Friday, May 11, 2018

Some thoughts on Johnson 2017 + Perfors 2017

I love seeing connections to Marr’s levels of description, because this framework is one that I’ve found so helpful for thinking about a variety of problems I work on in language development. Related to this, it was interesting to see Johnson suggest that grammars are computational-level while comprehension and production are algorithmic-level, because comprehension and production are processes operating over these grammar structures. But couldn’t we also apply levels of description just to the grammar knowledge itself? So, for instance, computational-level descriptions provide a grammar structure (or a way to generate that structure using things like Merge), say for some utterance. Then, the algorithmic-level description describes how humans generate that utterance structure in real time with their cognitive limitations (irrespective of whether they’re comprehending, producing, or learning). Then, the implementational-level description is the neural matter that implements the language structure in real time with cognitive and wetware limitations (again, irrespective of whether someone is comprehending, producing, or learning).

Other thoughts:
(1) One major point Johnson makes: a small change at the computational level can have a big impact at the implementation as level. This is basically saying that a small change in building blocks can have a big impact on what you can build, which is the idea behind parameters, especially linguistic parameters. It’s also the idea behind how the brain constructs the mind, with small neurological changes having big cognitive effects (for example, brain lesions).

But, importantly for Johnson and Perfors, implementational level complexity may matter more for evolutionary plausibility. In particular, the systems needed to support the implementation may be quite different, and that connects to evolutionary plausibility. Because of this, arguing for or against something on the basis of its computational level simplicity may not be useful because we don’t really know how the computational level description gets implemented (in the neural matter, let alone the genome that constructs that neural matter). If it turns out the genes encode some kind of computational level description, then we have a link we can exploit for discussing evolutionary probability. Otherwise, it’s not obvious how much evolutionary-plausibility-mileage we get out of something being simple at the computational level of description. So, the level at which simplicity is relevant for evolutionary arguments is the genetic level, since that’s the part that connects most directly to evolutionary arguments. (Though perhaps there’s also a place for “simple” to be about how easy it is to derive from cultural evolution?)

(2) From Johnson 2017: “...perhaps computational descriptions are best understood as scientific theories about cognitive systems?” While I understand where Johnson is coming from (given his focus on evolutionary explanations), I don’t think I agree with this idea of connecting “computational description” with “scientific theories”. A computational description is a description at the level of “the goals of this computation”. We can have scientific theories about that, but we can also have scientific theories about “how this computation is implemented in the wetware” (i.e., the implementational level of description).  So, to me, “level of description” is a separate thing from “scientific theory” (and usefully so).