The Only Winning Move

In 2002 the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded (in part) to Daniel Kahneman for his work on Prospect Theory - a move widely seen as a rebuke of Classical Economics and the expected utility assumption. Basically the tiff is this: Classical Economics treats people as both rational and knowledgable and makes its calculations accordingly. But as we all know, people do dumb shit. So, while the idea of a utility function and even the assumption that agents (people) universally want to maximize their utility may be well and good in and of itself, there are certainly outstanding questions about how people judge utility and what impact these judgements have on the claims of Classical Economics.

As is typical in these things, most of the commentators got it a bit wrong. Because it’s apparently fun for journalists to write stories about (what they perceive to be) “common sense” and “street wisdom” taking on the ivory tower assumptions of cloistered academics, the story they preferred to write about this was that all those stodgy old economists were making these OBVIOUSLY unrealistic assumptions about human nature until Daniel Kahnemann came along and brought the profession back down to earth. People are animals who can’t reason - ergo government-appointed scientists need to do it for them … or something.

But I always thought the more interesting aspect of Kahneman’s work wasn’t the claim that people are irrational (in fact, I’m not even sure that Kahneman is really making that claim - he’s just claiming that they have innate biases toward making certain kinds of reasoning fallacies, which gives them a tendency to be irrational in certain situations, but perhaps not generally), but the claim that they don’t have as much information as they’re given credit for.

In any case, one of the phenomena where Prospect Theory buys you an account over more classical theories has to do with judgments of intention. In what is apparently called the “Knobe Effect” (after J. Knobe, who discovered it), people are more likely to judge something as having been an intentional action if it has negative consequences. So - if we imagine a corporate board meeting where it is decided to go ahead with a development even though the board knows that there will be some negative environmental impact, people will later say that the corporation in question intentionally caused the environmental damager. However, if we imagine that the development has some kind of a positive impact on the environment, people will tend to describe it as a side bonus rather than an intended consequence. A lot of researchers have taken this to be an example of “folk morality” in play.

However, an interesting paper by Edouard Machery that I read yesterday wonders if perhaps it’s more universal. That is, the effect in question is really related to cost rather than ethics - that the ethical connection is actually a bit of a red herring. To test this, he devised a similar, but ethically neutral, tradeoff. Imagine that you go to a stand to buy a cold drink because you’re thirsty. The salesman tells you that they’re offering a special whereby if you by a large you get a free commemorative cup of some kind. Since you were planning to buy a large anyway, you accept the free cup. Now imagine that you go to buy a large only to find that the price has increased by a dollar from the last time you were there. The question is, in each case, whether you intentionally got the free cup or paid the extra dollar.

Subjects polled about this are significantly more likely to say that in the case of the commemorative cup receiving the cup was not intentional, whereas paying the extra dollar was, than they are to say anything else. So, Machery would seem to have proven that the effect is not limited to spheres of ethics.

Even in ethical contexts, however, there is reason to believe that ascription of intent to an action has to do with cost. Machery devised another scene where there can be no doubt that the action was intentional and ethical, but in one case the side-effect is negative and in the other positive. In this scenario, we imagine that someone sees a runaway train headed down a track likely to run over some oblivious workers. A bystander is out of earshot of the workers (who all have their backs to the oncoming train), but is near a switch that can divert the train down a sidetrack. In one scenario, diveting the train will cause it to kill only one worker, rather than five. In another scenario, diverting the train won’t kill anyone, and will save a dog in addition to the five workers. (Key to the presentation is, of course, making clear that the bystander is not motivated to save the dog when he acts, but merely to save the workers.) Sure enough, people respond that in the case where diverting the train still results in one death that the actor intentionally killed the person (though, it should be noted, people approve of the action in about 90% of cases all the same). In the case of saving the dog, they are much less likely to call it intentional. This is despite the fact that both are unavoidable consequences of acting.

I find Machery’s case persuasive - the operative question is not so much one of ethics but one of cost. It will naturally be responded that ethics - especially utilitarian ethics - is largely concerned with descibing what kinds of tradeoffs are permissible and what kind are not. That is true, and it is for this reason that no one is, I think, blaming Knobe for having failed to see the bigger picture. Since ethical decisions often involve making decisions about the propriety of cost-benefit tradeoffs, it is not surprising that we first noticed this effect in ethcial contexts. It does not follow from that that the effect shows up only in ethical contexts, which is rather Machery’s point. A more interesting response would be to point out that this is, in a way, a demonstration that the dependence between Psychology and Economics runs both ways. The award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Kahneman was meant to demonstrate that Economics had to come out of its bubble and take empirical Psychological results seriously. But I wonder if this case demostrates the converse for Psychology. Perhaps Psychology also has a lot to gain by thinking of things in terms of cost assessments, and that the findings in Economics, which has been running quite detailed cost assessments for centuries, will point Psychologists toward interesting avenues of study.

