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[[Social science]]s don’t have that get-out-of-jail-free card: they address precisely that kind of supervening cause: behaviour that is, intrinsically, ''un''predictable. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics — these concern themselves with human agents, who ''are'' influenced by each other — which is why we don’t use physical science to predict their behaviour. Social sciences have to deal with the inherently complex, non-Gaussian interactions between human beings.<ref>physical sciences set up closed logical systems within which their rules will work, and often these systems are dramatically simplified as compared with anything you see in the real world: Newton, for example, assumes a frictionless, stationery, stable, neutral frame of reference: circumstances which, in any observed environment, do not and ''cannot'' not exist. {{author|Nancy Cartwright}} calls these structures “[[nomological machine]]s”. Because of this explicit caveat, we can put any variances between Newton’s prediction and the observed outcome down not to [[falsification]], but to the messy real world “contaminating” the idealised experimental conditions. Hence, the proverbial [[crisp packet blowing across St Mark’s Square]].</ref> | [[Social science]]s don’t have that get-out-of-jail-free card: they address precisely that kind of supervening cause: behaviour that is, intrinsically, ''un''predictable. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics — these concern themselves with human agents, who ''are'' influenced by each other — which is why we don’t use physical science to predict their behaviour. Social sciences have to deal with the inherently complex, non-Gaussian interactions between human beings.<ref>physical sciences set up closed logical systems within which their rules will work, and often these systems are dramatically simplified as compared with anything you see in the real world: Newton, for example, assumes a frictionless, stationery, stable, neutral frame of reference: circumstances which, in any observed environment, do not and ''cannot'' not exist. {{author|Nancy Cartwright}} calls these structures “[[nomological machine]]s”. Because of this explicit caveat, we can put any variances between Newton’s prediction and the observed outcome down not to [[falsification]], but to the messy real world “contaminating” the idealised experimental conditions. Hence, the proverbial [[crisp packet blowing across St Mark’s Square]].</ref> | ||
===Behaviourism and | ===Behaviourism and ''The Ghost in the Machine''=== | ||
Now it wasn’t always like that. Fifty years ago psychologists were waging a battle royale against the positivist branch of their own discipline, which insisted on on proceeding by reference, exclusively, to “public events” and ignoring private mental events. Can you imagine it: a ''psychology'' which ''ignores private mental events''? Can you imagine an approach to artificially reconstructing natural intelligence which ignores private mental events? | Now it wasn’t always like that. Fifty years ago psychologists were waging a battle royale against the positivist branch of their own discipline, which insisted on on proceeding by reference, exclusively, to “public events” and ignoring private mental events. Can you imagine it: a ''psychology'' which ''ignores private mental events''? Can you imagine an approach to artificially reconstructing natural intelligence which ignores private mental events? | ||
{{Quote|On the strength of this doctrine, the Behaviorists proceeded to purge psychology of all intangibles and unapproachables. The terms ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’, ‘imagination’ and ‘purpose’, together with a score of others were declared to be unscientific, treated as dirty words, and banned from the vocabulary. ... <Br> | {{Quote|On the strength of this doctrine, the Behaviorists proceeded to purge psychology of all intangibles and unapproachables. The terms ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’, ‘imagination’ and ‘purpose’, together with a score of others were declared to be unscientific, treated as dirty words, and banned from the vocabulary. ... <Br> | ||
It was the first ideological purge of such a radical kind in the domain of scientists, predating the ideological purchase in totalitarian politics, but inspired by the same single-mindedness true fanatics.<Br> | It was the first ideological purge of such a radical kind in the domain of scientists, predating the ideological purchase in totalitarian politics, but inspired by the same single-mindedness true fanatics.<Br> | ||
—Arthur Koestler, | —Arthur Koestler, ''The Ghost in the Machine''}} | ||
You might ask what has changed, for it seems that the contemporary interest in in neural networks, big data and natural language processing, all of which eschew the intentional fallacy, adopt ''exactly'' the Behaviourist disposition. Don’t they? On one hand, they have no choice: if human psychologists are struggling to understand how consciousness works in situ, ''in the actual mesh of living veins, in cell of padded bone'', is it any wonder people looking at its proxy in a digital network might not bother? | You might ask what has changed, for it seems that the contemporary interest in in neural networks, big data and natural language processing, all of which eschew the intentional fallacy, adopt ''exactly'' the Behaviourist disposition. Don’t they? On one hand, they have no choice: if human psychologists are struggling to understand how consciousness works in situ, ''in the actual mesh of living veins, in cell of padded bone'', is it any wonder people looking at its proxy in a digital network might not bother? | ||