemplified by Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1997), an attempt to implement universal grammar via a connectionist architecture; nevertheless, this compatibility is a token truism that goes both ways and is due to the fact that artificial neural networks and Turing machines exhibit equivalent computational power inasmuch as either can implement any definable function, which is why most people simulate neural networks using common personal computers (currently, the best open-source, free software for creating your own neural network with relative ease is Emergent, a program hosted by the University of Colorado that runs on Windows, Macintosh OS's, and Linux-Ubuntu, and can be downloaded here). Looking beyond this universal computational compatibility, connectionism clearly opens the door to empiricism, and the vast majority of connectionist models do away with rationalist tenets and clearly partake of the long-standing empiricist tradition even if many of their authors aren't willing to admit this publicly because of the entrenched stigma branded into that philosophical label.
In linguistics, a clear alternative to generativism surfaced during the 1980s in the form of Cognitive Linguistics (Langacker 1987, Lakoff 1987). Though cognitive linguistics is not wholeheartedly committed to an empiricist theory of mind, its rejection of the fundamental tenets of generativism is in itself a retreat from the rationalist consensus that stood almost uncontested. Specifically, its rejection of an autonomous, modular universal grammar and its grounding of linguistic abilities in domain-general learning and associative mechanisms represent a big leap towards empiricism. Moreover, as linguistics increasingly meshes with psychology and connectionism, slowly but surely an associationist flavor that had long been wiped out by Chomsky and his followers returns to the field. In consequence, much work in linguistics is being fruitfully redirected from devising categorical acquisition schemes toward testing statistical learning algorithms for the acquisition of syntax as well as for syntax's prehistoric origins (e.g., Hazlehurst and Hutchins 1998, Hutchins and Hazlehurst 1995) and also for how grammar changes throughout history (see, e.g., Hare and Elman 1995).
In psychology, many connectionist-friendly accounts have been offered. Perhaps the most ambitious is Barsalou’s (1999) perceptual symbol systems, an account that takes a firm empiricist stance in the face of rationalist psychology by dissolving the distinction between perception and conception. Moreover, the perceptual symbol systems approach has been recently applied, though not without difficulties, to theory of discourse (Zwaan 2004) and to theory of concepts (Prinz 2002). Still, this is not the only empiricist current in psychology, as the domain of psycholinguistics has been propelled mostly by psychologists, like Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney, and has led to findings and models that are very compatible with the tenet of empiricism (see, e.g., Thelen and Bates 2003, Tomasello 2006, Goldberg 2004, MacWhinney 2013). Not to mention that many of the early proponents of the parallel distributed processing (or PDP) approach to Cognitive Science, like Rumelhart and McClelland, were psychologist by profession.
Empiricist cognitive architecture has gained a voice in every discipline in the cognitive sciences. The increasing acceptance of empiricism is leading not only to the testing of a rapidly-growing number of so-inspired hypotheses but also to a vast reinterpretation of earlier findings in light of radically different postulates. What has been taking place is clearly a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Hence, an exorbitant amount is still to be done. For starters, oddly enough several empiricist researchers are not convinced that their standing agendas are in fact empiricist, that is, that replacing ‘empiricist’ with ‘interactionist’ or with ‘emergentist’ does not black out the ‘empiricist’.
Consider, for example, the book Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Elman et al. 1996). After a thorough and outstanding assault of rationalism and defense of empiricism, the group goes on to assert “We are not empiricists” (p. 357). Like many other fearful academics, they view the label ‘empiricist’ as a stigma, not unlike having to bear the Scarlet Letter. It is about time that this stigma be removed, and in that spirit I offer a few clarifications. First, regardless of what Chomsky and Fodor would like us to believe, behaviorism and empiricism are not synonymous, as most versions of connectionism clearly illustrate. Even the simplest neural learning algorithms, such as error backpropagation, offer that which behaviorist could not, statistical means that can carry cognition from learning through finite data to understanding an infinite amount of possibilities. Second, consider the following excerpt—
"We are neither behaviorists nor radical empiricists. We have tried to point out throughout this volume not only that the tabula rasa approach is doomed to failure, but that in reality, all connectionist models have prior constraints of one sort or another. What we reject is representational nativism." (Elman et al. 1996 1996, p. 365)
In Rethinking Innateness, the authors distinguish between three kinds of possible innate constraints: representational, architectural, and chronotopic (timing). A prime example of an architectural constraint is the characteristic 6-layer structure of the human neocortex; for chronotopic constraints, think of embryonic cell migrations. As stated above, the group offers a wealth of innate architectural and chronotopic constraints but reject representational constraints. It is the wealth of mechanisms that can go into delineating what kind of tabula the mind is that leads them to suggest that interactionism entails that empiricism is false. But empiricists have never shunned innateness altogether. The empiricist-rationalist distinction rests squarely on the issue of innate mental representations.
