Sense of politics and sense of science

2009/01/31 at 4:47 pm | Posted in politic, Thought | Leave a comment

A speech error temporarily paused the process of president Obama sworn in his duty in the inaugural day. That is the situation the president followed Chief Justice Roberts’ words “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” Mr. Obama had a pause after “execute” because he found the “faithfully” before “execute” was removed. This caused the other sworn in at the day after the inaugural day and Steven Pinker’s comment on this politics of language. One blogger criticized Pinker made a comment on the political perspective of Roberts instead of linguistic analysis, but a reader of Pinker’s books would realize this is his style. He always reveal his political orientation, medium libertarian, in his articles talking about the human nature or the evolution of human mind. A recent case is an article of individual genome on the New York Times.

The mostly interested part is the association of the political opinion and the perspective of science for a scientist. Pinker’s viewpoint to language establishes on the conceptual quirks stored in human mind. He argued that these quirks are the product of evolution and are inhered generation by generation. The unlimited combinations of quirks contribute the unlimited expressions of human languages. This argument is contrary to the generative grammar proposed by Noam Chomsky who is a famous left wing intellectual. Chomsky also has a gap in science and politics between him and Burrhus Skinner who believes a well designed reward system will improve the quality of individual behavior.  Across three generations, these minds who give extraordinary contribution to the modern psychology and cognitive science have so many differences in each aspect. So many different minds compete with each other in the circumstance each mind perform their potential as they can. I have to say it is why the US have been leading the development of science (at least in my domain) till present.

Is there other society providing  the  distinguished mind  contribute their potential regardless the political view? I think this is an interesting issue for more observations and experiences.

After Inaugural Day

2009/01/24 at 8:48 pm | Posted in Cognition, Psychologist, Research, Thought | Leave a comment

January, 20, 2009 is a day remarked the coming of new era for the American people. This year I also experienced the change within the research society I am contacting. At the day after the inaugural day, the top science journal “Nature” published a paper that will challenge the basic assumption accepted by every researchers depending on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Dr. Sirotin and Dr. Das proposed the evidence that, in addition to the neural activity, a novel preparatory mechanism in the primates brain bring additional change to blood volume. I wonder the respond of my friends using fMRI as their research responds to this study. This news, in my opinion, is not totally bed for the future of cognitive neuroscience. This is the other opportunity for us to admit the complicated nature of the brain and to think of the bold but naive intention to build the link between brain and mind. The novel mechanism revealed by this study might be a caution for the optimistic views of building the link between behavior and brain function without sufficient understanding of behavioral facts.

The other change I am watching is the raising of the new perspective to the psycholinguists’ analytic tools. In the psycholinguistic studies, the generality of the empirical evidence is constrained by the variation of participants’ performance and the variation of stimuli property. For a group of stimuli with the same property according to a experimental definition, each stimuli usually generate a random effect within a wide variation. This situation increases the difficulty to conclude the effect of stimuli property based on the collected data. For a very long time, psycholinguists like to use by-item analysis for the confirmation of the observed effects. With the thousands of data accumulated, more and more psycholinguists have a thought if this analytic tool is really helpful to make conclusions. We might be expanding the frontier with an inaccurate compass. Keeping this awareness is what we should take care hour and hour in doing the psycholinguistic studies. Further reading about this issue is in the last volume of journal of memory and language, 2008.

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