Is Chomsky's View on the Mind-Body Problem Redefining Materialism?

[Mr.Samsa]

Just to add some more papers on this off-topic detour (which is fine since it's forcing me to read and learn something), I came across this paper. The author discusses this whole issue including MacCorquodale’s paper and Chomsky's response (or really dismissal) to it.

On Chomsky’s Appraisal of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior:A Half Century of Misunderstanding
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2223153/pdf/bhan-29-02-253.pdf

Cheers, yeah that's quite a good paper too but I didn't link to it because I think it focuses a little bit more on the political side of the issues, and more on Chomsky's tone and attitude, whereas MacCorquodale just deals with the arguments. But it's still a great paper.

 

[apeiron]

You seem to be presenting cognitive science and behavioral psychology as conflicting paradigms, and promoting the cognitive perspective, but ignoring the fact that cognitive science and behavioral psychology are interchangeable. They both study the same phenomena.

The point was how they don't study them in the same way.

Well Verbal Behavior led directly to Relational Frame Theory. This article discusses some of its findings in relation to neuroscientific findings.

Thanks for proving my case. Here we have behaviourism not discovering anything about the brain, but relying on an identification already made by neurolinguistics to justify their redescriptions.

The difference is neurolinguistics has a whole cognitive theory around N400s and other ERPs. They were critical in showing that the brain is acting in predictive Bayesian fashion to make best guesses of sentence semantics. There are neural net simulations that attempt to model the processing architecture, such as the Unification Space Model.

So on the one hand, we have behaviourists trying to justify bits of jargon by referring to what is already known in other fields. And on the other, we have science that has novel and surprising observations which are leading to architectural models that are then validated by simulations. And the people doing that science all call themselves cognitive researchers.

 

[bohm2]

In mind science, there are still the unresolved tensions caused by some deep polarities. Is the brain's architecture distributed or modular, computational or dynamic, material or informational, nature or nurture, hardwired or learnt?

In the most recent issue of "Langauge Learning and Development-Special Issue: Cognition and Language" there are some papers discussing this modularity debate. You guys might find the Chomsky piece in the same issue interesting (but not freely available for some reason unlike the other 2 papers?). The first link/piece below trying to accommodate both views is also worth reading:

Chomsky (in this issue) and Gallistel (in this issue) review work on human language and on spatial cognition in animals, arguing that these skills are each supported by a specialized cognitive module with its own unique organization principles, different in kind from other aspects of cognition. In this commentary, I outline a contrasting non-modular (or semi-modular) view of human language and suggest that such an alternative is consistent with the arguments made by Chomsky and Gallistel and is equally plausible, given our present state of knowledge; and I suggest several directions for future research that are needed to determine which of the alternatives provides a better account of the architecture of high level cognition.

The Modularity Issue in Langauge Acquisition: A Rapprochement? Comments on Gallistel and Chomsky
http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/newport/pdf/Newport_%20LLD11.pdf

Prelinguistic Thought
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~galliste/Gallistel_2011_Prelinguistic_Thought.pdf

I'm guessing here that in this quote Chomsky is taking a shot at Bayesianism?

The kind of critique just outlined, which is quite widespread, is generally accompanied by a novel concept of science that has emerged in the computational cognitive sciences and related areas of linguistics, with a new notion of “success”: an account of some phenomena is taken to be successful to the extent that it approximates unanalyzed data. Take the study of bee communication. According to this conception, the way it is generally conducted is seriously flawed. Instead of difficult experiments devising circumstances that never occur in nature—say, having bees fly to flowers on an island (see Gallistel, this issue)—bee scientists should be carrying out statistical analysis of massive collections of videotapes of bees swarming, achieving greater and greater success in approximating the videotapes, and getting a tolerably good prediction of what is likely to happen next, doubtless better than bee scientists could give (or would care about). Perhaps physics should be revised the same way. No balls rolling down frictionless planes and other such abstractions and idealizations that have virtually defined the subject for centuries: rather, extensive statistical analysis of videotapes of leaves blowing in the wind and other natural events, which will surely give more successful predictions of what will happen outside the window than what the physics department can provide.

Langauge and Other Cognitive Systems. What Is Special About Language?
http://www.tandfonline.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/doi/pdf/10.1080/15475441.2011.584041
Video Version of that paper-at ~1:19 there's an interesting section about Turing and the meaninglessness of the question whether computers/animals can think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v6XFkSwVys

 

[apeiron]

In the most recent issue of "Langauge Learning and Development-Special Issue: Cognition and Language" there are some papers discussing this modularity debate. You guys might find the Chomsky piece in the same issue interesting (but not freely available for some reason unlike the other 2 papers?). The first link/piece below trying to accommodate both views is also worth reading:

Thanks for pointing this out. From Newport's gloss, it seems that Chomsky has in fact shifted his position so that it fits the evolutionary view exactly as I argued in previous posts. The brain is generally arranged hierarchically and it was the vocal tract - the imposition of a serial constraint - which was the crucial difference that underpins syntactic communication.

