David Longley's paper,
An Actuarial System of Effective Regime & Sentence Management, offers many interesting insights such as the following:"The majority of staff employed by the Prison Service are already performing tasks which could be classed as work in behaviour management, but all too many confuse behavioural measures with psychological factors, or, alternatively, equate the word 'behaviour' with a limited class of actions, usually with a social consequence. In reality, skills with vocabulary, grammar, counting, and all other skills taught by instructors and teachers arebehaviours, and can be recorded as skills. Behaviour, in this sense, is no more or less than observable, recordable action or performance. What is required is a professional service in analysis of such performance using the same quantitative technology brought to bear in other areas of physical science and technology. If psychologists limited themselves to helping other staff to record and analyse measures of behaviour as functions of the regime in which they occur, the Prison Service would have an effective science and technology of behaviour along with a clear framework for both recruitment and staff training of such professionals."
The following paper comprises four elements.
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The first is an extract from HM Inspectorate of Prisons "Thematic Review", November 1997 which recommends a wider implementation of the actuarially based system of Sentence Management throughout the estate. |
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The second provides an Executive Summary of the larger project (of which the Sentence Management System is a substantial part). This is referred to as the 1994 system within the above report. |
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The third provides an edited extract from the original Sentence Management paper (see regimes.pdf for the full paper). |
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The fourth provides an academic context which reviews some diverse themes drawn from a number of areas of research within behavioural science which the current author believes lends some support to the assertion that in the interests of effective regime and inmate management the Prison Service should look to the implementation of a properly resourced, actuarially based system of skill assessment and programming |
4.01
At one time I considered publishing this chapter as a separate volume, because there is so much to be said about the principles and practice which should characterise the approach to children and young adults in custody. In the event I decided on making a summary only, setting out the Agenda for the person I hope will be appointed to action, not just process, my recommendations. This follows visits which I and my team have made to every Prison Service establishment (41 in all) holding young people between the ages of 15 and 21.4.75
Sentence plans (and custody plans for unconvicted prisoners, in the exceptional circumstances where these existed) tended to show no clear links between targets set, or achieved, and incentives and earned privileges schemes, where these were in operation. Incentives schemes tended to stand or fall on the availability of real incentives, and, while some establishments had shown considerable imagination in developing rewards, in other places there were very few real incentives.4.76
The lack of coherent linking between incentives schemes and sentence planning is symptomatic of a more general lack of integration; for example we found no consistent evidence of links between sentence plans and pre release programmes. The notion of throughcare starting at entry into custody and continuing through imprisonment and into the community as a "seamless process" is far from a reality. Yet the framework for integration exists in the information management system designed in 1994 in the then Directorate of Inmate Programmes of the Prison Service. My team were delighted to see that at least a small number of establishments had adopted a data collection process and were adapting sentence management questionnaire forms developed at HMP Garth. By making staff focus their attention on these questions, the system steers even those who were unaccustomed to interacting with prisoners were steered into closer contact with them. Ultimately, sentence management stands or falls on this interaction between staff and young people in custody. All establishments holding young offenders should introduce the sentence management scheme developed at HMP Garth.4.77 I noted a trend towards replacing some traditional activities with offending behaviour programmes, for example, reducing education courses and substituting drug awareness or cognitive skills courses. However, I also noted the wide gap between the need for offending behaviour programmes and their provision. What is more important is that my team found little evidence of offending behaviour programmes specifically designed for young offenders, adopted, applied and evaluated throughout the system. There were examples of good, locally grown programmes, and good examples of adoption of centrally designed programmes, but no norm. Some locally developed offending behaviour programmes appeared to suffer from a lack of training on the part of those devising and delivering them. Much can be accomplished by commitment and enthusiasm, but there needs to be a balance between energy and expertise, as inappropriate programmes can damage the recipient. A few programmes devised locally had been accredited but more often, they had not. This suggests a natural responsibility for a Director to ensure consistency throughout the system and with after-care in the community.
4.78
Many young offender institutions initially involved specialist departments in setting up and providing offending behaviour programmes, but cost cutting has meant, in some cases, a reduction in their input. There is every reason why suitably selected and trained Prison Officers should be involved in delivering offending behaviour programmes; the best of them do so already in their daily interaction with young people in custody, which amounts to informal offending behaviour work. It is however, a sign of poor management, as well as being demotivating and unfair to staff to assign to them the major role in delivering formal offending behaviour programmes without equipping them with the necessary resources (principally time, training and support) to enable them to do so effectively Some of the best examples we found of offending behaviour programmes, as in the adult system, involved a productive partnership between several departments (Prison Officers, Probation Officers, education staff and psychologists).4.83
This summary of the different stages that young people in custody experience underscores the lack of a coherent system for them. They are scattered across the prison estate: the Prison Service is struggling to cope with dramatically rising numbers; and there is no concerted attempt at needs assessment and provision either for children or young adults. The majority of establishments holding children and young adults have been forced to operate more like human warehouses, than reforming institutions. Despite this I found some outstanding examples of good practice, but these exist in isolation, and largely unsupported by the system. My team were told continually of the understandable frustrations felt by those working with this very difficult and demanding group of young people, without adequate recognition, and frequently with inadequate resources. The Prison Service has not helped itself by failing to make someone accountable and responsible, not just for designing what should happen to young prisoners, but for overseeing the consistent delivery of what is done, wherever they are held. Young people are a distinct group with distinct needs. These are not addressed consistently at present, which suggests that current arrangements are inadequate. It is depressing to find that many Governors of establishments holding young prisoners recognise this, yet the action taken by the Prisons Board has not appeared to do so adequately I have contended throughout this study that the needs of young people in custody are different from other prisoners. I hope, therefore, that the improvements contained in the Prison Service Review that is shortly to be published will include the appointment of someone accountable and responsible solely for young prisoners, who will have appropriate authority to deliver consistently high quality regimes across the estate.Delinquency,
simply construed, is a failure to co-operate with the some social requirements. As an alternative to a purely custodial model, the following outlines a positive incentive approach to structuring time in custody. It is designed to map on to all elements of inmate programmes, providing a systematic way of collating and managing progress as reported by experts, which is analysed objectively to produce reports based on actual behaviour rather than casual judgement. It is, by design, a system which will allow management of behaviour to be based on individual merit and performance.Research between 1989 and 1991 led to the conclusion that Sentence Planning will require such a fundamental, systematic, and nationally implemented information base and that this can most efficiently be derived from the management of inmate activities throughout the estate. According to this view, Sentence Planning needs to be supported by a system of 'Sentence Management' which focuses on the structure and functions of available and potential inmate activities.
In this way, Sentence Planning would be integrated with the Regime Monitoring System, effectively developing within the framework of 'accountable regime;. This implies that the most effective way to launch Sentence Planning is not as an additional task grafted onto the regime, but as a natural development and improvement of inmate review and reporting practices.
The system specified below is efficient and cost-effective with the potential infrastructure to support and integrate several initiatives which have begun since the re-organisation. Although not covered in this note, two of the most significant are Prisoners Pay, and The Place of Work in the Regime.
In broad outline, what is proposed has much in common with the Department of Education and Science's 1984 initiative Records of Achievement and has the benefit of using this nationally implemented programme in behaviour assessment as a source of best practice. Whilst the initiative outlined below is an independent development which took its cue from recommendations published in the 1984 HMSO CRC Report, from which the PROBE (PROfiling Behaviour) project developed, results of R&D work over the past 6 years are reassuringly compatible with the work done throughout the English education system during the same period. In this context, what is outlined below focuses on what the Department of Education and Science referred to as Formative Profiling (continuous assessment and interactive profiling involving the inmate throughout his career) rather than Summative Profiling (which provides a review somewhat akin to the parole review, or more locally, Long Term Reviews). In all that follows, the recommendations of the 1984 HMSO CRC Report are seen to be integrally related.
The system, for national implementation, across all sentence groups can be specified as a 5 step cycle:
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Inmates are observed under natural conditions of activities. |
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Observed behaviour is rated and recorded (continuous assessment). |
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Profiles of behaviour become the focus for interview dialogues/contracts. |
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Inmates are set targets based on the behaviour ratings/observations. |
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Elements of problem behaviour are addressed by apposite allocation. |
Some immediate comments follow.
With little intrusion into the running of Inmate Activities, behaviour which is central to these activities can be monitored and recorded more directly to identify levels of inmate competence across the range of activities. The records of competence would guide the setting and auditing of individual targets.
Targets will be identified within the Activity Areas supported by the regime. This requires continuous assessment of inmates within activities, and the setting of targets based on a set of possible attainments drawn from those activities. Such attainment profiles would serve to identify and audit targets and would enable allocation staff to judge the general standard of attainment within and across activities, thereby enhancing both target-setting and auditing.
The frequency of behaviour assessment within activities and routines, and the auditing of the whole process must be driven by what is practicable. The system requires assessment of attainment to be undertaken weekly and according to an explicit timetable, in order to ensure standardisation. Targets set are to be based on observations of behaviour which are already fundamental to the running of activities and routines, and the progress in achieving targets will be discussed with the inmate, guiding allocation to activities within and between prisons. These steps are in accordance with the policy guidelines. Whilst the targets set will be individual, and when collated will comprise a set of short and long term objectives defining the 'Sentence Plan', they will fall into some broad areas (social behaviour, health, performance at work, and so on).
By making more systematic use of the information which is already being used to select, deselect and manage inmates within activities and with respect to routines, Sentence Planning will become a natural co-ordinating feature of the prison's regime.
Specific programmes for problem behaviour (e.g. sex offenders) can be seen as particular inmate activities with their own, more intensive assessment, activity and target setting procedures explicitly designed to address problem behaviour. Development of, and allocation to such programmes will be integrated with other activities. These programmes are seen as both drawing on and informing 'Risk Assessment'.
Fundamental to the system outlined above is the fact that classes of behaviour (as opposed to properties of inmates) are taken as the basic data. These classes of behaviour are demanded by activities and routines, and should serve as basic data for Regime Monitoring.
Observations of inmate behaviour are observations of an inmate's level of attainment with respect to characteristics that staff responsible for the activities have specified in advance as essential to the task.
Activities and routines have a structure quite independent of the particular inmates who are subject to the demands of activities and routines. Perhaps the defining feature of Sentence Management is that it comprises a process of objective continuous assessment, where what are assessed are levels of attainment with respect to pre-set aims and objectives, themselves defining activities and routines. Since the focus is on classes of behaviour rather than attributes of inmates, all of the assessments are of progress with respect to pre-determined classes of behaviour which are requirements of activities and routines.
