metonymy4u

Driving down the highway today I realized another example of the rule governed / rule described dialectic. While I was driving, I was faced with a very common physics problem. I was attempting to pass a car in the lane to my right, and suddenly faced with a car in front of me in my own lane and forced to make a decision whether to accelerate or fall back. Was there enough space between me and the car in front of me to make safe acceleration and moving over into the other lane in front of the car next to me possible? At first I thought there was but as I hit the accelerator and moved ahead, I experiencing a slight twisting sensation somewhere in my mid-section and as I continued to accelerate the feeling got more and more intense. Clearly I was not going to make it. I backed off and feel behind, choosing instead to go around in back of the car I had been attempting to pass. Was my behavior rule governed or only rule described? Well, certainly I was following a rudimentary rule like “don’t do something stupid to get yourself killed,” or “don’t take unnecessary risks by passing to close to them at highway speeds.” However what rule specifically was I following when I made the actual decision to not pass the car on my right due to not having enough space in front of me? Did I stop and actually measure the distances and speeds involved, taking into account my engine strength and Newton’s second law of motion that force is equal to the time derivative of momentum? As a matter of fact, I can tell you that I did not. So what rule specifically was I following? In fact, none at all. In fact what was happening was that based on a specific learning history I simply responded to the available discriminative cues and engaged in a behavior that has a long history of being rewarded in the past (i.e. with life and continued driving privileges!).

My point is that when authors like Chomsky or Plato or Freud argue for a special unconscious rule following capacity, they are proposing a model that just does not explain all the data available to us. And that is the fact that we rarely ever follow rules! At least not in the sense that I’ve defined rule following, which is the conscious manipulation of data based on an explicit model of equivalences specified by either formal mathematical or formal logical relations. This is not to say that I don’t think people follow rules when they learn new languages, practice new skills, or are confronted with novel experiences (like traffic tickets or accidents!) but merely to observe that for the vast majority of the time when I’m engage in routine daily activities, rule following (at least conscious rule following) plays no role whatsoever. It’s a situation exactly like deciding whether to pass another car on the freeway with no knowledge whatsoever of the logical variables contained in the laws of physics. Of course, once one takes rule following unconscious, as many authors do, one can justify almost anything at all.