Chomsky argues that the structure of human language derives from two types of constraints: the nature of thought (is this thought special to language, or is it simply special to humans?) and the pressures of externalization. On his view, the nature of thought is nonlinear; it is hierarchical and recursive. His hypothesis about language is that it acquires its linear organization in the process of being externalized—at the sensory-motor interface, presumably in accord with pressures supplied by the nature of the articulation process, and perhaps also from the perceptual process applied by the listener.1 An overriding constraint applied to externalization is minimal computation, the constraint that there should be minimal computational complexity in the relationship of the hierarchical representation and its linearization.

In broad strokes, this is like the position articulated by Liberman (1970), who suggested that grammar is the outcome of the mismatch between the structure of thought and the workings of the mouth and ear—that grammar is the system that links these two very different types of structure and process to one another.

So now we can all be Chomskyites, even if it took him 42 years to get there.

I thought the Newport summary was excellent. But it shows the need for a concept of hierarchical organisation that is rather more sophisticated, more organic.

As I said, dichotomies are treated as a bug rather than a feature so long as science tries to force the question into an either/or form - is it modular, or is it non-modular (distributed)?

You can call it semi-modular, semi-distributed. But that is not very satisfactory. Or instead, as with nature~nuture and all the other dichotomies that crop up in scientific description, you can say it is 100 per cent of both. Each is equally strongly true of the system in question.

It is quite clear that to be conscious of the world, the brain has to work equally hard at two things - integration and differentiation. It must see the parts and see the whole. So it should be no surprise that it is organised along these lines.

It has suprisingly located responses - like a "Jennifer Aniston cell" (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7567). But also every neuron, every brain area, is immensely connected.

Modularity is reductionist jargon as it claims the brain to be an assembly of functional components. The language of hierarchies - where global constraints shape up local degrees of freedom - captures the reality that brains are both differentiating and integrating with equal vigour. A fact imprinted on their organisation as you might expect.

 

[MarcoD]

Maybe I am getting old, or he is, but I found it a very hard speech to follow. (Pretty sure he was jet-lagged.) The basic stand-off between behaviorists and cognitive scientists seems to boil down to the question whether all behavior is conditioning. From Chomsky's linguistical view, that also relates to the question whether language exists, it probably also bears relation to whether the question has meaning in either of two settings, where I think that behaviorists are probably inclined to deny the existence of language.

I am looking at it again, to try to decipher what he really said.

He rejects cognitive science studies, which take a holistic approach, as being unscientific. I am inclined to agree.

He states that there has been no linguistical evolution in humans for the last tens of millenia. I am inclined to disagree.

The combinatorial argument to speech I disagree with.

The existence of a Universal Grammar is probably right, though I am not sure what is meant with it.

I am not sure whether a UG is necessary, or reducible to discrete entities. Conversely, I am inclined to think that there must be an underlying principle to thought which can be abstracted from wetware neurological reasoning.

I have the feeling the brains is an organized mess, so explanations which are either pure neurological or modular are bound to fail.

A reduction of whether language exists to the existence of UG, in purely linguistical terms, boils down to semantics. The existence of language probably implies the existence of UG with a sufficiently broad definition of UG.

The minimalist program is 'scientific,' is the same as an endorsement, though I agree with it.

He tries to assign meaning to a meaningless sentence somewhere.

Perfectly good thoughts probably don't exist, so expressing them should be impossible too. He managed to express an inexpressible thought anyway.

Langauge is 'sound with meaning' vs 'meaning with sound.' Somewhat of an existential debate where one isn't sure what essence, or existence, is. I have little doubt that evolution doesn't care whether communication, or linearized internalized meaning, is more relevant since both add to your advantage.

The structural distance principle I find very interesting, and I agree a lot with him in that it says a lot about the computational process of thought. I am not intelligent enough to understand the merge combinators without projected examples.

The interaction between the emminent Chomsky and the next generation of scientists is hilarious.

 

[apeiron]

The basic stand-off between behaviorist and cognitive scientists seems to boil down to the question whether all behavior is conditioning.

That's a good way to put it. Conditioning implies that every action has some specific cause - and that's all you need to talk about. Whereas cognitive approaches are interested in the general causes.

Conditioning tends to encourage blank slate thinking because it seems that any kind of behaviour could in principle be learnt. As a style of analysis, it does not consider global constraints, and so the possible variety of local behavours seems quite unconstrained.

This is like the now outdated "modern synthesis" Darwinian evolution where selection pressure could chip away at the genome to produce any kind of organism in principle. The organism responded to its environment, its context, in an atomistic fashion, one trait at a time.