In fact, I think many Psychologists were there long before me and have, in fact, been taking Economics seriously for some time, if primarily as a source of fertile ground for theories to falsify. If that is indeed the case, then I would contend that the proper relationship between Economics and Psychology is probably closer to what it had been before the Kahneman Nobel win. That is, Economics is a kind of Philosophy (in fact, George Will describes it exactly that way) which describes a framework in which Psychology should operate. Machery indeed hints at this in his paper, by invoking Chomskys competence/performace distinction as a kind of starting point for potential explanations for this effect. It may be, for example, that people have a concept of “intention” that is misapplied in some cases due to performance errors. In other words, Philosophy provides a conceptual framework, and the business of Psychology is in documenting mechanisms active in the human mind that cause deviations from that idea. In a similar fashion, Economics may be more useful working out an ideal - as in purely rational - cost-benefit structure, and the work of Psychology is then to notice and account for any deviations from this. That relationship, in fact, seems to have held up pretty well between Psychology and Economics.

What saddens me is that the same relationship is apparently unavailable between Linguistics and Psycholingusitics. I study Syntax - i.e “grammar” - as a language universal. That is, my specialty in Linguistics is to document the range of grammatical phenomena present in human languages, notice any dependencies between grammatical phenomena, and account for them in the most compact formal system that captures all (or at least the vast majority of) known data. Ideally, Psychologists would then look at this language idealization, notice deviations from it, and account for them. I would be tasked with laying out a philosophy of how language operates (which, like with Economics, would be more empirical than traditional Philosophy), and Psychology would worry about how this is implemented. That this kind of thing does not seem to be possible at present is, I think, largely an error of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky insisted that his theory be a Psychological one. Perhaps if the term “Cognitive Science” had been around in the late 1950s (or at least more popular in the late 1950s), Chomsky could’ve stuck to the more acceptible “Cognitive Science,” assering (rightly) that Linguistics was a branch of Cognitive Science that would be of interest to Psychologists. But since he insists on making psychological claims even though he is not a trained psychologist and in fact employs none of the empirical methods that are common to that profession, Psychologists are right not to take him seriously. He is stepping on their turf, and in an incompetent way. I think the damage has been catastrophic. It has caused Linguists to overreach, and in so doing devoted resources from the more proper focus of the field - which is collecting Linguistics data and working out a Philosophy of Language framework in which it makes sense. And since Psychologists have not felt the need to read Linguistics papers, I think work on the Psycholinguistic end has also been stunted. Psychologists do make careers out of studying language, but while there are some standout examples of informed Psycholinguists, many of the experiements that I read about Psychology of Language are based on pedestrian, folk linguistic notions of what goes on in language processing.

There is a lot to be said for interdisciplinary overlap, but in some cases one side takes overlap too far and damages the relationship. I think that has happened with Linguistics.

Nathan took the time to watch Timecop over the weekend. Pause for a moment to marvel at the time management priorities of someone who has the spare minutes to sit through something like Timecop but has never even once in his life seen Red Dawn. Very well, let us never speak of it.

It seems that in Timecop my favorite ignorant Yankee bugbear rears its ugly head. Yes, folks, I’m talking about the WHOLLY IMAGINARY “royal ya’ll.”

The idea is this. People who are not from the South and ard in no way native speakers of our beautiful dialect(s) sometimes imagine that we use ya’ll in the singular.

So, in situations where someone says “How’re ya’ll doin’?” - and only addresses one person - certain wishful thinkers imagine that there is a singular form. To be clear on this: there might be in some dialects. For example - in one of Eric Hyman’s papers on the subject he includes a citation to the effect that fully one-third of Oklahoma respondants claim that they can use ya’ll in the singular. Bully for them: but they’re not Southern and so I won’t make claims about how they speak. The “controversy” is over whether this ever happens in the South, and the answer is “rarely, if ever, and if it does it is an idiolectal phenomenon and not a feature of any Southern dialect.”

