Kseniya Romasheva, 0-7.15

THANKS TO SEVERAL DECADES of rigorous empirical research by behavioral scientists, our understanding of the how and why of persuasion has never been broader, deeper, or more detailed. But these scientists aren't the first students of the subject. The history of persuasion studies is an ancient and honorable one, and it has generated a long roster of heroes and martyrs.

A renowned student of social influence, William McGuire, contends in a chapter of the Handbook of Social Psychology, 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1985) that scattered among the more than four millennia of recorded Western history are four centuries in which the study of persuasion flourished as a craft. The first was the Periclean Age of ancient Athens, the second occurred during the years of the Roman Republic, the next appeared in the time of the European Renaissance, and the last extended over the hundred years that have just ended, which witnessed the advent of large-scale advertising, information, and mass media campaigns. Each of the three previous centuries of systematic persuasion study was marked by a flowering of human achievement that was suddenly cut short when political authorities had the masters of persuasion killed. The philosopher Socrates is probably the best known of the persuasion experts to run afoul of the powers that be.

Information about the persuasion process is a threat because it creates a base of power entirely separate from the one controlled by political authorities. Faced with a rival source of influence, rulers in previous centuries had few qualms about eliminating those rare individuals who truly understood how to marshal forces that heads of state have never been able to monopolize, such as cleverly crafted language, strategically placed information, and, most important, psychological insight.

It would perhaps be expressing too much faith in human nature to claim that persuasion experts no longer face a threat from those who wield political power. But because the truth about persuasion is no longer the sole possession of a few brilliant, inspired individuals, experts in the field can presumably breathe a little easier. Indeed, since most people in power are interested in remaining in power, they're likely to be more interested in acquiring persuasion skills than abolishing them.

Kseniya Romasheva, 0-7.15

Almost exactly 35 years ago I had the opportunity to give several lectures here, same auditorium, I think, on the topic “Language and mind”. And quite a lot has been learned in the end of intervening years about language and the brain, ? the mind and the sense in which I use the term then the term mind and mental and such terms and those lectures. Pardon? Thank you. I will continue to use them now. Always nice to have a friend in the audience. Using these terms as just descriptive terms for the certain aspects of the world, pretty much on a par with such descriptive terms as a chemical or optical, electrical and so on, these terms used to focus attention on particular aspects of the world that seem to have rather integrated character and to be worth-considering for a special investigation, without any allusions that they cut nature at the joints. In those earlier lectures I took for granted that human language can reasonably be studied as part of the world, specifically as property of human organism, mostly the brain and for convenience I’ll keep to that. Both then and now I’m adapting what Lyle Jenkins in a recent book calls “The Biolinguistic perspective”, that’s the framework within which we approach the language I’m considering developed about fifty years ago. Also for convenience I’ll use the term language to refer to human language, that’s a specific biological system, there’s no meaningful question as to whether the communication system of bees or what might be taught apes or mathematics or music, as to whether it’s not question, as to whether these are languages, or whether airplanes really fly or submarines really swim or whether computers think or translate languages or other comparably meaningless questions, many of them based on misinterpretation of important paper by Alan Touraine.\, over fifty years ago, 1950, which is pointed a large, to my mind, mostly misguided and literature explicitly despite Touring’s very explicit ? not to pursue that direction which has apparently been overlooked. From the Biolinguistic Perspective language is a component of human biology, more or less on a par with mammalian vision or insect navigation and other systems for which the best theories that have been devised attribute computational capacities of some kind what’s informal usage sometimes called rule following, so, for example, contemporary text on vision describes the circle rigidity principle, it’s formulated about fifty years ago, as follows if it’s possible and other rules permit interpret image motions as projections of rigid motions in three dimensions. In this case later work provided substantial inside into the mental computations that seem to be involved and when the visual system follows these rules in informal terminology. Even for simple organisms that’s not slight task, great many issues remain on result in these areas which are quite obscure even for insects. The decision to study language as part of the world in this sense should be in my view uncontroversial but it has nothing on a contrary the assumption ? enterprise was rejected pretty forcefully fifty years ago and continues to be rejected, virtually all of contemporary philosophy of language and mind is based on rejection of the assumption, one of the same ? what’s called the computer model of mind that underlines the good deal of theoretical cognitive science, denied in this case not only for a language but for mental faculties generally, it’s explicitly denied in the technical linguistic literature what are called ? accounts of language and also in a different way denied by the conceptualism that was devised by the same authors and accurately attributed to many linguists including me. It’s also apparently denied by many sociolinguists, it’s incomparable with structure of behavioral approaches to language, it’s, little to my surprise, rejected by current studies of language by leading neuroscientists, most notably Terence Dicken in recent work, which has been favourably received by eminent biologists again little to my surprise. The approach therefore seems to be controversial but I think the appearances are misleading, a more careful look will show, I think, that the basic assumptions are tacitly adapted even by those who strenuously reject them and indeed have to be adapted even for coherence.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 990