But cognitive science, and the current evo-devo approach to evolution in general, accept the existence of global constraints on what is actually possible. There is a systemic relationship that limits (as well as guides) the kinds of bodies that can evolve, and the kinds of behaviours that can be learnt.

Well, of course, the problem with cognitive science is there are some like Chomsky who turn constraints into rules. They just take the global aspects of a system as something which exists in a Platonic fashion, not something that emerges due to an evolutionary/developmental process of local~global interaction.

Adding to the confusion, they then try to stick these rules inside some black-box component - a functional module. In the systems view, the constraints are constituted in a holistic fashion. They are the general architecture. But once you start trying to treat constraints as something separate, something that exists rather than emerges, then you have to find a location for them within the system. You have to stick them away in a private box which you claim is a rule-implementing device.

So no surprise that Chomsky is so murky as he tries to navigate this contorted view of what is going on (while the Behaviourists seem by contrast, childishly simplistic).

The modelling needs to focus on how particulars become generals, and generals in turn shape the particulars. As for example with generative neural network approaches to modelling the mind. Or with hierarchical accounts of the brain that are in fact now the norm in cognitive neuroscience.

So there are three camps. Those who believe that the particulars of a system explain everything. Those who believe the generals explain everything. And those who believe that systems are about the interaction of the particular with the general. We learn from experience, and we experience by applying the lessons that have been learnt.

Supporters of Chomsky and Skinner will of course point out how their heroes are always much misunderstood because really they were arguing for this third way.

 

[MarcoD]

That's a good way to put it. Conditioning implies that every action has some specific cause - and that's all you need to talk about. Whereas cognitive approaches are interested in the general causes.

Conditioning tends to encourage blank slate thinking because it seems that any kind of behaviour could in principle be learnt. As a style of analysis, it does not consider global constraints, and so the possible variety of local behavours seems quite unconstrained.

This is like the now outdated "modern synthesis" Darwinian evolution where selection pressure could chip away at the genome to produce any kind of organism in principle. The organism responded to its environment, its context, in an atomistic fashion, one trait at a time.

But cognitive science, and the current evo-devo approach to evolution in general, accept the existence of global constraints on what is actually possible. There is a systemic relationship that limits (as well as guides) the kinds of bodies that can evolve, and the kinds of behaviours that can be learnt.

Well, of course, the problem with cognitive science is there are some like Chomsky who turn constraints into rules. They just take the global aspects of a system as something which exists in a Platonic fashion, not something that emerges due to an evolutionary/developmental process of local~global interaction.

Ah, I was still writing while you posted. I don't know a lot about Skinner vs cognitive science.

When it comes to conditioning, I am in the cognitive science camp. There are many examples in human life where thought processes overrule what is otherwise 'conditioned' behavior. Going on a diet after Christmas, going cold turkey after a drug addiction, and so forth. I guess you could reduce that to conditioning too, but I would like to see those arguments first.

Of course both sides have an argument: We know people calm down when you play Bach, hence we experiment with that in criminal environments -or play music in stores,- but we also know that people can be smarter than their animal behavior, so we appeal to that too.

I am not sure you don't read too much into Chomsky's 'Platonic' approach. Chomsky seems to postulate that a Universal Grammar should exist, but I am not sure how much he thinks of it as a thing which is really universal (as in that even alien intelligences should develop it), Platonic, or an emergent property of human mind/body(tongue) interaction. He sure did point out that linearization is a necessary byproduct of our communication organ, whereas structural distance is a necessary product of our neurological organ; that is not Platonic. (Though I think he tried to state that language was 'born' perfect, which I would disagree with.)

So no surprise that Chomsky is so murky as he tries to navigate this contorted view of what is going on (while the Behaviourists seem by contrast, childishly simplistic).

Chomsky is a linguist, and a hard-core one too. (Which I find a bit fifties, though I tend to agree with him.) He's probably only seen as murky by psychologists. Conversely, I am not sure in present-day psychology he can, or should, have an opinion. Though his old opinions are certainly worth study.

Then again, I sometimes find psychology is on the same level of academic worthiness as free-time studies. But that's a personal thing.

Retrospectively, also, I don't find Chomsky's ideas very murky. He just postulates, and overemphasizes, the role of language.

The modelling needs to focus on how particulars become generals, and generals in turn shape the particulars. As for example with generative neural network approaches to modelling the mind. Or with hierarchical accounts of the brain that are in fact now the norm in cognitive neuroscience.

So there are three camps. Those who believe that the particulars of a system explain everything. Those who believe the generals explain everything. And those who believe that systems are about the interaction of the particular with the general. We learn from experience, and we experience by applying the lessons that have been learnt.

