The doddering Hans effect

Another well-worn example bites the dust? You remember that famous study in which the participants, if primed with words connoting agedness, walked more slowly when leaving the lab.

A new study by the Belgian team of Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, and Axel Cleeremans not only failed to replicate the effect, but also appeared to show that the effect observed in the original study was owing to the experimenters’ expectations.

Experimenters’ expectations seem to provide a favorable context to the behavioral expression of the prime. Obviously, this interpretation remains tentative, as we do not know how this process operates. However, it is likely that [experimenter-subjects] who expect their participants to walk slower behave differently than those who expect their participants to walk faster and that such behavioral cues are picked up by participants.

Key findings:

• The setup was one that included not only the usual subjects being primed or not with a scrambled-sentence task, but also other “experimenter-subjects” whose task it was to time the usual subjects’ passage down the hall as they left the lab. Doyen et al “were indeed able to obtain the priming effect on walking speed for both subjective and objective timings. Crucially, however, this was only possible by manipulating [experimenter-subjects’] expectations in such a way that they would expect primed participants to walk slower”.
• Subjective timings (with a stopwatch) yielded errors when experimenter-subjects were told that subjects would be primed to walk faster as well as when they were told that subjects would be primed to walk slower. But objective timings yielded an effect only when the priming was for walking more slowly; no effect was observed when the priming and the experimenter--subjects’ expectations were at odds.

The authors agree that unconscious behavioral priming appears to be well established,

in line with our result it seems that these methods need to be taken as an object of research per se before using it can be considered as an established phenomenon.

It’s worth noting that Doyen et al do not report any awareness on the subjects’ part of having been cued by the experimenter-subjects, even though there was some awareness (as revealed by a forced-choice test) of the priming (not as priming, but as a salient feature of the stimulus).

• Anonymous. (2012) “Behavioral priming paradigm needs update”. Medical Xpress 18 Jan 2012.
• J. A. Bargh, M. Chen, L. Burrows. (1996) “Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype-activation on action”. Journal of personal & social psychology 71.2:230-44. See also Bargh and Chartrand, “The unbearable automaticity of being”, American Psychologist, 54.7 (1999) 462-479, available here.
• S. Doyen, O. Klein, C.-L. Pichon, A Cleeremans. (2012) “Behavioral priming: it's all in the mind, but whose mind?” PLoS ONE 7.1: e29081. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029081

Lynxes and lumps

I’ve been reading Robert Batterman’s Devil in the details, a book that packs a lot of punch in a relatively few pages. Among its themes is that of the universality of certain mathematical models. Universality is “the slightly pretentious way in which physicists denote identical behaviour in different systems” (Berry 1987:185, quoted in Batterman 13).

That requires some unpacking. Two systems exhibit “identical” behavior if that behavior can, under suitable redescription, be seen to instantiate the same mathematical system (I use the imprecise word ‘system’ rather than a more precise term because what is instantiated need not be, for example, the graph of a single equation). They are different if, as in the case of Berry’s own examples, they have different shapes, or if, as in some cases discussed by Batterman, they are made of different stuffs. We will see yet another sort of difference below.

Let me start instead with something simple: the directed graph or digraph. Family trees and citation networks instantiate that structure: draw an arrow from x to y if x is a progenitor of y or if y is cited by x. More interestingly, so-called “scale-free” networks, though arising in different real-world situations (different in the sense of being realized on quite different scales by quite different sorts of process), obey the same statistics (for example, the number of arrows entering a node—think of links to a site—obeys a power-law distribution): the probability of a node’s having n entering links is inversely proportional to some small power n k of n. Many nodes will have only a few entering links, and a very few will have many.

Source: J. Lamping, R. Rao. “The hyperbolic browser: a focus+context technique for visualizing large hierarchies”. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 7 (1996) 33–55, fig. 14. See also here.

“Une trace impérissable de ces fugitives mélodies”

The earliest known recording of the human voice from which intelligible sound has been recovered was made by the French scientist Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on 9 April 1860—seventeen years before Edison’s first phonograph recording. It is a bit of “Au clair de la lune”.

On 20 April another recording, longer and with better fidelity, was made. Earlier recordings exist, but for lack of calibration they have not been converted. Scott calibrated his later recordings with a tuning fork of known pitch.

The recovery was carried out by First Sounds, a group devoted to preserving, recovering, and publishing old recordings.

Below is a sketch from Scott’s patent application (“brevet d’invention”), dated 25 Mar 1857.

A piece of their mind

Addendum: Republished from NewAPPS. See there the informative comment by John Protevi on the substance of Balko’s column—the fallibility of drug-sniffing dogs (and their trainers), and the resulting miscarriages of justice.