Each activity area can be specified in terms of classes of behaviour which the activity requires. These classes of behaviour are basic skill areas which are fundamental to the nature of the activity, which in combination account for activities being distinguishable from each other. These basic skill areas will be referred to as Attainment Areas. They need to be carefully selected as they will be taken to be the defining features of the activity. From this point of view, any part of the daily routines should be specifiable in these terms, and staff should be encouraged to think about how best their area of inmate supervision could be so sub-classified. Whilst the identification of Attainment Areas may, at first glance seem a demanding or unfamiliar task, it is soon appreciated that the identification of Attainment Areas is in fact a pre-requisite to the establishment of any activity in prison, be it an education course, industrial activity or simple housework.
Each Attainment Area can be further classified into up to five levels of attainment. These are levels of the same skill, progressing from a low level of competence to a high level of competence. These must be described in a series of direct statements, specifying particular skills of graded sophistication which can be observed, and checked as having been observed. Levels of competence are therefore NOT to be specified as a scale from LOW to HIGH, but rather as a series of specific, and observable behavioural predicates. These are the Attainment Criteria (or Occasion Sentences) of an activity or routine. Just as Attainment Areas are naturally identified by staff who design activities, so too are Attainment Criteria natural pre-requisites for day to day supervision.
For each set of Attainment Areas the Attainment Criteria comprises a COMPETENCE CHECKLIST, against which performance can be monitored. Competence Checklists are referred to within the system as SM-1s.
Targets are identified using a second form, referred to as SM-2. Targets will generally be identified from the profile of Attainment Criteria within Activities, (Competence Checklists being completed on a weekly basis provide a record of progress). But Targets may also be identified outside of standard activities, based on an analysis of what is available within the Regime Digest, or Directory which will be a natural product of the process of defining Attainment Areas and Attainment Criteria, and the printing of the Competence Checklists
The two forms, ATTAINMENTS (SM-1) and RECORD OF TARGETS (SM-2) comprise the building blocks of the system. These forms are now available as final drafts (and will incidentally be machine readable). Both forms are designed to be stored in the third element of the system, the inmate's Sentence Management Dossier. This is simply a 'pocket file' to hold the sets of the two forms, and the proposal is that the Head of Inmate Activities and his staff be responsible for maintaining the system.
Through an analysis of the SM-1s both within and across activity areas, Heads of Inmate Activities would have a better picture of the structure of the activities, and of the relative progress of inmates within activities. With inmates actively involved in the process of target negotiation, and with the system being objective, problems of confidentiality so characteristic of subjective reports, would become substantially reduced. Whilst the system can run as a paper system, once computerised, the data collected via SM-1s and SM-2s will form the basis of automated reports.
In terms of paperwork, this is not a demanding task, and in capitalising on what is already done at Reporting Points (where daily logs are maintained already) it promises to be an efficient and accurate way of collecting the required data. For a Reporting Point with 15 inmates, the system would require 15 SM-1s to be completed and returned to the Head of Inmate Activities each week . The design of the system enables data to be processed automatically, converted to computer storable data, thereby making the whole system easier to manage and audit and actuarially analyse.
Fundamental to the design of the SM-1 is the fact that the Attainment Criteria are generated by staff who will be using them, each SM-1 being tied specifically to an activity. The content of the form is 'user definable'. More than one SM-1 form will be completed per inmate per week since the inmate will be assessed at more than one Reporting Point. To record behaviour in daytime activities and domestically on the wings, one SM-1 would be completed each week as a record of attainment at the allocated work/education Reporting Point, and another on the wings, the latter providing an assessment of the inmate's level of co-operation/contribution to the general running of the routines.
The focus is at a more fundamental level of the regime - the recording of attainment levels of individual inmates - with the regime data being logically compiled or deduced from those individual measures of attainment. In defining Attainment Areas and Attainment Criteria by staff supervising the Reporting Point, RM-1s, SM-1s and SM-2s would allow staff to define the nature and objectives of all Reporting Points, storing them within the proposed Sentence Management System to serve as the basic data for any subsequent computer profiling of the inmate's progress as well as serving as the basic material for a local and national directory or digest of activities and their curricula.
The major costs are those required to professionally staff units to maintain the system and use the data to support other staffing the effective, actuarialy based management of behaviour and regimes. A significant benefit is in the potential for automatic machine-generated reports of inmate progress. These could save many thousands of officer-hours. The practicality of such reports has been demonstrated over the years that the system has been piloted.
The SM-1 form is designed to allow all staff to formally assess any programme of activity in a standard manner (ie, marking whether behaviour in the activity matches the attainment criteria on the Competence Checklist). This form has provision to record a Checklist Code, along with the activity and reporting point identifier. This Checklist Code will allow more than one checklist to be generated for each Reporting Point if the extent or modular nature of the activity requires multiple checklists for comprehensive assessment of the skills which the activity offers.
Similarly, the SM-2 form allows targets to be identified by staff both within an activity, or from a knowledge of what the regime has on offer. The Head of Inmate Activities, in building a library of Attainment Areas and Attainment Criteria, (the Regime Digest, or Directory) will be able to provide interested staff, such as Review boards, with a digest of what activities are available and how they are broken down by attainment areas and criteria.
In this way, short duration intervention programmes can be included in the 'Sentence Management Dossier' in the same way as are the more formal activities. Formal activities are so regarded because they tend to occupy large groups of inmates in activities which are basically structured to have inmates participate for a relatively fixed period (8 weeks to several years).
Using this form of assessment, the staff wishing to run ad hoc programmes, occupying either small groups or single inmates in short modules would be tasked with defining Attainment Areas and Attainment Criteria as a sine qua non for running the proposed programme, submitting the proposal that it be considered as an element of the regime.
The fact that each SM-1 has an attendance register will permit the system to capture the extent of all activity throughout the regime, thereby contributing to a more comprehensive profile of activity within each establishment and the estate in general. Effective regime management would more clearly become one of co-ordinating Attainment Areas to bring about a balanced and appropriately monitored regime, and the data would serve as a sound information base from which staff could build Sentence Plans.
These 12 volumes present a computerised system for monitoring and managing inmate behaviour within the English Prison Service. Developed primarily in the Maximum Security Long Term Prison Estate between 1987 and 1994, the system is designed to provide managers with comprehensive information on the behaviour of inmates in response to the day to day demands of residential routines and day time activities. Although long-term prediction of complex dynamic systems can be extremely difficult, recording what occurs over time can provide reliable measures of differential change. The major products of the PROBE system are computer generated reports on the behaviour of individual inmates throughout sentence, showing their relative performance on a monthly level as well as trends over longer periods. The PROBE system also provides profiles of behaviour at the wing and prison level, thereby allowing managers to monitor long term changes in the average behaviour of their population by wing or even landing. Comprehensive, and standardised, behaviour profiling is therefore available from the individual inmate level over time, all the way up to comparative profiles between whole establishments, sub-establishments and wings, over time. All such profiles can be generated automatically by selecting an option from a local menu, or by downloading a file from a central computer.
'A System Specification for Profiling Behaviour'
in 12 volumes, begins with a series of overviews of PROBE written by various field psychologists, along with an introduction to the academic background which lies behind the system.Volume 1 provides a survey of some of the key areas in behaviour science bearing on the system. Although not comprehensive, what is not covered explicitly is covered implicitly. The main issues covered include the relative merits of adopting an entirely behavioural or third person approach to managing inmates rather than attempting to work to include an inmate's point of view. In other words, the PROBE system adopts a standard, scientific approach which is based on an axiom of the predicate calculus which seems to be inapplicable within psychological contexts. This is a central theme which is elaborated in the first three volumes. This stance is further developed by providing a review of the current state of research on the use of actuarial (statistical) judgement rather than clinical, or personal (intuitive) judgement. The case is made that the latter can only ever be an approximation of the former at best. Most managers today are too busy to be able to make optimal decisions without the support of Information Technology and this is likely to continue to be so. The case is made that managers must therefore make greater use of such systems, and that behaviour scientists must invest more time in their production. This leads naturally on to a consideration of the appropriate technology to support the actuarial stance, and to a critical evaluation of current practices adopted by psychologists in their design and evaluation methods (largely attempts at simple factorial designs which test that differences between groups are unlikely to be explained on the basis of chance alone). The case is presented that this is possibly one of the worst things that ever happened in psychology, and that all too few psychologists (less than one in 20) appreciate the weakness of such an approach. The volume makes the case that a more descriptive approach to data collection and research must be adopted now that systems are available to profile entire populations, and that such data should be functionally analyzed using simple regression technology with an aim to establishing and testing point predictions, and improving on those predictions as is done in the rest of physical science. The volume continues with a brief, but comprehensive survey of the literature on
'What Works' in the way of programmes for prisoners, and concludes with a brief presentation of a computerised system for managing, monitoring, and assessing inmates' participation in activities throughout sentence in the interests of effective inmate sentence management, planning and throughcare.Volume 2 provides a report on a pilot of the PROBE Sentence Management system introduced in volume 1. Conceived in 1991 and 1992 as a flexible, user defined behaviour assessment system, and developed between 1992 and 1993 when it ran at HMP Parkhurst and HMP Frankland, the pilot study was overseen by a DIP Steering Group commissioned by the Director of Inmate Programmes during a DIP Senior Management Seminar held at Newbold Revel in March 1992 (DIP Research Report No. 2, November 1992). The pilot was completed in January 1994, and volume 2 serves as an empirical illustration of how the prototype system ran in an applied context. The volume includes reports from the Head of Inmate Activities at HMP Parkhurst and the psychologist who oversaw the pilot at that prison. The volume illustrates how comprehensive management information can be provided in simple descriptive graphical form as
box-plots which show the distribution of behaviour on the landings and within activities, readily identifying inmates with scores at the upper and lower ends of the scale. The volume also shows how individual and group based reports of inmate performance and attendance can be automatically generated for Heads of Residence and Heads of Activities. All attainment measures are functionally related to measures of control, and it is shown how the PROBE Sentence Management System can be used to facilitate the maintenance of control through effective, and positive Sentence Planning by providing an infrastructure within which individual inmate targets can be identified, negotiated, contracted and subsequently monitored by the first-line staff who have the most contact time with inmates. It is emphasised that it is those staff who are responsible for directly training and supervising inmates within specific domains of expertise, and for want of an adequate technology, such staff's observations and assessments often go totally unrecorded. The volume illustrates how the technology of Sentence Management can be used to make effective use of such staff's professional assessment skills in the interest of recording and shaping positive behaviour change throughout sentence, allowing decisions to be subsequently made on the basis of differential levels of attainment. The case that is made that since it is here that the Prison Service invests in maximally, it is here that our technology for monitoring and recording behaviour change must be focused. Collation, standardisation and presentation of the information recorded can be undertaken by computer. Quality control lies largely in the hands of higher management.Volume 3 provides a functional specification of the entire PROBE system. Part one covers the logic and technology of relational database technology, showing how this relatively recent technology supports the application of behaviour science in an applied setting, and how such a system can serve well as a Management Information System. Section 1 also outlines the main elements of the PROBE system, explaining how the communications network functions to support the entire system and the staff maintaining it. Section two provides graphical illustrations of how the system has been used in support of maintaining control within the Adult Long Term estate, how routine profiles of inmate movements, disciplinary offending and segregation histories can be generated from local menus, and how profiles at the wing and establishment levels can be readily produced in support of operations. Section three shows how the system can be used as a support system for F2054 Sentence Planning, drawing on monthly Sentence Management data to identify suitable Sentence Plan targets. Thus, whilst section two outlines the technology of PROfiling BEhaviour, ie measuring and describing behaviour, section three provides a technology for PROgramming BEhaviour, ie providing a means of effectively managing inmate behaviour under the rubric of Sentence Planning. This technology provides managers for the first time with a system which enables them to effectively manage or programme inmate activities at the individual and regime level.