Supporters of Chomsky and Skinner will of course point out how their heroes are always much misunderstood because really they were arguing for this third way.

Nice, guess everybody is in the third camp then. From the little I now know about it, I know I am. Thanks for the explanation.

 

[bohm2]

The major difference is still the debate between empiricism versus rationalism/nativism. The rest is "window-dressing", I think. Everyone agrees that all behavior is caused by the interaction of a genetically-derived structure with its environment but nativists like Chomsky believe that everybody else gives way too much importance to "external stimulation," to environmental cues, and too little to the genetically-derived "internal structure of the organism, the ways in which it processes input information and organizes its own behavior." So for him, the internal structure is not some sort of amorphous blob ready to be molded by its environment, but an organism adapted to exploit that environment in its own unique way, and this fundamental principle applies to the mind-brain (CNS) as well as to all other organismal structures. And both should be treated and studied similarly.

 

[apeiron]

I am not sure you don't read too much into Chomsky's 'Platonic' approach. Chomsky seems to postulate that a Universal Grammar should exist, but I am not sure how much he thinks of it as a thing which is really universal (as in that even alien intelligences should develop it), Platonic, or an emergent property of human mind/body(tongue) interaction. He sure did point out that linearization is a necessary byproduct of our communication organ, whereas structural distance is a necessary product of our neurological organ; that is not Platonic.

Yes, as Newport points out, his tune is changing. He is now in fact endorsing Lieberman's story of 40 years ago.

Before, he was saying it was all about a module/organ that could handle hierarchical syntax. Now he has moved closer to the idea that the whole brain is hierarchically organised, and the suddenly new thing in evolutionary history was the serial constraint placed upon that hierarchical organisation by a vocal tract.

So in saying this, Chomsky has finally come around to agreeing with existing thought in paleolinguistics.

But of course, to be consistent with his long history of scorn for this hypothesis, he has to say that the novel constraints created by the vocal tract are "peripheral". So really, we only have to pay attention to the hierarchical organisation of the brain.

Yet the whole point is that the constraints are indeed "on the periphery". They would have to be to be able to constraint the functioning of the brain in a radical new way. You have to stand outside what you seek to control.

So Chomsky is still seeking to downplay the significance of "computational linearisation" when it is the whole point really. It is what actually arose as the difference in evolutionary terms. The structural efficiency of hierarchical organisation is an important fact too - but it is an important fact about the brain in general, not the language function in particular. It was not the evolutionary novelty whose social and genetic history we must trace.

 

[apeiron]

...nativists like Chomsky believe that everybody else gives way too much importance to "external stimulation," to environmental cues, and too little to the genetically-derived "internal structure of the organism, the ways in which it processes input information and organizes its own behavior."...

Yes, but even when you get into genome-level learning of the species, as opposed to the developmental-level learning of the individual, you still have the same dichotomy to sort out.

Are you/Chomsky saying that this genomic learning is empirical or rational? Is it the bit by bit, trait by trait, construction of something due to particular experiences, or is there instead some kind of global organisational constraint that acts as a Piagetian structural attractor?

As Chomsky says, there is a computational efficiency argument when it comes to hierarchical organisation. But that is not a lesson that can be learned empirically. Or can it in fact? Well, it certainly is a form that must emerge because all less efficient organisations get weeded out.

So strong rationalism (of the true Platonic kind) says the existence of these kinds of fundamental truths - the efficiency of hierarchical organisation - exist "somewhere" that is external to the systems they constrain. Which is what makes them so mysterious. It is the old debate about the nature of maths - is it Platonically existent or merely socially constructed?

But a systems view of constraints is that they emerge - reliably. When things self-organise, they fall into predictable and "logical" arrangements. And some kind of "least mean path" principle is at the heart of all our physical laws. When symmetry breaks, it follows the most efficient available course.

So a balanced approach treats empiricism vs rationalism as a false dichotomy. That is, we don't have to make a choice that sees one as wrong, the other is right. At every level of the story, both exist. And at every level of the story, both are in interaction.

By nativist, you simply mean genome-level learning/adaptation. And evo-devo spells out how that is an interaction of the "empirical" and the "rational". Or rather, that selection can only tune the parameters of self-organising limit cycles.

I guess you could call the selection "empirical" - the outward experiencing - and the self-organisation "rational" - the inward knowing. But these particular terms do start to seem rather strained.

 

[MarcoD]

It is what actually arose as the difference in evolutionary terms.

Though I know little of the subject, I am inclined to disagree with either of you. For communication, it is likely necessary to somehow linearize thought. At the same time, for 'higher thinking' processes, rationality, it is also likely necessary that linearization of thought is necessary, as modelling the world linguistically probably also gives an evolutionary advantage.