Ya’ll is, quite simply, never ever singular for Southerners. However, it does have a use that can admittedly be confusing to people who are not native speakers of the dialect. As an example, let’s take the sentence that Eric Hyman thinks of as his trump card:

I put a box of gloves for y’all [spellt this way in original] on the table if you need it [dentist to assistant, Fayetteville, NC, May 23, 2005]

He puts this at the head of his Fall 2006 article in American Speech and evidently thinks thereby to have ended the debate. This cannot be the so-called “institutional” ya’ll (where, say, in addressing a clerk in a store as ya’ll the speaker refers to the store), nor can it be the “associative” ya’ll (a form that includes people associated with the addressee but not necessarily present - like family members). Ergo, it must be singular - i.e. the assistant only in the example given.

Harumph. It is not. Not only am I Southern, but I also happen to be from North Carolina, and the dentist simply can’t have meant only the assistant by that statement. Maybe he is from Oklahoma, or Southern Indiana, or any of the other places that claim to have this singular form, but I find it really difficult to believe that he can be from North Carolina and mean by this statement what Hyman thinks he means. Were I to overhear this, I would parse it as a plural referring implicitly to the dentist’s entire staff of hygentists. Now - I’m also from Charlotte and not Fayetteville, so I suppose it’s just possible that people in the eastern half of the state have this form - but I seriously doubt it. Ya’ll, as I and everyone else I know uses it, is only ever plural. The dentist means “you staff.”

Now, Hyman also includes a cute swipe at intropection as a method of data collection in his article.

A linguist [=all linguists] needs to employ both empirical data and Chomskyan introspection.*

True enough. But it’s worth spelling out all the same why Chomskyan introspection works so well. It works so well because members of the community under study have internalized, though exposure to countless examples (=data), the rules of communication peculiar to that speech community. While it often happens that someone from far away uses seemingly familiar forms in unexpected ways, people close to home who do this usually get recognized for speaking a particular idiolect. For example, Alexis knows someone who has spent her entire life in Arizona, but neverhteless has isolated Northern Cities Shift pronounciations - like “melk” for “milk.” The point here is that however she came by this, people around her notice it and think it odd. Another example: one of Noah’s friends has a strange way of pronouncing “innovative” - with heavy stress (and a short vowel) on the second syllable: innAHvative. The reason it’s “fucked up” isn’t because no one but him does it (I hear certain breeds of Canadians do it on TV all the time), but rather because no one he grew up with does it. Where he picked it up is anyone’s guess, the point being that the mere fact that he does it doesn’t make it generally permissible in, much less characteristic of, his speech community. It’s what we Linguists call “marked,” which is a euphemistic way of saying [+weird] in this case.

Here’s Hyman:

The relative rarity or frequency of ya’ll is not at issue here: if even some native speakers of Southern American English do use it, then it can be so used.

Bollocks, mate.

Dialects are not the union of the set of all sentences permissible to anyone who happens to have been born in a given region. Such a definition would obviously be completely useless. If we paid attention to every old git who claimed to be able to get a reading we wanted for a string of phonemes that we wanted to have it, then we’d might as well hang up our labcoats and be done with it. A language is as much defined by what’s unacceptable as by what’s acceptable. To cite an example - a certain student in our very own department here at IU who is (allegedly) from Pittsburgh claims that nominative is the default case there. For those of you not schooled in syntax, this is actually probably not true of any dialect of English - which is why when someone asks you “Who wants candy?,” and you do, your response is either “Me” or “I do,” but never just “I” by itself. That’s because objective case is probably default in English, and you only get nominative when there’s a tensed verb (which is why putting “do” after “I” makes it mysteriously OK). Now - when pressed on this this student claims that in Pittsburgh people say “I” in response to “Who wants candy?” But I simply don’t believe her, and I doubt that anyone in Pittsburgh does either. Sometimes people are just plain “wrong.” Of course she’s not “wrong” for her own idiolect. There are any number of reasons that she herself might actually speak this way (given the individual, I suspect it’s a vain attempt to appear intelligent - classic hypercorrection). It’s the claim that this is permissible in the Pittsburgh dialect that’s silly. Just because we have one example of a native speaker of that dialect who finds it permissible does NOT make it grammatical for the community.

So sorry, Dr. Hyman, but you’ll have to do better than coming up with a handful of people who misparse ya’ll to make your case. I have no doubt that you can hand a couple of guys at a gas station $20 and stage a conversation. I just wonder whether you can call it “science.”

*This is included as an example sentence, making it an example of the Linguist’s favorite dodge.

There’s a deliciously disingenuous post on Language Log today about Obama’s past sins that is illustrative both of the kinds of acrobatics his supporters go through to defend him on his past associations as well as the gratuitous leftism of much of academia.