Advancing a strong view of architectural and chronotopic constraints does not depart one from the notion of a tabula rasa. The interaction of the many constraints with the world conforms the tabula—no sane empiricist would ever deny this! —but that does not render the tabula un-rasa, it just delineates what kind of tabula it is (i.e., a nervous system, not a DVD or a 35mm film or an infinite magnetic tape). To put it simply, denying all innate architectural and chronotopic features would be tantamount to claiming the children resemble their parents only because their parents raise them. No one ever claimed that! The debate between rationalists and empiricists has always been about whether there are certain pieces of knowledge that are represented in the mind that are simply not learned. If you reject representational nativism yet do not reject the existence of something like ideas or mental representations, then you are committed to the tabula rasa, whether you like it or not. It may be unpopular, but it is nevertheless so because rejecting representational nativism without discarding mental representation is affirming that there are no innate ideas. That the type of tabula that it is determines what kind of information can be written on it and that human brains are highly structured does not entail the falsity of empiricism, unless representation is preprogrammed into the slate. Without unlearned representations, a highly structured and complex tabula is as concordant with empiricism as a simple and amorphous pattern-seeking agent.
Clearly, the type of slate that is proposed today is different from what was proposed during the Enlightenment. To Hume, the mind was primarily a passive photocopier of experience; in contrast, current neural networks are much more active in their assimilation of environmental information. Moreover, while Hume thought that that human minds associate the compiled copies of experience according to three domain-general types of association, connectionist neural networks are universal approximators that modularize as functional approximations consolidate because of the details of the surrounding environment and, therefore, in consequence, these readily develop mechanisms that go beyond association through association itself (see How You Know What You Know for a review). Advancing a stronger, more complex view of the cognitive slate does not distance the account from empiricism since it rejects representational nativism, just like Elman et al. 1996 did.
It is telling that connectionists naturally gravitate toward empiricism in spite of the stigma surrounding the tradition and even their own explicit assertions and roundabout philosophical identifications. Ultimately, the hallmark dispute among connectionist and classicalists is the question of what kind of tabula the mind is, a question that does not directly concern the rationalist/empiricist distinction but results from it by entailment. It is really just a practical matter that, whereas syntactic or logical engines require innate representations, complex neuronal slates like ours do not. Then again, it is also a practical matter that the only intelligent beings we know of are born with highly complex neural networks. Deep down, I am inclined to think that Fodor’s Informational Atomism is logically correct—if the mind works like a logical or syntactic engine, then all simple concepts must be innate. As Barsalou (1999) notes, there are no accounts on offer for how simple symbols can be acquired by a classical cognitive architecture or any logical or syntactic engine, and this may very well be because there are no possible accounts at all. This admission, however, should not lead us to accept Fodor’s theory of concept, but rather it should convince us that the mind is not a Turing machine (like the image below) or a syntactic engine (cf., Pinker 2005).
As the evidence mounts, even Chomsky had to abandon most of the original postulates of generative linguistics, including the important distinction between surface structure and deep structure and also the view that syntax is a totally autonomous faculty that does not derive or associate at all with the lexicon. The Minimalist Program (1995) reduced the philosophical rationalism of Chomsky's theory to such an extent that several academics that have based their own work on generative models, suddenly finding themselves in a theoretical void that threatens to undermine their research, have chosen either to ignore it entirely or to attempt to undermine the program. But this is just one example of how rationalist philosophy of mind is undergoing its slow death, weakening as data piles up. As the first generation of cognitive scientists dies out and the third generation starts to assume positions of power, the stigma branded upon empiricism will weaken. The likely result is a renewal that will allow funding to flow to new experimental techniques and to innovative practical application across the interrelated disciplines. Exciting times lie ahead.
-------
REFERENCES
- Anderson, J.R. (1982). “Acquisition of cognitive skill”. Psychological Review 89: 369-406.
- Arnauld, A. & Lancelot, C. (1660). General and Rational Grammar: The Port-Royal Grammar. J. Rieux and B.E. Rollin (trans.). The Hague: Mouton, 1975.
- Arnauld, A. & Nicole, P. (1662). Logic, or The Art of Thinking; being The Port-Royal Logic. Thomas Spencer Baynes (trans.). Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1850.
- Barsalou, L.W. (1999). “Perceptual symbol systems.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22: 577-609.
- Bechtel, W., Abrahamsen, A. & Graham, G. (1998). "The Life of Cognitive Science". A Companion to Cognitive Science. W. Bechtel & G. Graham (eds.). Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
- Boole, G. (1854). An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. London: Macmillan.
- Brooks, R.A. (1991). “Intelligence Without Representation.” Artificial Intelligence Journal 47: 139–160.
- Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Chomsky, N. (1959). "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior." Language, 35, No. 1: 26-58.
- Chomsky, N. (1966). Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. New York: Harper & Row.