To be honest, as stated elsewhere, evolution doesn't stop. Never. So it is highly likely that both processes occurred in tandem, along with a lot of other processes. Maybe the Neanderthal became extinct since he, or she, was less capable of communication as of thought due to organic limitations of the tongue and brain. And probably, even today, people who lack mental or speech capabilities die earlier with respect to better equipped individuals.

My point: Evolution dictates that both the thinking and the communication organ developed in tandem, and keep on evolving, so the question of what came first seems rather moot. Or rather, it's the combination of both which does the 'trick.'

 

[apeiron]

My point: Evolution dictates that both the thinking and the communication organ developed in tandem, and keep on evolving, so the question of what came first seems rather moot. Or rather, it's the combination of both which does the 'trick.'

But are you talking now about biological or cultural evolution? Genetics or memetics?

The socio-cultural evolution of human thinking could only really begin with the invention of language. And indeed, the story is one of exponential change. That's plain enough from the archaeological record.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

The point was how they don't study them in the same way.

But the point is that they do. How else would there be such a massive amount of crossover between cognitive and behavioral researchers? Surely if they don't study them in the same way, it would be impossible or difficult for them to collaborate as often as they do.

Thanks for proving my case. Here we have behaviourism not discovering anything about the brain, but relying on an identification already made by neurolinguistics to justify their redescriptions.

Yes, that's called "science". When you are developing a new theory, you need to demonstrate that it can account for the range of data we currently have.

The difference is neurolinguistics has a whole cognitive theory around N400s and other ERPs. They were critical in showing that the brain is acting in predictive Bayesian fashion to make best guesses of sentence semantics. There are neural net simulations that attempt to model the processing architecture, such as the Unification Space Model.

So on the one hand, we have behaviourists trying to justify bits of jargon by referring to what is already known in other fields. And on the other, we have science that has novel and surprising observations which are leading to architectural models that are then validated by simulations. And the people doing that science all call themselves cognitive researchers.

I don't understand how you are so confused over this. Why would learning theorists come up with architectural models of the brain? This is like suggesting that the sociologists are "blank slatists" because they haven't contributed anything new to genetics. Science doesn't just reduce down to lower levels of explanation like that, and you can't expect a particular field to make predictions about an area it's not related to.

Learning theorists are focused on what learning mechanisms produce behaviors, and language in this case. The behaviorist research here resulted in breakthroughs like long-term potentiation and in-vitro reinforcement, which are vital for any process that requires an element of learning - this is the kind of thing that it would add to neurolinguistics. It won't add knowledge of modular concepts within the brain because that's not what they're studying.

Maybe I am getting old, or he is, but I found it a very hard speech to follow. (Pretty sure he was jet-lagged.) The basic stand-off between behaviorists and cognitive scientists seems to boil down to the question whether all behavior is conditioning.

Who would hold that position? Behaviorism is predicated on the understanding that not all behavior is conditioned, and in fact the entire field would collapse if this were true. This is because learning begins with the biological systems that underpin (to put it simply) our concept of pleasure and pain. We also have innate senses of things that are inherently 'pleasurable', like eating food, having sex etc, and these form primary reinforcers or unconditioned stimuli.

Such a position would require us to ignore numerous breakthroughs in innate behaviors which have come about through behaviorist research, like the discovery of the Garcia effect (the finding that we are naturally predisposed to learning a taste-sickness association to avoid poisoning ourselves), "preparedness" (the finding that we are naturally predisposed to learning some associations like fear of snakes more readily than others), tool-use and culture in New Caledonian crows, and even the matching law, which underpins our major theories of choice, is argued to be an innate feature of organisms.

As Skinner argued, behavior is necessarily a combination of environment and genetics/biology (he also included "culture", but I think that essentially falls into environment). No behaviorist would argue that all behavior is conditioning as such a position would be ridiculous and unworkable.

From Chomsky's linguistical view, that also relates to the question whether language exists, it probably also bears relation to whether the question has meaning in either of two settings, where I think that behaviorists are probably inclined to deny the existence of language.

I'm not sure what this means. If behaviorists deny the existence of language, then why do they spend so much time studying it?..

That's a good way to put it. Conditioning implies that every action has some specific cause - and that's all you need to talk about. Whereas cognitive approaches are interested in the general causes.

Conditioning doesn't imply that, unless you interpret conditioning as simple stimulus-response psychology (which, as discussed above, nobody holds to anymore since the behaviorists disproved their position). Our behavior, especially in the messy real world, is largely driven by the general context, reinforcement histories, genetic predispositions, etc.

It's not like behaviorists argue that, say, Action X is caused by Stimulus Y.

Conditioning tends to encourage blank slate thinking because it seems that any kind of behaviour could in principle be learnt.

What? Who the hell would suggest such a thing?