Volume 4 provides a detailed description, at the computational level, of the programming which comprises the system. This is the main Technical Specification of the PROBE system. Sections 4 through 9 detail how each class of computer system within PROBE is actually configured, the software which runs on each system, and how each class of system is scheduled to operate at different stages of the day and week. This includes a detailed description of the automatic screening of candidates for Special Units, the generation of comparative statistics for the dispersal prisons each week, the production of daily quality control reports, and so on.
Volumes 5 and 6 list the fixed data dictionaries for the PROBE database at Adult and Young Offender sites respectively, along with example code for the data entry system. These two volumes specify precisely the predicates which are used to classify inmates, the range of the valid values for those predicates, and their labels. The adult system comprises 34 tables of predicates or relations. Development work within the Young Offender system, whilst relatively recent, illustrates that the system can be used as an effective substrate for behaviour science and technology within any convicted population which is practically concerned with Sentence Planning. The Sentence Management records illustrate how sophisticated use of relational theory can be used to extend the data dictionary ad infinitum without having to make structural changes to the data dictionary per se. From a technical perspective, this may well be a unique feature of the PROBE system.
Volume 7 lists the computer on-line help script for the system. This is basically the user's on-line manual which provides explicit, context sensitive instructions as to how each field in the database must be maintained, e.g. the codes for an inmate's index offence, his preconvictions, and where to find these in the prisoner's record. As changes are made to the system over time, new help scripts can be automatically distributed over the electronic network and automatically installed.
Volume 8 provides the material for a 3 day course on PROBE. Material covered includes basic programming using the 4th Generation Programming Language (PQL) provided with the system, illustrated examples of how to use a wide range of output procedures, and how to use more advanced programming facilities such as TABFILES and MATRIX operations. In effect, in conjunction with the reference manuals and other volumes of the System Specification, this volume comprises a comprehensive self-instruction course in the PQL programming language which is the basis of all of the report writing facilities within the PROBE system.
Volume 9 provides an illustration of the weekly statistics generated automatically by the system. These show comparative figures for the dispersal prisons, and for other PROBE maintaining prisons within the Long Term Category B estate. These statistics include the distribution of security category, sentence length, and so on across PROBE sites, first for the dispersal estate, and then the other category B prisons. Additional comparative statistics show control indices by wing within a prison, and between prisons. Rudimentary data on inmates who have been in Special Units are compared with normal location inmates, illustrating the potential for detailed follow up.
Volume 10 provides a list of the essential procedures held within the PROCEDURE file of the Data Base Management System. These Procedural Query Language routines are an essential part of the PROBE system at each installed site. As new systems are developed, they are automatically distributed to all field sites to ensure that all facilities are standardised.
Finally, a General Index is provided. Each of the preceding volumes is provided with references, subject indices, names indices, files indices and where appropriate a list of the attributes used within the Data Base Management System. This document collates all of those indices and references into one convenient reference volume. All volumes beyond volume 3 are essentially technical material. A summary of what the system can provide as a Management Information System can be gleaned from Volume 3, sections 2 and 3. Managers' attention is drawn to the fact that the comparative graphics and tables covered in those sections are refreshed each Sunday night, and are electronically available to Psychology Units every Monday morning. For specific coverage of PROBE in support of inmate activities and Sentence Planning, the reader is referred to volume 2 and section 3 of volume 3. For the specific rationale behind the system given what is known about normal human decision making and its constraints, the reader is referred to volume 1 and to section 1 of volume 3.
The documentation describes the PROBE system as it was when managed within the Directorate of Inmate Programmes. The 1994 reorganization of Headquarters led to the loss of the posts which developed and supported PROBE. Responsibility for day to day technical management of the system now lies with Prison Service IT Services, and policy responsibility with Custody Group. The future of the PROBE system therefore rests to a very large extent in the hands of field staff and it is hoped that the provided documentation goes some way towards consolidating the infrastructure which has been built up over the past eight years. It is also hoped that those now contributing towards the federated system will insist on the continuation of a high level of central support, maintenance and oversight of the system sufficient to sustain comparative profiling which is an essential element of overall system quality control. Quality control and feedback being the sine qua non of PROBE as a system, with the changes in system management in 1994, it must be emphasised that the integrity of the system now rests much more so in the hands of field staff. The future integrity and standardisation of the system will depend as much upon feedback to central support on the accuracy of the weekly statistical profiles made available on the central system, as it will on local quality control.
22 November 1997 (Draft)
'I should like to see a new conceptual apparatus of a logically and behaviourally straightforward kind by which to formulate, for scientific purposes, the sort of psychological information that is conveyed nowadays by idioms of propositional attitude.'
W.V.O Quine (1978)
'On our view, many of the illusions cannot be dispelled by a "few moments' prompted reflection," or several months of college teaching; if dispelled, the illusions seem to return in full force the next time a similar situation comes along. Such illusions seem to be rooted very deeply in the human mind.'
The Persistence of Cognitive Illusions
P. Diaconisa and D. Freedman
The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1981),4, p
'A bias towards vividness might well mean that a powerfully placed decision maker will act on the basis of unrepresentative, but highly vivid, personal experiences or anecdotes and ignore the "dull" results of large, well designed statistical surveys. It is of no practical value to consider whether such behaviour can, by some philosophical device, be deemed to be "rational." It is evident that such behaviour is undesirable, in the sense that it is likely to produce inefficient decisions and costly errors.'
J. St. B. T. Evans and P Pollard
The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1981), 4 p 335
This paper reviews and analyses convergent lines of research which amount to a radical critique of cognitivism in its most problematic guise -
inductive psychologism. It targets two widely accepted dogmas:|
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that past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour; and |
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that there is practical merit in treating 'cognition' as an independent variable when working to effect behavioural change. |
The fundamental objective of this paper is to demonstrate why the above assumptions are false and to present instead alternative foundations upon which to build a professional science and technology of behaviour (primarily in the applied field of corrections (prisons)). This alternative presents the case that the body of normative principles referred to as science comprises a dynamic web of belief which is open to empirical revision through a formal process of conjecture and refutation (Popper 1965). It will be argued that such revisions occur both at the professional and individual levels, and according to the same procedures. As such, what is advocated here as a methodology for best practice in the profession of behaviour science and technology applies quid pro quo for change in an individual's observable behaviour. It is the thesis of this paper that all such developments must always be based upon the extensional stance, hence the weight given to explication of its modus operandi
.Additionally, it is fundamental to the case being made that the reader appreciates that there is, from this perspective, no means of advancing our current normative scientific standards outside that of the naturalistic process of empirical conjecture and refutation. That is to say, it is fundamental to the theme of this paper that the evolution of normative laws, including those of logical and mathematical analysis, has no foundation other than
empirically demonstrable best practice (Quine 1951;1968).Nevertheless, to appreciate why so much weight has been given to 'cognition' by contemporary psychologists, the reader is presented a brief but relevant history of psychology of recent psychology, focusing specifically on events which gave rise to what is now widely referred to as the 'Cognitive Revolution'. The two dogmas listed above, are, it will be argued, a consequence of a simple, but quite radical misinterpretation of the data which inspired this revolution and which has subsequently adversely changed the direction of much of contemporary research in experimental psychology.
To anticipate the conclusion somewhat, argument and evidence is presented to suggest that the only instances where past behaviour is said to be the best predictor of future behaviour is where the referred to behaviour has not changed. Under such conditions, the statement is not empirical, but tautologous. Secondly, what is widely referred to as 'cognitive behaviour', invariably reduces to publicly observable and measurable
behaviours - a fact which renders the qualifier 'cognitive' redundant except as a convenient sub-classifier. In support of this statement, the following heuristic is offered: in all cases where cognitive skills are referred to as independent or dependent variables, the question should be asked: 'how are such variables observed and measured, and reported?'. Each class of behaviour has its own merits as foci for behavioural change, depending upon the objectives of the specific programme, but whatever the class of behaviour subject to intervention, there are constraints on what one can expect to achieve based upon what is now known about the context specificity of learning.The following critique has practical implications for programmes such as 'Cognitive Skills Training' in corrections. The first consequence is that such programmes can only aspire to change context free verbal behaviour. Given the evidence which has accumulated in support of the context specificity of all skill acquisition and retrieval, claims for the efficacy of such programmes content must be regarded with scepticism, and alternative explanations (such as selection effects) for any empirically recorded efficacy of such programmes (see Longley 1997a). Resources should be focused on the establishment of areas of activity which offer the greatest scope for demonstrable skill acquisition to the greatest range of individuals. If efforts are
not made to enable maximum opportunity for acquisition of new skills, there can be little rational basis for expecting behavioural change except through adventitious, ie uncontrolled, and therefore unmanaged processes - or ageing. So why do some psychologists give such weight to 'cognitive' processes? The explanation lies in a misconception of the nature of psychology.The impetus for the 'Cognitive Revolution' came in the mid 1950s, largely through the influence of the work of Jerome Bruner, who summarised his influential series of studies on judgement and reporting as follows:
'The most characteristic thing about mental life, over and beyond the fact that one apprehends the events of the world around one, is that one constantly goes beyond the information given'.