My late cat Mr. H came to be very good at knowing when I was finished playing a piece on the piano. I have recordings in which, a second or two after the piano stops, Mr. H’s characteristic yowl supplies a coda. One might almost think he had a grasp of musical form, but I’m quite sure that his grasp was rather of my habits than of anything to do with music. He had likely picked up something in my posture that correlated with finishing a piece, something distinctive enough that he was rarely deceived by pauses during a piece.

I was reminded of this in reading first a column by Radley Balko on police dogs and then some extracts from a book cited by Balko, Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a dog (the title alludes to a Groucho Marx joke, in case you’re wondering). Horowitz describes experiments in which domestic canines, when humans are present, tend to do much worse than their wild cousins.

Tested on their ability to, say, get a bit of food in a well-closed container, wolves keep trying and trying, and if the test is not rigged they eventually succeed through trial and error. Dogs, by contrast, tend to go at the container only until it appears that it won’t easily be opened. Then they look at any person in the room and begin a variety of attention-getting and solicitation behaviors until the person relents and helps them get into the box (180).

Anyone who has a dog or cat will recognize the phenomenon. Are dogs, then, dumber than wolves? Horowitz doesn’t think so.

On Schliesser on Glymour

This is a slightly amended version of a comment on one of Eric Schliesser’s responses to Clark Glymour’s opinions concerning philosophy.

How can you use “philosophical background to write insightfully and importantly about public policy” if there’s no background? I take it that the background is either (i) traditional ethics, including the “theoretical ethics” that is being consigned to the trash, or (ii) some formal-philosophical alternative. If (i), the proposal to save public policy ethics is incoherent when accompanied by a proposal to consign traditional ethics to oblivion. That leaves (ii). Is anyone actually doing public policy ethics in a formal way?

I think you’re right that there must be a supposition to the effect, not that truth-seeking entails liberal politics, but that there will be a consensus on that point among genuine philosophers, on the basis of which public policy ethics can be carried on by “formal” means, i.e. by means that themselves make no ethical presuppositions.

The justification of that consensus can only be a mystery from the standpoint of genuine philosophers themselves. How is it that agents who value, and therefore seek, truth should regard themselves as bound by (other) liberal values?

On that point there has been discussion, hasn’t there? —an “open society”, I take it, is supposed to be optimal for science, etc. It’s not clear to me why the argument has to be a priori, by the way. What bars appeal to general facts about nature and human nature?

Even if one waives the issue you raise, and grants that (i) there is a consensus and (ii) that consensus is liberal (both of which facts will be, as I said, mysteriously ungrounded, by which I don’t mean that there would be no natural scientific explanation of them, but that there would be no rational justification of it, for surely no-one thinks that ”Darwin makes right“), nevertheless what we agree on is not, so to speak, lying out in the open like the constitution of a state (and just mentioning consitutions suggests that even if they did, their interpretation would still be contentious). The route to an explicit version of the agreed-upon principles and from them to policy would require something other than “logic, mathematics and the theory and practice of computation”.

Translate: carry across

The metaphor implicit in translation is that of something being carried over from one “place” to another. The most fortunate, the most deserving of saints might be translated into heaven; their earthly remains were often translated from one church or monastery to another, along with the prestige of possessing them. Translate in this older sense bears a clear relation to transfer, of which it is merely the irregular past participle.

In those cases a thing was carried over or across: a person, a relic. In the now most common case, that of translation between languages, what’s carried across is not at all obvious. Decades ago, when theories of meaning—or rather speculation about theories of meaning—were all the rage, one would have said that translation consists in the construction and use of a systematic mapping of the sentences of one language to those of another, a mapping that preserves meaning or truth. The first attempts at computer translation worked from a similar definition.

Source: John Macnamara, Journal of Social Issues; 23.2 (1967) 59.

Translation so conceived “carries across” only abstracta: the meaning or truth-value of the source. For anyone who has taken seriously the task of translation, that is a sort of caricature. The truth in it—what makes it caricature and not outright falsehood—is that something can be captured by the algorithms employed by Google and other automatic translation services. Call it the “gist”.

The truth about infinitesimals

In what follows I am not pushing any conclusions; I’m offering an extended example with which to think about questions of truth and historical interpretation.

Russell knew how things stood with infinitesimals. Weierstrass and Cantor have solved the problem of placing the calculus on a rigorous basis. The infinitesimals of an earlier age are banished; the contradictions entailed by their use can now safely be ignored because it has been shown we can do without them. (NB: My guide in this discussion is John Bell’s The continuous and the infinitesimal, esp. ch. 4.)