The approach of learning theorists is to test what behaviors could be learnt. I know it's a subtle distinction, but it's an important one. For example, if someone suggests that grammar is an innate aspect of humans, then this suggestion needs to be tested. A good way to test it is to find an exception to it, i.e. finding our black swan. So we take an organism which has no evolved 'grammar module' according to the nativist researcher, and we see if we can manipulate the environmental variables so that the organism can pick up grammar - as Herbranson did with pigeons.

This isn't to say that anything can be learnt, or even that we're trying to demonstrate that, but we're simply testing hypotheses put forward by other researchers who claim that they can't be learnt. Look at tool-use in the New Caledonian crow, where evolutionary psychologists argued that it must be innate. We separated chicks at birth, and put them in a situation where they could build tools to catch their food. What happened was that they still attempted to build the tools (by carving out notches in a pandanus leaf), but the creation was sloppy and the physics behind the tool was often wrong (i.e. the "hooks" of the leaf were on the wrong side so it couldn't hook on to a grub). From this we could conclude that there appears to be an innate preference for modifying leafs and resources in their environment, but that this behavior requires an element of learning to perfect and successfully use. And this finding is then strengthened by the finding that there were essentially different isolated "cultures" of crows across the island that had generated different designs over generations.

So no. No behaviorist ever has, currently does, or ever will believe that any behavior (even in theory) could be learnt. And as mentioned above, a blank slate approach to behaviorism would cause all behaviorist theory to collapse in on itself. It just could not function under the assumption that blank slatism was true.

As a style of analysis, it does not consider global constraints, and so the possible variety of local behavours seems quite unconstrained.

Come on.. you're just taking the piss now, right?

A fundamental approach to behavioral research is the understanding of biological constraints on the organism - in a highly simplistic way, this is why rats aren't taught to fly using tree bark as a reinforcer. To argue that it ignores such constraints is like attacking optimal foraging theory for "assuming" that behavior is always aimed at being optimal, when the point of the analysis is to theorise what a 'perfect' behavior would look like and see how the actual behavior deviates. This discrepancy leads to clues as to what is causing a particular behavior. Look at the work of the Brelands that discovered "instinctive drift", where the finding was that 'natural' behaviors will sometimes come to the surface - this was a constraint on a form of learning, and it's something that needs to be taken into account when studying behavior.

Supporters of Chomsky and Skinner will of course point out how their heroes are always much misunderstood because really they were arguing for this third way.

Nice poisoning of the well there, but tell me: if someone explicitly states that their entire philosophy is dependent on a combination of both genetics/biology and environment, then how are we to interpret this? That they're lying and really they're blank slatists, despite the fact that they released several books specifically to refute the claim that they are blank slatists?

As for the implication that Skinner is my "hero", this is of course ridiculous. He was a scientist with some good ideas, and some horribly flawed ones (e.g. his views on punishment, cognitive science, etc). His view is mostly historical now of course, and he's only relevant to this discussion because Chomsky was attempting to address his arguments. Defending Skinner against the charge of blank slatism is no different from defending Darwin from a charge of being a creationist due to his apparent claims of intelligent design when we quotemine his discussion of the complexity of the eye. That is, I defend him because the charges are so ridiculously wrong, that they don't deserve to be in a forum that is supposedly filled with intelligent and scientific-minded people. As an individual, he was an interesting person who kickstarted a hugely important and influential field, but his ideas are largely outdated and have been replaced now. The field has moved on to quantification and prediction, understanding context and constraints, and looking at what behaviors are learned and which are innate.

 

[MarcoD]

But are you talking now about biological or cultural evolution? Genetics or memetics?

I was pointing out that human rationality developed as a byproduct of language, sentence manipulation, and that manipulation is the result of the interaction between the communication device and the thinking device. Since it is unlikely that nature professionally designed one of them before the other, both devices interact, and the combination of both is what really gives an evolutionary advantage, we can assume that early humans had lousy working proto-tongues and proto-brains, subsequently evolved to what we have now, and will evolve further into better talking and better thinking individuals, hopefully.

So I would say the genetics and memetics work hand in hand. Better brain/tongue (genes), better -more elaborate- thoughts (memetics), better survival.

 

[MarcoD]

Who would hold that position? Behaviorism is predicated on the understanding that not all behavior is conditioned, and in fact the entire field would collapse if this were true. This is because learning begins with the biological systems that underpin (to put it simply) our concept of pleasure and pain. We also have innate senses of things that are inherently 'pleasurable', like eating food, having sex etc, and these form primary reinforcers or unconditioned stimuli.

Such a position would require us to ignore numerous breakthroughs in innate behaviors which have come about through behaviorist research, like the discovery of the Garcia effect (the finding that we are naturally predisposed to learning a taste-sickness association to avoid poisoning ourselves), "preparedness" (the finding that we are naturally predisposed to learning some associations like fear of snakes more readily than others), tool-use and culture in New Caledonian crows, and even the matching law, which underpins our major theories of choice, is argued to be an innate feature of organisms.