J Bruner (1957)
Going Beyond The Information Given
(in H Gulber and others (eds) Contemporary Approaches to Cognition
These and later studies demonstrated that people naturally have a tendency to report
what they expect to be the case rather than what objectively is case, making expectancy, or a priori heuristics, important research phenomena in their own right. In one famous study (later used by T.S. Kuhn in his influential book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', playing cards of an atypical suit/colour combination (e.g. a red 5 of spades, or black 3 of hearts) were standardly reported as convention would expect (ie as a standard 5 of spades, 3 of hearts). In other investigators' experiments, conflicts in accurately reporting name/feature combinations such as the word BLUE written in red ink (the 'Stroop Effect') were widely replicated, but conventionally studied to shed light on levels of information processing with the objective of differentially testing the relative merits of alternative models of memory and attention. In all of this research, the objective has always been to model cognitive processes - however, in the present context, the reader is asked to consider such phenomena as testament to the context dependency and general unreliability of natural human decision making when compared to formal, normative standards. Whilst there are indubitably good reasons to provide good and predictive models of the natural processes of human judgement and decision making, such research can also be cited as evidence of the extent to which a priori heuristics and processing limitations influence accurate observational reporting. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, a range of perceptual illusions were cited in support of the non-veridical or inferential nature of perception, a feature also referred to as 'perceptual readiness'. In other studies, Postman and colleagues provided experimental evidence in support of the 'Chinese Whispers' phenomenon - a classic series of experiments on serial reproduction - the propagation and distortion which occurs when messages or reports are serially repeated from one individual to another. This is the psychology of rumour, but could also be called the psychology of reporting.In other research programs, psychologists studied related phenomena, first under the auspices of 'Cognitive Dissonance' (Festinger 1957). The extent to which these processes were aptly described as cognitive was challenged at the time by radical behaviourists such as Bem (1963) who urged psychologists to interpret the same phenomena in terms of adventitious nature of self-perception and operant conditioning. In the late 1960s and 1970s such work dominated research in Personality and Social Psychology, but under the new rubric of 'Attribution Theory' (Kelley 1955;1967) which provided detailed studies of what came to be known as the fundamental attribution error. Such research provided a substantial body of evidence in support of Bruner's thesis that, in making assessments of events and their relations (including assessments of one's own behaviour), folk manifest a remarkable tendency to 'go beyond the information given', resorting well circumscribed heuristics. From this perspective, the entire discipline of empirical psychology can be viewed as the study of the modus operandi of 'folk psychology' or 'common-sense'. This being so, a clear distinction must be made between a descriptive account of natural judgmental heuristics on the one hand, and the development and application of normative standards of science and technology on the other. The extensional stance outlined here explicates a framework for the delivery of an effective applied behaviour science based on the latter.
Judgmental heuristics are embodied in natural language, and have been identified, largely by philosophers of language (Quine 1956,1960; Davidson 1970) as the logically anomalous idioms of 'propositional attitude'. Whilst anomalous, in the absence of suitable alternatives, they remain essential modi vivendi, and will be retained as part of each culture's natural repertoire and be disseminated via the family, media and major social institutions as normal social convention until more valid and reliable systems of prediction are identified through research and development. The natural mode of distribution of social convention is narrative (Bruner 1990), which accounts for such processes being the focus of so many psychological research programmes to date. It is because of the pragmatic daily demands for a viable folk psychology that it is so difficult to sustain support for research and development based upon the extensional stance - its whole approach differs quite dramatically from the popular conception of the role of the conventional psychologist, a point which is particularly marked with respect to the place of 'cognition' in behaviour analysis and management. From the extensional stance, 'cognition' requires explanation - it is not to be used as explanation.
In contrast to narrative, it is only in the latter half of this century that formal language systems, grounded in deductive logic have been developed to the extent that they can now be widely deployed in the guise of relational database. technology. These developments have been dependent on the widespread use of the digital computer, and, more importantly, the development of programming. Such developments now enable professionals to build formal models which are reliable enough to replace intuitive or expert opinion. With the support of such technology, descriptive cognitive psychology and neuroscience are likely to be of value only to the extent that they reveal limitations on human competence and performance, characteristics which are largely irrelevant to the practising behavioural scientist tasked with providing analyses of distributions of data. The former disciplines are more likely to provide data of interest to cultural anthropologists and biologists than applied behavioural professionals.
In the wake of the 1879 Fregian revolution in formal logic, the scientific enterprise as the pursuit of truth became much clearer. Owing much to the work of members of the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, three affiliates in particular, R. Carnap, K.R Popper and W.V.O Quine, pressed logical empiricism to its limits throughout the 20th century. Quine, departing from Carnap in identifying intensional idioms as anomalous locutions within ordinary language, suggested how and why the pursuit of truth might be impeded unless a distinction is made between a merely instrumental acceptance of the intensional idioms of propositional attitude as elements of a theoretical folk psychology on the one hand, and the formal integrity of the 'web of (scientific) belief' on the other. The logically anomalous mentalistic (intensional) idioms, 'thinks that', 'believes that' (the verbs of propositional attitude) can have no formal place in a unified science which can be regimented within the language of the predicate or functional calculus, and must ultimately, be replaced (in science at least), by suitable extensional alternatives. This Quinean program promises a far more fruitful basis upon which to build a profession of behaviour analysis and management than has hitherto been possible, and provides a clear if anomalous status to the idioms of propositional attitude as elements of folk psychology's modus vivendi.
Folk psychological lore, like folk physical lore, is learned developmentally and inductively. The resulting cultural diversity, whilst at one time quite vast, is now more apparent in more subtle forms such as individual dialects and local lore, and ultimately individual 'personality'. It is shared socially within human cultures via narrative processes, many of which exert their influence early in life from parents, siblings and other significant others. The modus operandi of these fundamental social processes have been studied by psychologists of various theoretical persuasions under the rubrics of 'conditioning', 'learning', or 'attribution'. In recent decades they have also been studied by a range of academics collectively referring to themselves (oxymoronically perhaps) as 'cognitive scientists'. Yet there are professional demands which extend far beyond such descriptive accounts - a fact which renders the majority of professionals helpless when tasked with providing an accountable service in the assessment and management of behaviour. Here, evidence must play the key role. It is here that the knowledge of the professional behaviour scientist meets that of the folk psychologist, and it is here that the former has to demonstrate provision of a service which can be readily identified as providing good value for money. This paper sets out to explicate how and why when this confrontation takes place the psychologist is rarely able to provide an effective contribution for want of adequate data and the skills to analyse it.
Whilst psychology strives to provide an account (ultimately with the help of neuroscience) of how folk naturally make sense of the regularities in the world (how folk come to assert and act as if one event can be predicted or expected on the basis of another), it must be understood clearly that such accounts do not aim to provide a legitimatization or validation of such processes or events. Yet, in an insidious manner, the blurring of the difference between the descriptive and normative is precisely what has occurred in much of contemporary applied psychology. What begins merely as a descriptive account of 'natural assessments' or judgements, is all too readily accepted as validation of such processes, largely because professionals so rarely have access to the distributional data needed to permit them to do otherwise. This in turn is a consequence of the fact that the majority of professionals are unwilling or unable to identify quantitative analysis of observations as their primary professional responsibility. As a consequence, the professional psychologist's role has widely degenerated into one amounting to little more than serving as a folk psychological reference point - as expert folk-psychologist among many practising folk psychologists'. One of the objectives below is to explicate the practical differences between the normative analysis and management of behaviour ('The Extensional Stance'), from the cognitivist approach ('The Intentional Stance'). Whilst folk psychology is the natural repository of folk wisdom, shared through narrative, it is so prone to bias and distortion that it is effectively useless as a reliable data source for the professional behavioural scientist/technologist. When Dennett published 'The Intentional Stance'' in 1987, he outlined it merely as an instrumentalist position:
'The intentional stance is the strategy of prediction and explanation that attributes beliefs, desires, and other "intentional states" to systems (living and nonliving) and predicts future behavior from what it would be rational for an agent to do, given those beliefs and desires; such systems are intentional systems. The strategy of treating parts of the world as intentional systems is the foundation of "folk psychology" but is also exploited in artificial intelligence and cognitive science more generally, as well as in evolutionary theory. The analysis of the intentional stance grounds a theory of the mind and its relation to the body.'
D C Dennett (1988)
Précis of The Intentional Stance.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences; Sep Vol 11(3) 495-546
Yet the demands of the applied professional are different unless the objective is to record the narrative processes in their own right. It is important that the reader understands that the viability of Dennett's 'Intentional Stance' depends on 'the rationality assumption', ie that it is valid to assume that 'beliefs' and 'desires' can be analysed logically. It is precisely this assumption that is challenged in the pages which follow. Evidence is presented below which strongly suggests that this assumption is largely responsible for the minimal progress achieved to date by 'cognitivist' approaches. Behavioural technology, is, therefore, not an application of psychology per se, but, from the stance developed in this paper, an instantiation of 'Artificial Intelligence'. Applied effectively (computationally.), 'Artificial Intelligence', has to be contrasted with what Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky (1982) have called 'natural assessments' or what Agnoli and Krantz (1989) called 'intensional heuristics'. The latter are the intuitive and inductive (or associative) processes, studied by psychologists as conditioning. Artificial Intelligence on the other hand - ie formal intelligence as measured and technologically implemented, is always a normative measure (or instantiation) of non-psychological skills. These reduce, in any culture fair test, to an assessment (or instantiation) of formal logical operations. Indeed, to the extent that such skills are instantiations of logical or quantitative skills, it is likely that as these are more widely implemented the services of professional psychologists will become more and more difficult to distinguish from other well educated staff . There signs that this is already happening:
'There has been a long and unresolved debate over what the Prison Service employs psychologists for: only 3 of the 100 or so outside of HQ are clinical psychologists and even though many of the others do some work with inmates much psychological input goes into management services, operational research and training..It is not easy to resolve the position of psychologists within the organisational structure without answering the more basic question of what the role of psychologists should be.'