Leibniz in particular is censured for having given a “wrong direction to speculation as to the Calculus”.

His belief in the actual infinitesimal hindered him from discovering that the calculus rests on the doctrine of limits, and made him regard his dx and dy as neither zero, nor finite, nor mathematical fictions, but as really representing the units to which, in his philosophy, infinite division was supposed to lead (Russell, The Principles of mathematics 325).

Leibniz’s—and his successors’—attempts to save infinitesimals were bound to come to naught, because “infinitesimals as explaining continuity must be regarded as unnecessary, erroneous, and self-contradictory” (Principles 345: his verdict on Hermann Cohen’s Neo-Kantian interpretation of the calculus).

Celebrating the accomplishments of Weierstrass, Russell makes his work a fulfillment of Zeno’s:

After two thousand years of continual refutation, these sophisms [Zeno’s paradoxes] were reinstated, and made the foundation of a mathematical renaissance, by a German professor, who probably never dreams of any connection between himself and Zeno. Weierstrass, by strictly banishing all infinitesimals, has at least shown that we live in an unchanging world, and that the arrow, at every moment of its flight, is truly at rest (347).

What Russell knows is that the key notion of the calculus—that of limit—has been defined by nineteenth-century mathematicians in terms that make no reference to other than “normal” finite quantities. In the classical ε, δ definition of convergence, those variables range over ordinary numbers like .01 or 1/π. The dx and dy of Leibniz’s calculus are thus eliminated; every proposition containing such symbols can be replaced, salve veritate and also salve deductive relations, by a proposition not containing them. Elimination by definition became a familiar strategy in analytic philosophy, carried forward in extremis by “nominalists” whose aim was to eliminate by similar means all abstracta, including the sets or classes to which, in the late nineteenth century, all other mathematical entities then conceived had been reduced. The model and origin of all such reductions was, directly or indirectly, that of Weierstrass.

The importance of that model would be difficult to exaggerate. It was seen to be the successful solution, ending all dispute, to a longstanding philosophical and mathematical problem, the problem of infinitesimals. It was Progress with a capital P.

Rightly termed, witcraft

Eric Schliesser’s note on translation put me in mind of one of my favorite books. Early in my graduate career I discovered in the Stanford stacks a series of reprints, mostly in English, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, published by Scolar Press, now sadly defunct. Among the many wonderful facsimile volumes in the series was Ralph Lever’s The arte of reason, rightly termed, witcraft teaching a perfect way to argue and dispute (1573). This is said to be, after Thomas Wilson’s Rule of reason (1552), the second logic book written in the vernacular. And boy is it…

To give you a taste, here is an excerpt from the chapter which in our English would be entitled “Of the subjects and predicates that are in a simple proposition”. The “storehouses” are the categories of Aristotle; a “naysay” is a negation.

Of the foresets and back sets that are
in a simple shewesaye. Chap. 3.

1 The foreset is a nowne placed afore the verbe, and the backset after, as, man is juste: man is the foreset, and just, is the backeset.
2 Sometymes a whole sentence or a clause of a sentence is a backset, or a foreset: as to rise earely is a holesome thing: in this shewsay, to rise earely, is the foreset, and a holesome thing is the backsette, they both supplying the roome and office of an nowne.

To what use foresettes and backesettes serve.

3 The storehouses serve to shew the nature of wordes as they are taken and considered by themselves alone.
4 The foreset & backset of a shewsay declare the respecte that wordes have one to [71|72] an other, as they are coupled and linked together in a perfect saying.

To knowe what respecte the backset hath to the foreset
in every simple shewsaye of the seconde order.

5 If the backset is deuided and parted a sunder from the foreset by a naysay, then doth it but eyther differ from it, or els it is a gainset to it.
6 What differing words and gaynsets are, we have shewed afore in the. 12. Chapter of the first booke.
7 If it be affirmed & coupled to the foreset by a yeasay: then muste the foreset and backset be such as either may be saide of other turne for turne, or not saide.
8 If either may be said of other turne for turne, then is the one of them the kindred, and the other his saywhat: or els one the kindred and the other his propertie.
9 For onelye the saywhat and the propertie compared to the kindred, maye bee said of it, and it of them, turne for turne: but the saywhat expresseth what the kindred [72|73] is, and the propretie doth not.

Lever was very deliberate in his coining of terms; the new terms are intended to replace the Latin-derived terms hitherto in use, to the advantage of those “english men” not versed in the Classical languages. There is no question but that English is up to the task of teaching logic; the only problem will be that some new words will have to be used.