I am not a professional but all arguments I have seen so far from behaviorists are related to conditioning, not elaborate reasoning - a unique human trait. Worse, even all the examples you gave above are conditioning, and I, as a human can think -or force- myself into behaving opposite to what 'animalistic' conditioning prescribes.

If behaviorism isn't the study of conditioning, then I want to see a behavior example where rationality is involved.

(I don't know Chomsky's argument in detail, but he seemed to be against non-structural explanations of what he called cognitive psychology, and I am assuming he meant behaviorism with that.)

Moreover, I am also opposed to calling humans organisms unless warranted. I find it unethical.

I'm not sure what this means. If behaviorists deny the existence of language, then why do they spend so much time studying it?..

As Bohm pointed out: Chomsky is talking from a linguistical perspective. If behaviorism is empiricism, then it denies rationalism, and it isn't science. I.e., linguistics -the internal working of individuals- is what should be studied and explained in structural terms, not the interactions with the environment, and therefor behaviorism doesn't study humans, or anything, at all. It denies the existence of language since it doesn't explain it in structural concepts or entities.

I've read your other arguments, but so far you've only convinced me that behaviorism is the study of animal behavior. I.e., it is part of biology, not psychology.

(What happened to 'cogito ergo sum' here? Bah, non sum mus.)

 

[Mr.Samsa]

I am not a professional but all arguments I have seen so far from behaviorists are related to conditioning, not elaborate reasoning - a unique human trait. Worse, even all the examples you gave above are conditioning, and I, as a human can think -or force- myself into behaving opposite to what 'animalistic' conditioning prescribes.

Elaborate reasoning in an emergent process that comes about through a combination of biological structures and conditioning. I'm not sure what you mean by elaborate reasoning being a unique human trait though - what would you consider an example of elaborate reasoning that could be tested in non-human animals?

I'm not sure why you describe conditioning as "animalistic" though. Conditioning is how we learn - for example, when we learn how to do algebra or calculus, we are doing so through a complex system of conditioning. Higher order mathematics is surely not "animalistic"?

Moreover, I am also opposed to calling humans organisms unless warranted. I find it unethical.

I'm not sure how. It's just an accurate way of referring to a collection of living things.

As Bohm pointed out: Chomsky is talking from a linguistical perspective. If behaviorism is empiricism, then it denies rationalism, and it isn't science. I.e., linguistics -the internal working of individuals- is what should be studied and explained in structural terms, not the interactions with the environment, and therefor behaviorism doesn't study humans, or anything, at all. It denies the existence of language since it doesn't explain it in structural concepts or entities.

Behaviorism isn't just empiricism though, as it uses rationalist arguments to support theories of inner structures and processes. Behaviorism is not simply the study of organisms interacting with their environment, but also a study of the inner processes within organisms - either in a more 'abstract' way, like the study of memory and attention, or in a more specific way, like the study of neural and structural processes.

Behavioral psychology obviously studies humans, and their minds.

I've read your other arguments, but so far you've only convinced me that behaviorism is the study of animal behavior. I.e., it is part of biology, not psychology.

So all those studies on humans are what exactly? And all the research of the inner processing of human minds is just "animal behavior"?

 

[MarcoD]

Elaborate reasoning in an emergent process that comes about through a combination of biological structures and conditioning. I'm not sure what you mean by elaborate reasoning being a unique human trait though - what would you consider an example of elaborate reasoning that could be tested in non-human animals?

What about: I won't pull this lever anymore since I know I am part of an experiment. Or: I won't take these happy drugs anymore since I know I'll probably die from them.

I'm not sure why you describe conditioning as "animalistic" though. Conditioning is how we learn - for example, when we learn how to do algebra or calculus, we are doing so through a complex system of conditioning. Higher order mathematics is surely not "animalistic"?

Mathematics involves much more than the 'conditioning' of just manipulating the symbols. It is not understood.

Behaviorism isn't just empiricism though, as it uses rationalist arguments to support theories of inner structures and processes. Behaviorism is not simply the study of organisms interacting with their environment, but also a study of the inner processes within organisms - either in a more 'abstract' way, like the study of memory and attention, or in a more specific way, like the study of neural and structural processes.

From Wikipedia: The behaviorist school of thought maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind.

Don't confuse the subject.

Behavioral psychology obviously studies humans, and their minds.

Read the definition of behaviorism.

So all those studies on humans are what exactly? And all the research of the inner processing of human minds is just "animal behavior"?

Read the definition of behaviorism.

All organisms are living things, humans are living things, conflating humans and organisms too much will imply at some point that the same rules apply to them. It's a manner of showing respect to human life that you never confuse that life with the life of a bacterium.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

What about: I won't do pull this lever anymore since I know I am part of an experiment. Or: I won't take these happy drugs anymore since I know I'll probably die from them.