Review of Organisation & Location Above Establishment Level
HM Prison Service - PA Consultants (1989)
One finds psychologists working in HIV counselling, hostage situation training, staff selection, - in fact just about every area of staff deployment. What one does not find is their widespread deployment in the systematic collection and analysis of behavioural data in support of effective inmate behaviour management. This paper asserts that one can not justify the deployment of psychologists in an area simply on the grounds that it is an area of human behaviour. To do so is both to mismanage psychologists and misunderstand the nature of psychology. Whilst any area of human activity can benefit from the application of normative analysis, this is only because under some circumstances, such staff are prone to resort to the principles of folk psychological judgement. Those circumstances are when their professional skills prove technically inadequate and they find themselves forced to act outside their professional role. Where the skills of the behaviour scientist are required is in the quantitative analysis of behaviour in support of other professionals. Nowhere are the professional skills of quantitatively skilled behaviour scientists required more urgently than in such a capacity - yet it is precisely this role of the psychologist as behaviour scientist that is grossly underappreciated, and probably for want of a sound knowledge of the history of psychology itself:
'History may well record that towards the middle of the twentieth century many classical problems of philosophy and psychology took on renewed interest and vigour with the emergence of a new (and not yet well understood) notion of mechanism. While the development of this notion has many roots within philosophy (especially in studies of the foundations of mathematics by Alonzo Church and others) the major milestone was probably the formalization of the idea of computation by Alan Turing in 1936. This work, in a sense, marked the beginning of the study of cognitive activity from an abstract point of view, divorced in principle from both biological and phenomenological foundations. It provided a reference point for the scientific ideal of a mechanistic process which could be understood without raising the spectre of vital forces or elusive homunculi, but which at the same time was sufficiently rich to cover every conceivable informal notion of mechanism. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this development for psychology.......there is a growing feeling, not only among those working in AI but also among more enlightened experimental psychologists, that the study of intelligence cannot be decomposed along such traditional lines as those which, say, mark off typical elementary textbook chapter headings....As Donald Michie (1971) has put it, in speaking of recent developments in AI, ' ...we now have as a touchstone the realization that the central operations of the intelligence are ...transactions on a knowledge base'. ....psychologists have opted for a type and size of parcel which many people, particularly in AI, are beginning to feel is fundamentally wrong-headed.'
'A cognitive theory with no rationality restrictions is without predictive content; using it, we can have virtually no expectations regarding a believer's behavior. There is also a further metaphysical, as opposed to epistemological, point concerning rationality as part of what it is to be a PERSON: the elements of a mind - and, in particular, a cognitive system - must FIT TOGETHER or cohere .......no rationality, no agent.'
C. Cherniak (1986)
Minimal Rationality p.6
'Complexity theory raises the possibility that formally correct deductive procedures may sometimes be so slow as to yield computational paralysis; hence, the "quick but dirty" heuristics uncovered by the psychological research may not be irrational sloppiness but instead the ultimate speed-reliability trade-off to evade intractability. With a theory of nonidealized rationality, complexity theory thereby "justifies the ways of Man" to this extent.'
ibid p.75-76
Dennett's (1987) 'The Intentional Stance' focused on one of three alternative stances, the others being the physical and design stances. In advocating the intentional, he did so as an instrumentalist, accepting that its efficacy is dependent upon an important assumption - that the individual one is trying to predict or understand, using the intentional stance, behaves rationally. This is 'the rationality assumption'.
The establishment of coherence or incoherence depends on a commitment to clear and accurate recording and analysis of observations and their relations within a formal system. Biological constraints on both neuron conduction velocity and storage capacity impose such severe constraints on natural human information processing capacity that we are restricted to using heuristics rather than the recursive functions which are used by effective computer programs. This would not be such a problem if it were not for the fact that nature does not reliably present its laws in representative samples.
For many routine applications, it is now widely accepted that non-human computers offer a far more reliable set of procedures for analysing information than does natural intuitive human judgement - preference for the former being based on little more than familiarity and an innate neo-phobia. The superior reliability of the computer is true at least with respect to decidable systems of the propositional calculus and first order predicate calculus with monadic predicates. Such systems allow automated execution of algorithms written to solve mathematical and logical problems. Yet it still comes as a surprise to many that this is also true of almost all areas of human expertise - all that can be clearly explicated can be computed. Whilst the main practical reason for writing this paper is to explicate the practice implications of the difference between descriptive 'folk psychology' and that of the scientific analysis of behaviour, it is also in part motivated by the author having been in a position for some time where he has both taught and supported applied psychologists in the use of deductive (computer based relational database 4GL programming) as well as inductive (inferential statistical) inference. These responsibilities in turn came after several years of research into the neural basis of reinforcement, incentive motivation and habit formation in the early 1980s. Reviews of the published literature on the teaching and transfer of formal skills, referenced in the following pages shed some light on the clear difficulties which many, otherwise well accomplished individuals, clearly have in effectively applying the practical implications of such technology in the service of a professional analysis of behaviour.
Some very influential work in mathematical logic this century has suggested that certain domains of concern simply do not fall within the scope and language of science (Quine 1956). That work suggests, in fact, that psychological idioms belong to a domain resistant to the tools of scientific analysis in that they flout a basic precondition for valid inference. Whilst this thesis has been known to logicians for nearly a century, (and whilst various studies in psychology in the 1940s and 50s might have alerted us earlier), clear and influential empirical evidence casting doubt on the 'rationality assumption' only began to accumulate throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a result of behavioural decision theory research in psychology and medicine. (Davidson 1959; Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky 1982; Arkes and Hammond 1986). This research provided a substantial body of evidence that human judgement is not adequately modelled by the axioms of subjective probability theory (ie Bayes Theorem, cf. Savage 1954; Cooke 1991), or formal logic (Wason 1966; Johnson-Laird and Wason 1972), and that in all areas of human judgement, quite severe biases of judgement are common. Research suggests that this is at least partially attributable to basic neglect of base rates (where base-rate refers to prior probabilities or relative frequencies of behaviours in the population). The evidence now strongly suggests that natural, common sense judgements are often little more than educated guesses, ('heuristics' or 'rules of thumb') prone to well documented biases. These heuristics, such as 1) the ready 'availability' of information, or 2) its 'representativeness'(similarity to stereotype) are characteristic of what psychologists have long studied under the rubric of conditioning rather than what most folk in moments of reflection consider to be 'reasoning'. Yet, as will be seen from what follows, it may well be the case that much of 'reasoning' is in fact no more than the context specific application of a priori rules - intensional heuristics learned through adventitious conditioning.
To some, this body of research has been taken to progressively undermine the very foundations of Cognitive Science, which takes rationality and substitutivity as axiomatic. It renders the 'Intentional Stance' (Dennett 1987) and Davidson's 'Principle of Charity' unrealistic instrumental strategies in that one can not assume that subjects are largely rational. Only to the extent that individuals have been receptive to the majority of social rules can they be deemed rational - a factor one should be wary of assuming to any great extent when the focus is on delinquent behaviour.
The literature since Wason's experiments in the 1960s provide some consolation to the teacher who finds it difficult to teach the general use of deductive reasoning skills, for it is notoriously difficult to teach such skills with the objective of having them applied to practical problems outside of the training context. What seems to happen, despite efforts to achieve the contrary, is that skills which are acquired, are both acquired and applied as intensional, inductive heuristics tied to the training examples, rather than learned as a set of formal rules or 'cognitive skills'.
This logical analyses and review of empirical research presented in this paper sets out to provide a rationale for the system of inmate management and assessment outlined elsewhere in this series as 'Sentence Management'. This rationale requires a clear understanding of Brentano's Thesis (Quine 1960) also known as 'the problem of intensionality', or 'the content-clause problem'.
'One may accept the Brentano thesis as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of an autonomous science of intention, or as showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention. My attitude, unlike Brentano's, is the second. To accept intentional usage at face value is, we saw, to postulate translation relations as somehow objectively valid though indeterminate in principle relative to the totality of speech dispositions. Such postulation promises little gain in scientific insight if there is no better ground for it than that the supposed translation relations are presupposed by the vernacular of semantics and intention.'
W. V. O. Quine
The Double Standard: Flight from Intension
Word and Object (1960), p218-221
"The keynote of the mental is not the mind it is the content-clause syntax, the idiom 'that p'".
W. V. O. Quine (1990)
Intension
The Pursuit of Truth p.71
Quine's gloss on Brentano's Thesis is that there can be no scientific analysis (no reliable application of the laws of logic or mathematics) to the domain of intensional phenomena. Since the language of psychology is intensional, this has devastating (or enlightening) consequences for that part of psychology which is couched in intensional language. It is devastating because intensional locutions flout the very axioms which mathematical, logical and computational processes (the language of science) must assume for deductive inference to be valid. From the demonstrable fact that logical quantification is unreliable within intensional contexts it follows that within such contexts both p and not-p could be held as truth values for the same proposition, and any system which allows such inconsistency allows any conclusion whatsoever to be inferred - a definition of equivocation which is fatal within any rational system/theory. This paper marshals evidence in support of the thesis that many of the difficulties vanish once one appreciates that methodologically, behaviour science requires the extensional analysis of behaviour and not interpretation or analysis of psychological idioms of propositional attitude. The methodology of behaviour science and technology is exclusively deductive and analytical:
'If we are limiting the true and ultimate structure of reality, the canonical scheme for us is the austere scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation and no propositional attitudes but only the physical constitution and behavior of organisms.'
W.V.O Quine (1960)
Word and Object p 221
Quine's analysis of the mental idiom renders 'psychology' and behaviour science two very different disciplines, with very different methods and ontological status. The focus is on language, and anomalies which have evolved along with the growth of language. One class of terms is the 'extensional' and the other the logically anomalous 'intensional'. Verbatim extracts from a selection of the relevant literature are presented to illustrate the practical implications which analysis of the subordinate clause has for applied, practical work of criminological psychologists. Verbatim - because it is sentences and not propositions, which are true or false in science, and:
'Once it is shown that a region of discourse is not extensional, then according to Quine, we have reason to doubt its claim to describe the structure of reality.'