- Chomsky, N. (1967). “Preface to the 1967 reprint of ‘A Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior’.” Readings in the Psychology of Language. Leon A. Jakobovits & Murray S. Miron (eds.). Prentice-Hall, Inc. pp. 142-143.
- Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Dreyfus, H.L. (1992). What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Elman, J. L. (1998). “Connectionism, artificial life, and dynamical systems: New approaches to old questions.” A Companion to Cognitive Science. W. Bechtel & G. Graham (eds.) Oxford: Basil Blackwood.
- Elman, J.L., Bates, E.A., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MASS: MIT Press.
- Feldman, J.A. (1981). “A connectionist model of visual memory.” Parallel models of associative memory. G.E. Hinton y J.A. Anderson (eds.). Nueva Jersey: Erlbaum.
- Fodor, J.A. (2003). Hume Variations. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Fodor, J.A. & Pylyshyn, Z.W. (1988). “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis.” Cognition 28: 3-71.
- Goldberg, A.E. (2004). “But do we need Universal Grammar? Comment on Lidz et al.”(2003)” Cognition 94: 77-84.
- Hare, M. & Elman, J.L. (1995). “Learning and morphological change.” Cognition 56: 61-98.
- Haugeland, J. (ed.) (1985). Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Hazlehurst, B. & Hutchins, E. (1998). “The emergence of propositions from the co-ordination of talk and action in a shared world.” Language and Cognitive Processes 13(2/3): 373-424.
- Hebb, D. (1949). The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological theory. New York: Wiley.
- Hutchins, E. & Hazlehurst, B. (1995). “How to invent a lexicon: the development of shared symbols in interaction.” Artificial Societies: the computer simulation of social life. N. Gilbert & R. Conte (eds.). London: UCL Press. pp. 157-189.
- Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. (2nd revised edition)
- Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- Langacker, R.W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- Lewis, J.D., & Elman, J.L. (2001). “Learnability and the statistical structure of language: Poverty of stimulus arguments revisited.” Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.
- MacWhinney, B. (2013). “The Logic of a Unified Model”. S. Gass and A. Mackey (eds.). Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. New York: Routledge. pp. 211-227.
- McClelland, J.L. & Rumelhart, D.E. (1981). “An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 1. An account of basic findings.” Psychological Review 88: 375-407.
- McClelland, J.L. (1989). “Parallel distributed processing: Implications for cognition and development.” Morris, R. (ed.) Parallel distributed processing: Implications for psychology and neurobiology. New York: Oxford University Press.
- McCulloch, W.S. & Pitts, W. (1943). “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity.” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5: 115–137.
- Newell, A., Shaw, J.C. & Simon, H.A. (1959). “Report on a general problem-solving program”. Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Processing . pp. 256-264.
- Pinker, S. (2005). "So How Does The Mind Work?" Mind and Language 20, 1: 1-24.
- Prince, A. & Smolensky, P. (1997). “Optimality: From Neural Networks to Universal Grammar”. Science 275: 1604-1610.
- Prinz, J.J. (2002). Furnishing the Mind. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
- Quine, W.V.O. (1960). Word and Object. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
- Rochester, N., Holland, J.H., Haibt, L.H., & Duda, W.L. (1956). “Tests on a cell assembly theory of the action of the brain, using a large digital computer.” IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2: 80-93.
- Rosenblatt, F. (1962). Principals of Neurodynamics: Perceptrons and the Theory of Brain Mechanisms. Washington, D.C.: Spartan Books.
- Skinner, B.F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. Acton, MA: Copley, 1992.
- Thelen, E. & Bates, E. (2003). “Connectionism and dynamic systems: are they really different?” Developmental Science 6, 4: 378-391.
- Tomasello, M. (2006). “Acquiring linguistic constructions”. Handbook of Child Psychology. Kuhn, D. & Siegler, R. (eds.). New York: Wiley.
- Turing, A.M. (1936). "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2, 42: pp. 230–65, 1937.
- van Gelder, T.J. (1999). “Defending the dynamical hypothesis.” Dynamics, Synergetics, Autonomous Agents: Nonlinear Systems Approaches to Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science. W. Tschacher & J.P. Dauwalder (eds.) Singapore: World Scientific. pp. 13-28.
- von Neumann, J. (1945). "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC". Originally confidential [property of the United States Army Ordnance Department].
- Zwaan, R.A. (2004). “The Immersed Experiencer: Toward an embodied theory of language comprehension.” The Psychology of Learning and Motivation 44: 35-62.
--------
If you enjoyed this article, you may also like:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Featured Original:
How You Know What You Know
In a now classic paper, Blakemore and Cooper (1970) showed that if a newborn cat is deprived of experiences with horizontal lines (i.e., ...
-
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2) is the most comprehensive personality test currently available. Using 567 true or ... -
Both the long and short forms of the MMPI-2 but not the MMPI-A commonly given to adolescents are available through this link . The Minne...