The argument goes like this:

Everyone (well, almost everyone) knows that context is important when we try to understand meaning. … And when you look at language in the context of time (when something was said in the past), it’s relatively easy to find fault with silly people like us who change our minds about some wacky position we once held. Years, months, weeks, or even minutes ago most of us said, sometimes even believed, something that we wouldn’t want to support any longer. But there are bullies out there who ignore such time contexts so if you said it once, you’re stuck with it forever.

You see where this is going, right? People are allowed to change their minds on things. Well, right, fair enough. But it doesn’t take us long to get from there to here:

I’m coming clean at this late date because political events have made these wrenched-from-context-gotchas the game du jour. For example, we all know that Senator Barack Obama’s membership in the Chicago church where Reverend Jeremiah Wright once preached marks him negatively in the minds of a huge number of U.S. voters. No matter that he hasn’t regularly attended that church for decades. He used to attend, so he’s guilty, even if he didn’t hear the allegedly offending sermons, and even though he has since renounced Reverend Wright’s offensive positions. Forget the context of time. It happened. So off with his head.

What Shuy (the author) is “coming clean” about, by the way, is his three-year membership in a sexist gentleman’s club way back in the 1960s. I think we can all agree that he’s allowed to have changed his mind with the changing times in the last 40 years, especially if it’s true, as he says, that the primary reason for resigning his membership in the club was its exclusion of women.

What, one wonders, does this have to do with Obama? That’s the illustration of the second point: a leftist academic will find a way to smuggle shallow and off-topic political commentary into just about any discussion. It’s annoying, to put it mildly, and made all the more so in this case since Shuy cowardly closed comments on the post in question. Language Log generally allows them - but not when they’re pontificating about Obama.

It takes only a cursory familiarity with the facts to know that Obama doesn’t qualify for the “changed his mind” exemption in the way Shuy does. First and foremost, that’s because to qualfiy you have to actually have changed your mind, and Obama’s little conversion rings more than just a bit insincere. Association with Wright isn’t something that Obama did in the 1960s and then decided against on his own before he was in the public spotlight. Quite the contrary - he titled the book that doubles as his campaign manifesto after a line in a Wright sermon as recently as 2 years ago. He remains a member of Wright’s church to this day and has no intentions of disassociating himself from it. Furthermore, he has made inconsistent statements on the controversy that make it clear he’s not being entirely truthful about his motivations, initially claiming in news interviews that he had never heard Wright making such controversial statements but later admitting in campaign speeches he had. Perhaps richest of all is Obama’s on-again-off-again invitation to Wright to bless his campaign launch and act as his campaign’s spiritual advisor. Obama called Wright the night before the official campaign launch event to disinvite him, and that apparently on the basis of a Rolling Stone article about him that devotes a lot of column space to Wright. And what did Obama say to Wright to disinvite him? The following:

“You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.”

If there’s any reading of that that doesn’t amount to “my association with you could be poltically embarrassing,” I’d really like to hear it. Certainly there’s no way to look at that and conclude that Obama was blissfully unaware all this time that his pastor had been saying all these controversial things, as he initially claimed in television interviews. And neither is there any way to look at that and conclude that Obama was starting to develop real personal misgivings about Wright’s positions. Nope, this was all politics all the time.

As for Obama’s eventual “renunciation” of Wright that Shuy is at pains to make sure we’re all aware of, does anyone really need to remind Shuy that it came a month after a popular speech in which Obama defended his association with Wright, and only came because Wright not only deliberately made more such comments in press interviews, but also implied that Obama had been lying about his opinions on Wright all along?

So yeah, people can talk about changing their minds, but they only get a cookie for it if they’re not lying for political expedience. If Roger Shuy was a member of a sexist organization in the 1960s which he dropped out of to protest its sexist policies, that’s fine - laudable, even. I think we can all agree that he’s allowed to “change his mind” about his membership under these circumstances (although, one hastens to add, the way he spins it in his Language Log column, he didn’t actually change his mind since he supposedly tried to use his membership to change organizational policies from withing, etc. etc., but never mind). Just as I think we can all agree that we wouldn’t buy it if he’d never actually left the organization, claimed on one occasion that he was unaware it was sexist and then on another that he knew but it didn’t matter because it had other redeeming qualities, and then only disowned its leader a month after he defended him, and that only because the leader impled in public that Shuy was insincere in his opposition to the group’s sexism. Obviously, in such a case, we wouldn’t believe for a minute that Shuy had actually changed his mind about anything.

Just as no one who’s been paying attention honestly believes that Obama has changed his mind about Wright.

Shuy’s column is disingenuous, his mention of Barack Obama gratuitous, and really, the whole thing, as a political and personal apologia, is inappropriate for a blog like Language Log that is supposed to be about Linguistics.