C. Hookway (1988)
Logic: Canonical Notation and Extensionality
Quine
The dilemma for intensional (common sense or 'folk') psychology is outlined by Nelson (1992):
'The trouble is, according to Brentano's thesis, no such theory is forthcoming on strictly naturalistic, physical grounds. If you want semantics, you need a full-blown, irreducible psychology of intensions.
'There is a counterpart in modern logic of the thesis of irreducibility. The language of physical and biological science is largely extensional. It can be formulated (approximately) in the familiar predicate calculus. The language of psychology, however, is intensional. For the moment it is good enough to think of an intensional sentence as one containing words for intensional attitudes such as belief.
'Roughly what the counterpart thesis means is that important features of extensional, scientific language on which inference depends are not present in intensional sentences. In fact intensional words and sentences are precisely those expressions in which certain key forms of logical inference break down.'
R. J. Nelson (1992)
Naming and Reference p.39-42
and most explicitly by Place (1987):
'The first-order predicate calculus is an extensional logic in which Leibniz's Law is taken as an axiomatic principle. Such a logic cannot admit 'intensional' or 'referentially opaque' predicates whose defining characteristic is that they flout that principle.'
U. T. Place (1987)
Skinner Re-Skinned P. 244
In B.F. Skinner Consensus and Controversy Eds. S. Modgil & C. Modgil
The intension of a word or sentence is its 'meaning', or the property it conveys. It is sometimes used almost synonymously with the 'proposition' or 'content'. The extension of a term or sentence on the other hand is the class of designata of which the term or sentence can be said to be true. Thus, things belong to the same extension of a term or sentence if they are the same members of the designated class, whilst things share the same intension, (purportedly) if they share the same property. But here, there's a problem -.Quine (1987) explains it thus:
'If it makes sense to speak of properties, it should make clear sense to speak of sameness and differences of properties; but it does not. If a thing has this property and not that, then certainly this property and that are different properties. But what if everything that has this property has that one as well, and vice versa? Should we say that they are the same property? If so, well and good; no problem. But people do not take that line. I am told that every creature with a heart has kidneys, and vice versa; but who will say that the property of having a heart is the same as that of having kidneys?
'In short, coextensiveness of properties is not seen as sufficient for their identity. What then is? If an answer is given, it is apt to be that they are identical if they do not just happen to be coextensive, but are necessarily coextensive. But NECESSITY, q.v., is too hazy a notion to rest with.
'We have been able to go on blithely all these years without making sense of identity between properties, simply because the utility of the notion of property does not hinge on identifying or distinguishing them. That being the case, why not clean up our act by just declaring coextensive properties identical? Only because it would be a disturbing breach of usage, as seen in the case of the heart and kidneys. To ease that shock, we change the word; we speak no longer of properties, but of CLASSES.
'We must acquiesce in ordinary language for ordinary purposes, and the word 'property' is of a piece with it. But also the notion of property or its reasonable facsimile that takes over, since these contexts never hinge on distinguishing coextensive properties. One instance among many of the use of classes in mathematics is seen under DEFINITION, in the definition of number. For science it is classes SI, properties NO.'
W. V. O. Quine (1987)
Classes versus Properties
Quine (1956,1960,1992,1995) urges us to accept that the scope and language of science is entirely extensional, that the intensional is purely attributive, instrumental or creative, and that there can be no universal language of thought or 'mentalese', as the latter would presume determinate translation relations - a possibility which his indeterminacy of translation argument was designed to discredit. Instead, we are asked to accept that different languages are different systems of behaviour which may achieve similar ends. They do not, however, support direct, determinate translation relations. Despite Quine's (1960) indeterminacy thesis, we still (for want of education perhaps? behave 'as if' it is legitimate to directly translate (substitute), and we do this not only within our own language, but within our thinking. Quine's point is still fundamentally a point of mathematical logic and philosophy, perhaps in time it will become more familiar..
The intensional idioms with which we are most concerned in our day to day transactions with one another are the so called
'propositional attitudes' - 'saying that', 'remembering that', 'believing that', 'knowing that', 'hoping that' and so on. If we report that someone said that he hated his father, it is often the case that we do not report what is articulated verbatim. Instead, we frequently 'approximate' the 'meaning' of what was said and consider this legitimate so long as the 'meaning' is preserved. Unfortunately, this assumes that, in contexts of propositional attitude, ie the primary vehicle of psychological expression - we are free to substitute terms or phrases in the subordinate clauses, ie what comes after that. We can do this within extensional contexts, 7+3 can be substituted for 5+5 as co-extensive with 10. Doing so is fundamental to the solution of many mathematical problems. By analogy, or simply through not making a distinction, it is naturally assumed that inference within intensional contexts is equally valid - but it is demonstrably, and to some, (quite surprisingly), not.Nobody would report that if Oedipus said that he wanted to marry Jocasta that he
said that he wanted to marry his mother. The problem with intensional idioms is that they do not support substitutivity of identicals salva veritate. Terms which might seem to be equal in meaning can not be substituted for one another whilst still preserving the truth functionality of the contexts within which they occur. The original contexts must be preserved. In other words, they can only be directly quoted verbatim as behaviours. Substitution of co-referential identical 'salva veritate' is Leibniz's Law, and is the basic extensional axiom of first order logic. It is, therefore, a law which underpins all valid inference. One of the objectives of this paper is therefore to specify in practical detail how and why one must adopt the extensional stance with respect to inmate reporting which does not flout Leibniz's Law. This is a serious challenge to much of current practice in applied criminological psychology. Whilst the example cited above is a simple one, it is nevertheless, representative of the problem facing practising psychologists, who, often ignorant of the logical constraints on intensional contexts, commit serious logical fallacies in their reporting practices which render much of their report writing and expert advice little more than 'creative fiction' rather than expert scientific analyses based on evidence. Dretske (1980) put the problem as follows:'If I know that the train is moving and you know that its wheels are turning, it does not follow that I know what you know just because the train never moves without its wheels turning. More generally, if all (and only) Fs are G, one can nonetheless know that something is F without knowing that it is G. Extensionally equivalent expressions, when applied to the same object, do not (necessarily) express the same cognitive content. Furthermore, if Tom is my uncle, one can not infer (with a possible exception to be mentioned later) that if S knows that Tom is getting married, he thereby knows that my uncle is getting married. The content of a cognitive state, and hence the cognitive state itself, depends (for its identity) on something beyond the extension or reference of the terms we use to express the content. I shall say, therefore, that a description of a cognitive state, is non-extensional.'
F. I. Dretske (1980)
The Intentionality of Cognitive States
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5,281-294
For the discipline of psychology, the above logical analyses can be taken either as a vindication of 20th century behaviourism/physicalism (Quine 1960,1990,1992;1995) or as a knockout blow to 20th century 'cognitivism' and psychologism (methodological solipsism) as viable methodological frameworks for applied behaviour scientists. In 1980, Jerry Fodor published an influential paper entitled
'Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy for Cognitive Psychology' in which he advocated that Cognitive Psychology adopt a stance which explicated the way that subjects make sense of the world from their 'own particular point of view'. This was to be contrasted with the objectives of 'Naturalistic Psychology' or 'Evidential Behaviourism'.Methodological solipsism, as opposed to methodological behaviourism, investigates 'cognitive processes', mental contents (meanings/propositions) or 'propositional attitudes' of folk/common-sense psychology at face value. It proposes that there is a
'Language of Thought' (Fodor 1975), that there is a universal 'mentalese' which natural languages map onto, and which express thoughts as 'propositions'. It examines the apparent causal relations and processes of 'attribution' which comprise the modus operandi of this common-sense or folk psychology. But, it also accepts what is known as the 'formality condition', namely that thinking is a purely formal, syntactic, computational affair which therefore has no room for semantic notions such as truth or falsehood. Such computational processes are therefore indifferent to whether beliefs are about the world per se (can be said to have a reference), or are just the imaginings of the belief holder. Yet as will be shown later, from a logical stance, 'beliefs' are not subject to 'existential quantification'. Examples of what all this entails might be helpful here, since the implications are far ranging, and have a bearing on 'transfer of training', 'generalisation decrement', 'inductive vs. deductive inference', and the distinction between 'heuristics' and 'algorithms'. Here is how Fodor summarized his paper:'Explores the distinction between 2 doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are viewed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined. The following claims are defended: (1) The traditional dispute between rational and naturalistic psychology is plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the computational theory of mind. (2) To accept the formality condition is to endorse a version of methodological solipsism. (3) The acceptance of some such condition is warranted, at least for that part of psychology that concerns itself with theories of the mental causation of behavior. A glossary and several commentaries are included.'
J A Fodor (1980)
Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences; 1980 Mar Vol 3(1) 63-109
Some of the commentaries, particularly those by Loar or Rey clarify the issues:
'If psychological explanation is a matter of describing computational processes, then the references of our thoughts do not matter to psychological explanation. This is Fodor's main argument....Notice that Fodor's argument can be taken a step further. For not only are the references of our thoughts not mentioned in cognitive psychology; nothing that DETERMINES their references, like Fregian senses, is mentioned either ...Neither reference nor reference-determining sense have a place in the description of computational processes.'
B. F. Loar Ibid p.89
Not all of the commentaries were as formal, as the following makes clear:
'Fodor thinks that when we explain behaviour by mental causes, these causes would be given "opaque" descriptions "true in virtue of the way the agent represents the objects of his wants (intentions, beliefs, etc.) to HIMSELF" (his emphasis). But what an agent intends may be widely different from the way he represents the object of his intention to himself. A man cannot shuck off the responsibility for killing another man by just 'directing his intention' at the firing of a gun: 'I press a trigger - Well, I'm blessed! he's hit my bullet with his chest!"'
P. Geach ibid p80
The Methodological Solipsist's stance is clearly at odds with what is required to function effectively as an applied criminological psychologist if 'functional effectiveness' is taken to refer to intervention in the behaviour of an inmate with reference to his environment. Here's how Fodor contrasted methodological solipsism with the naturalistic approach:
'..there's a tradition which argues that - epistemology to one side - it is at best a strategic mistake to attempt to develop a psychology which individuates mental states without reference to their environmental causes and effects...I have in mind the tradition which includes the American Naturalists (notably Pierce and Dewey), all the learning theorists, and such contemporary representatives as Quine in philosophy and Gibson in psychology. The recurrent theme here is that psychology is a branch of biology, hence that one must view the organism as embedded in a physical environment.
The psychologist's job is to trace those organism/environment interactions which constitute its behavior.'
J. Fodor (1980) ibid. p.64
That function is clearly and exclusively the professional role advocated in this paper for the Applied Behaviour Analyst.
'the modern.....position is that learned problem-solving skills are, in general, idiosyncratic to the task.'
A. Newell (1980).
Returning to Fodor's paper, here is how Stich (1991) reviewed Fodor's position ten years on:
'This argument was part of a larger project. Influenced by Quine, I have long been suspicious about the integrity and scientific utility of the commonsense notions of meaning and intentional content. This is not, of course, to deny that the intentional idioms of ordinary discourse have their uses, nor that the uses are important. But, like Quine, I view ordinary intentional locutions as projective, context sensitive, observer relative, and essentially dramatic. They are not the sorts of locutions we should welcome in serious scientific discourse. For those who share this Quinean scepticism, the sudden flourishing of cognitive psychology in the 1970s posed something of a problem. On the account offered by Fodor and other observers, the cognitive psychology of that period was exploiting both the ontology and the explanatory strategy of commonsense psychology. It proposed to explain cognition and certain aspects of behavior by positing beliefs, desires, and other psychological states with intentional content, and by couching generalisations about the interactions among those states in terms of their intentional content. If this was right, then those of us who would banish talk of content in scientific settings would be throwing out the cognitive psychological baby with the intentional bath water. On my view, however, this account of cognitive psychology was seriously mistaken. The cognitive psychology of the 1970s and early 1980s was not positing contentful intentional states, nor was it (adverting) to content in its generalisations. Rather, I maintained, the cognitive psychology of the day was "really a kind of logical syntax (only psychologized). Moreover, it seemed to me that there were good reasons why cognitive psychology not only did not but SHOULD not traffic in intentional states. One of these reasons was provided by the Autonomy argument.'
Stephen P. Stich (1991)
Narrow Content meets Fat Syntax
in MEANING IN MIND - Fodor And His Critics and writing with others in 1991, even more dramatically:
'In the psychological literature there is no dearth of models for human belief or memory that follow the lead of commonsense psychology in supposing that propositional modularity is true. Indeed, until the emergence of connectionism, just about all psychological models of propositional memory, except those urged by behaviorists, were comfortably compatible with propositional modularity. Typically, these models view a subject's store of beliefs or memories as an interconnected collection of functionally discrete, semantically interpretable states that interact in systematic ways. Some of these models represent individual beliefs as sentence like structures - strings of symbols that can be individually activated by their transfer from long-term memory to the more limited memory of a central processing unit. Other models represent beliefs as a network of labelled nodes and labelled links through which patterns of activation may spread. Still other models represent beliefs as sets of production rules. In all three sorts of models, it is generally the case that for any given cognitive episode, like performing a particular inference or answering a question, some of the memory states will be actively involved, and others will be dormant......
The thesis we have been defending in this essay is that connectionist models of a certain sort are incompatible with the propositional modularity embedded in commonsense psychology. The connectionist models in question are those that are offered as models at the COGNITIVE level, and in which the encoding of information is widely distributed and subsymbolic. In such models, we have argued, there are no DISCRETE, SEMANTICALLY INTERPRETABLE states that play a CAUSAL ROLE in some cognitive episodes but not others. Thus there is, in these models, nothing with which the propositional attitudes of commonsense psychology can plausibly be identified. If these models turn out to offer the best accounts of human belief and memory, we shall be confronting an ONTOLOGICALLY RADICAL theory change - the sort of theory change that will sustain the conclusion that propositional attitudes, like caloric and phlogiston, do not exist.'
W. Ramsey, S. Stich and J. Garon (1991) (my emphasis)
Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk psychology.
The implications here are that progress in applying psychology will be impeded if psychologists persist in trying to talk about, or use psychological (intensional) phenomena within a framework (evidential behaviourism) which inherently resists quantification into such terms. Without bound, extensional predicates, we can not reliably use the predicate calculus, and without the predicate (functional) calculus we can not formulate lawful relationships, statistical or determinate. This methodologically solipsistic or intentional position is, surprisingly, pervasive within the applied psychological profession.
Folk psychology reflects how individuals and groups use socially conditioned (induced) intensional heuristics, and how these are at odds with what we now know to be formally optimal (valid) from the stance of the objective (extensional) sciences. Accordingly, the primary objective of the applied psychologist must be the extensional analysis of observations of behaviour (Quine 1990) with any intervention or advice being based exclusively on extensionally derived data To attempt to understand or describe behaviour without reference to the environment within which it occurs is not only likely to result in partial accounts of behaviour at best (a point made long ago by Brunswick and Tolman (1933)), but to fail to appreciate the constraints on reporting of observations is to treat self-assessment/report as valid and reliable sources of data, in spite of the evidence the contrary. Like 'folk physics', 'folk psychology' has been documented and its deficiencies highlighted. It can now be demonstrated how and why the intensional is unreliable
The following pages cite some examples of research which looks at the use of intensional heuristics. The first looks at the degree to which intensional heuristics can be trained, a development of work initially undertaken by Nisbett and Krantz (1983). Whilst responses, or behaviour generalisation (the transfer of training) to new problems is the focus of this part of the paper, it should be noted as Nisbett and Wilson (1977) clearly pointed out, that subjects' own self-perception ('awareness') should not be given undue weight when assessing the efficacy of transfer. Instead, such transfer should be extensionally assessed differential placement in contexts which require transfer of skills.
'Ss were trained on the law of large numbers in a given domain through the use of example problems. They were then tested either on that domain or on another domain either immediately or after a 2-wk delay. Strong domain independence was found when testing was immediate This transfer of training was not due simply to Ss' ability to draw direct analogies between problems in the trained domain and in the untrained domain. After the 2-wk delay, it was found that (1) there was no decline in performance in the trained domain and (2) although there was a significant decline in performance in the untrained domain, performance was still better than for control Ss. Memory measures suggest that the retention of training effects is due to memory for the rule system rather than to memory for the specific details of the example problems, contrary to what would be expected if Ss were using direct analogies to solve the test problems.'
Fong G. T. & Nisbett R. E. (1991)
Immediate and delayed transfer of training effects in statistical reasoning.
Journal of Experimental Psychology General; 1991 Mar Vol 120(1) 34-45
Note that the authors report a decline in performance after the delay, a point taken up and critically discussed by Ploger and Wilson (1991). In fact, upon reanalysing the Fong and Nisbett's results, these authors concluded:
'The data in this study suggest the following argument: Most college students did not apply the LLN [Law of Large Numbers] to problems in everyday life. When given brief instruction on the LLN, the majority of college students were able to remember that rule. This led to some increase in performance on problems involving the LLN. Overall, most students could state the rule with a high degree of accuracy, but failed to apply it consistently. The vast majority of college students could memorize a rule; some applied it to examples, but most did not.
Fong and Nisbett (1991) concluded their article with the suggestion that "inferential rule training may be the educational gift that keeps on giving" (p.44). It is likely that their educational approach may be successful for relatively straightforward problems that are in the same general form as the training examples. We suspect, however, that for more complex problems, rule training might be less effective. Students may remember the rule, but fail to understand the relevant implications. In such cases, students may accept the gift, but it will not keep on giving.'
D. Ploger and M. Wilson
J Experimental Psychology: General, 1991,120,2,213-214 (My emphasis)
This criticism is repeated by Reeves and Weisberg (1993):
'G. T. Fong and R. E. Nisbett claimed that human problem solvers use abstract principles to accomplish transfer to novel problems, based on findings that Ss were able to apply the law of large numbers to problems from a different domain from that in which they had been trained. However, the abstract-rules position cannot account for results from other studies of analogical transfer that indicate that the content or domain of a problem is important both for retrieving previously learned analogs (e.g., K. J. Holyoak and K. Koh, 1987; M. Keane, 1985, 1987; B. H. Ross, 1989) and for mapping base analogs onto target problems (Ross, 1989). It also cannot account for Fong and Nisbett's own findings that different-domain but not same-domain transfer was impaired after a 2-wk delay. It is proposed that the content of problems is more important in problem solving than supposed by Fong and Nisbett.'
L. M. Reeves and R. W. Weisberg
Abstract versus concrete information as the basis for transfer in problem Solving:
Comment on Fong and Nisbett (1991).
Journal of Experimental Psychology General 1993 Mar Vol122(1) 125-128
The above authors concluded their paper:
'Accordingly, we urge caution in development of an abstract-rules approach in analogical problem solving at the expense of domain or exemplar-specific information. Theories in deductive reasoning have been developed that give a more prominent role to problem content (e.g. Evans, 198; Johnson-Laird, 1988; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991) and thus better explain the available data; the evidence suggests that problem solving theories should follow this trend.
Ibid p.127
The key issue is not whether students (or inmates) can learn particular rules, or strategies of behaviour, since such behaviour modification is quite fundamental to training
any professional; rather, the issue is how well such rules are in fact applied outside the specific training domain where they are learned, which, writ large, means the specialism within which they belong. This theme runs throughout this paper in different guises. In some places the emphasis is on 'similarity metrics', in others, 'synonymy', 'analyticity' and 'the opacity of the intensional'. Throughout, however, the emphasis is on transfer of skills or training and how the failure of this highlights the fragmentary nature of all skill learning.This principle is fundamental to the rationale for the system of Sentence Management outlined elsewhere in this series (Longley 1991,1992;1997), as the system is designed to profile behavioural changes which it is unlikely that the inmates, or even those reporting their local observations of behavioural attainment are likely to be able to report upon accurately..
Fong et al .(1990) having reviewed the general neglect of base rate information and overemphasis on case-specific information in parole decision making, went on to train probation officers in the use of the law of large numbers. This training increased probation officers' use of base-rates when making predictions about recidivism, but this is a specialist, context specific skill.
'Consider a probation officer who is reviewing an offender's case and has two primary sources of information at his disposal: The first is a report by another officer who has known the offender for three years; and the second is his own impressions of the offender based on a half-hour interview. According to the law of large numbers, the report would be considered more important than the officer's own report owing to its greater sample size. But research suggests that people will tend to underemphasize the large sample report and overemphasize the interview. Indeed, research on probation decisions suggests that probation officers are subject to exactly such a bias (Gottfredson and Gottfredson; 1988; Lurigio, 1981)'
G. T. Fong, A. J. Lurigio & L. J. Stalans (1990)
Improving Probation Decisions Through Statistical Training
Criminal Justice and behavior 17,3,1990, 370-388
However, it is important to evaluate the work of Nisbett and colleagues in the context of their early work which explicates both fallibility of 'intuitive' human judgement, and the general finding of limited applicability of formal reasoning skills. Their work illustrates the conditions under which formal discipline, or 'cognitive skills' can be effectively inculcated, and which classes of skills are relatively highly resistant to training. Such training generalises most effectively to apposite situations many of which will be professional contexts. A major thesis of this paper is that for skills to be put into effective practice, explicit applications must be made salient to elicit and reinforce those skills. Formal, logical skills are most likely to be applied within contexts such as actuarial analysis or the application of professional skills within the domain of information technology.
Recently, Nisbett and colleagues (1992) in defending their stance against the conventional view that there may in fact be little in the way of formal rule learning, have suggested criteria for resolving the question as to whether or not explicit rule following is fundamental to reasoning, and if so, under what circumstances:
'A number of theoretical positions in psychology - including variants of case-based reasoning, instance-based analogy, and connectionist models - maintain that abstract rules are not involved in human reasoning, or at best play a minor role. Other views hold that the use of abstract rules is a core aspect of human reasoning. We propose eight criteria for determining whether or not people use abstract rules in reasoning, and examine evidence relevant to each criterion for several rule systems. We argue that there is substantial evidence that several different inferential rules, including modus ponens, contractual rules, causal rules, and the law of large numbers, are used in solving everyday problems. We discuss the implications for various theoretical positions and consider hybrid mechanisms that combine aspects of instance and rule models.
E. Smith , C Langston and R Nisbett (1992)
The Case for Rules in Reasoning, Cognitive Science 16, 1-40
This 'teaching for transfer', applies to the use of deductive and actuarial technology (computing and statistics), as with any 'cognitive skill', whether part of inmate programmes, or staff training. For instance, in some of the published studies (e.g. Porporino et al 1991), pre to post course changes (difference scores) in cognitive skills have been presented as evidence for the efficacy. Clearly one must ask whether one is primarily concerned to bring about a change in cognitive skills per se, or a change in other behaviours (such as offending behaviour or employability). In the transfer of training and reasoning studies by Nisbett and colleagues, the issues are acknowledged to be highly dependent on the types of heuristics being induced. The problem is one of
generalisation of skills to novel tasks or situations - situations or examples other than the training tasks themselves. To what extent does generalisation in practice occur, if at all?. These issues, and the research in experimental psychology (outside the relatively small area of criminological psychology), are cited below as empirical illustrations of the opacity of the intensional. The conventional view, as Fong and Nisbett (1991) state, is that:'A great many scholars today are solidly in the concrete, empirical, domain-specific camp established by Thorndike and Woodworth (1901), arguing that people reason without the aid of abstract inferential rules that are independent of the content domain.'
Thus, whilst Nisbett and colleagues have provided evidence on the induction of (statistical) heuristics, they acknowledge that there is a problem attempting to teach formal rules (such as those of the predicate calculus) which are not 'intuitively obvious'. This issue is therefore at the heart of the resourcing of specific educational programmes, which are 'cognitively' based, and which adhere to the conventional 'formal discipline' notion. Such investment must be compared with investment in the other programmes which can be used to monitor and shape behaviour under relatively natural or generalizable conditions. There, the natural demands of the activity are focal, and the 'programme' element rests in apposite allocation along with clear accounts of what the activity area requires/offers in terms of requisite behavioural skills.
There is a logical possibility that in restricting the subject matter of psychology, and thereby the deployment of psychologists, to what can only be analysed and managed from a cognitive perspective, one will render some very significant results of research in psychology irrelevant to applied
behaviour science and technology, unless taken as a vindication of the stance that all accounts of behaviour is essentially context specific. As explicated above, intensions are not, in principle, amenable to quantitative analysis. They are, in all likelihood, only domain or context specific. A few further examples should make these points clearer.There is a logical possibility that in restricting the subject matter of psychology, and thereby the deployment of psychologists, to what can only be analysed and managed from a methodological solipsistic (cognitive) perspective, one will render some very significant results of research in psychology irrelevant to
applied behaviour science and technology, unless taken as a vindication of the stance that behaviour is essentially context specific. As explicated above, intensions are not, in principle, amenable to quantitative analysis. They are, in all likelihood, only domain or context specific fragments of behaviour. Since this is the title of this paper, a more concrete illustration may be apposite at this point:When one begins operant conditioning work with rats, one has to get the animals to notice where the food pellets they are going to bar press for are going to be delivered from. This is often referred to as 'magazine training' because the little food pellets are dispensed one at a time from a magazine. After a few deliveries, the rat quite happily munches away after each pellet pops down the food chute. The next task is to get it to go near the lever, so one watches for the rat to go towards the lever, and as soon as it moves in the right direction, one can press a button to deliver a food pellet. As the rat moves closer and closer one ceases to deliver pellets when it is at a relatively remote site, and only reinforces behaviour which brings the rat almost on to the lever. Finally, the rat brushes against, or falls upon the lever, and the mechanism of lever press - pellet delivery takes over. Then, the rat learns to 'press the lever'. What is often not fully appreciated, is the range of behavioural fragments which are emitted and learned. Each approximation that is learned is a contingency, or production rule IF p THEN f. The rat is not repeating the 'same' behaviour and having the 'same' response reinforced, since each operant is a unique piece of behaviour in space and time. The set of responses must be treated as to be a class of
fragments of behaviour, out of which emerges a configured set of rules:IF such_and_such_behaviour THEN food_pops_out_at_X
IF so_and_so_behaviour THEN NOT food_pops_out_at_X.
'Pressing the lever' per se is an abstraction which
the trainer makes. What good behaviour analysis will record is the contingent events, and from such records it is very easy to see how the cognitive attributions which comprise the intensional stance are generated. However, the rat learns many fragments of behaviour in such contexts, and progressively some are selectively reinforced and others not (they are extinguished). In fact once one gets the animals to repeat the required behaviour often enough it becomes stereotyped (mechanical). The longer the animal is trained, the better it is able to stop when food is no longer contingent (the overtraining extinction effect). The amount of lever pressing in extinction (when the food is no longer contingent upon lever press) can be shown to be a function of how much training the animal gets during acquisition. One could say that the rat progressively 'homes-in' on the required invariant class of behaviours by irrelevant behaviours dropping out.In standard classical conditioning paradigms, this is referred to as
'configuring', and in a slightly different guise, 'blocking' (in either case some, unpredictive, ie irrelevent, elements of the behavioural repertoire drop out). Stripped of the 'Rattus-Norvegicus-falsificationist' talk, what the animal does is emit a class of behaviours which can be 'construed' cognitively albeit, from the teachers point of view, but which are probably best treated theoretically as a class of behaviours which can be shaped up to the required behaviour through differential feedback. What is important is practice, so that the 'effective' strategies can be configured. To talk about 'understanding' being necessary apart from this configuring of context specific fragments of behaviour may well just be an intrusion of folk psychological language into science, representing little more than a failure of observers to appreciate the subtlety of detailed behaviour analysis.Cognitive Psychologists have studied 'Deductive Inference' from the perspective of 'psychologism', a doctrine, which, loosely put, equates the principles of logic with those of thinking. Whilst the work of Church (1936), Post (1936) and Turing (1937) clearly established that the principles of 'effective' computation are not psychological, and can be mechanically implemented, researchers such as Johnson-Laird and Byrne (1992) have still considered it a worthwhile objective to develop 'mental models' providing a descriptive and predictive account of the natural processes which seem characteristic of human reasoning, including the difficulties and errors observed in human deduction (Wason 1966). Prior to the 1970s, formal logical models were
de rigeur for the majority of the models of memory, attention and other cognitive processes. However, throughout the 1970s, substantial empirical evidence began to accumulate to refute this functionalist (Putnam 1967) thesis that human cognitive processes were formal and computational. Even well educated subjects it seems, have considerable difficulty with relatively simple deductive Wason Selection tasks such as the following:|
|
Where the task is to test the rule
"if a card has a vowel on one side it has an even number on the other". Or in the following:
where subjects are asked to test the rule: '
each card that has an A on one side will have a 3 on the other'. In both problems they can only turn over a maximum of two cards to ascertain the truth of the rule. Similarly, the majority have difficulty with the following problem, where the task is to reveal up to two hidden halves of the cards to ascertain the truth or falsehood of the rule 'whenever there is a O on the left there is a O on the right':
Yet conventional, Von-Neumann based computer technology has no difficulty with instantiations of deductive inference rules, e.g modus tollens, such as the Resolution Method. The solutions to each problem require the valid application of the material conditional. Problem one is falsified by turning cards A and 9, problem two is solved by turning cards A and 7, and problem three is solved by turning cards (A) and (D). Even logicians, and others trained in the formal rules of deductive logic often fail to solve such problems:
'Time after time our subjects fall into error. Even some professional logicians have been known to err in an embarrassing fashion, and only the rare individual takes us by surprise and gets it right. It is impossible to predict who he will be. This is all very puzzling....'
P. C. Wason and P. N. Johnson-Laird (1972)
Psychology of Reasoning
Whilst there is evidence that some subjects have less difficulty with such problems if they are presented in more familiar contexts (Johnson-Laird, Legrenzi & Sonino Legrenzi (1972), the replicability of such findings are in doubt (Griggs 1981). Furthermore, there is impressive empirical evidence that formal training in logic does help the solution of such problems (Nisbett et al. 1987). Why is this so if human reasoning is, as the cognitivists have claimed, essentially logical and computational? The answer, perhaps, is that those who make such claims have failed to appreciate the full implications of the nature of normative models of rationality in contrast to descriptive records of behaviour. Prima facie evidence that under some conditions people can behave rationally should not be regarded ipso facto that they naturally behave rationally any more than the demonstration of any other context specific skills should be taken a priori that such skills are natural and generally transferable. Such assumptions are often made only because of the absence of sufficient observations.
Wason (1966) also provided subjects with numbers which increased in series, asking them to identify the rule. In most cases, the simple fact that all examples shared no more than simple progression was skipped, and whatever hypotheses they created were held onto even though the actual rule was subsequently made clear. This persistence of belief, and rationalisation of errors despite debriefing and exposure to contrary evidence, is well documented in psychology, and is a phenomenon which methodologically is, as Popper makes clear, at od