Herrnstein described these behaviors as being maintained by 'extraneous reinforcers'. Essentially, in a choice task with two options, there are theoretically three options; the left lever, the right lever, and every other possible behavior (e.g. scratching, wandering around the cage/room, daydreaming, etc). This might sound like post hoc rationalisation, but it's important to note that we have equations which allow us to perfectly quantify what these rates of reinforcement are for each option, and in doing so we can vary how likely it is for a subject to choose each option.

Animals do this regularly.

Mathematics involves much more than the 'conditioning' of just manipulating the symbols. It is not understood.

I explicitly specified the learning of mathematics.

From Wikipedia: The behaviorist school of thought maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind.

Don't confuse the subject.
Read the definition of behaviorism.
Read the definition of behaviorism.

"Behaviorism (or behaviourism), also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors..."

"Behaviorism comprises the position that all theories should have observational correlates but that there are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions) and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling).[4]"

Even your wikipedia article disagrees with you, because you've misunderstood what it means. The idea that behaviors can be understood without recourse to physiological or mental events does not mean that physiological and mental events are not used to describe behaviors.

From the Radical Behaviorism page:

"Radical behaviorism is a philosophy developed by B.F. Skinner that underlies the experimental analysis of behavior approach to psychology. The term radical behaviorism applies to a particular school that emerged during the reign of behaviorism. However, radical behaviorism bears little resemblance to other schools of behaviorism, differing in the acceptance of mediating structures, the role of private events and emotions, and other areas.[1]"

"John B. Watson argued against the use of references to mental states and held that psychology should study behavior directly, holding private events as impossible to study scientifically. Skinner rejected this position conceding the importance of thinking, feelings and "inner behavior" in his analysis. Skinner did not hold to truth by agreement, as Watson did, so he was not limited by observation.

In Watson's days (and in Skinner's early days), it was held that psychology was at a disadvantage as a science because behavioral explanations should take physiology into account. Very little was known about physiology at the time. Skinner argued that behavioral explanations of psychological phenomena are "just as true" as physiological explanations. In arguing this, he took a non-reductionistic approach to psychology. Skinner, however, redefined behavior to include "everything that an organism does," including thinking, feeling and speaking and argued that these phenomena were valid subject matters. (The challenge was that objective observation and measurement was often impossible.) The term radical behaviorism refers to just this: that everything an organism does is a behavior."

"Many textbooks, in noting the emphasis Skinner places on the environment, argue that Skinner held that the organism is a blank slate or a tabula rasa. Skinner wrote extensively on the limits and possibilities nature places on conditioning. Conditioning is implemented in the body as a physiological process and is subject to the current state, learning history, and history of the species. Skinner does not consider people a blank slate, or tabula rasa.[8]

Many textbooks seem to confuse Skinner's rejection of physiology with Watson's rejection of private events. It is true to some extent that Skinner's psychology considers humans a black box, since Skinner maintains that behavior can be explained without taking into account what goes on in the organism. However, the black box is not private events, but physiology. Skinner considers physiology as useful, interesting, valid, etc., but not necessary for operant behavioral theory and research."

It's important to note that Skinner's ideas on thoughts not being possible causes of behavior was not widely accepted by behaviorists, and so most behaviorists reject that aspect of Skinner's thinking. His ideas on the role of physiology was also largely a product of his time, where little was known about the human brain and he thought it was problematic to invoke specific parts of the brain as causes of behavior when such claims had little explanatory value. Later in his career though, and as neuroscience grew as a field, he was impressed with the breakthroughs in that area and emphasised the importance of behavioral research needing to combine with neuroscientific research.

All organisms are living things, humans are living things, conflating humans and organisms too much will imply at some point that the same rules apply to them. It's a manner of showing respect to human life that you never confuse that life with the life of a bacterium.

And when discussing universal behavioral laws which apply to both human and non-human animals, "organism" is an appropriate and accurate term. But even ignoring that fact, I see no reason to give human life any particular "respect" when we're discussing scientific issues. Doing so can produce biases in our thinking, and we might be fooled into thinking that humans are 'special' or 'unique' in some sense, without evidence or support for such a position.

 

[apeiron]

But the point is that they do. How else would there be such a massive amount of crossover between cognitive and behavioral researchers? Surely if they don't study them in the same way, it would be impossible or difficult for them to collaborate as often as they do.

Unfortunately I wrote a detailed reply that got eaten by the system when I hit the wrong button.

I shall respond directly to that episode of negative reinforcement with a second far shorter reply, thus demonstrating the expected extinction of behaviour.

Learning theorists are focused on what learning mechanisms produce behaviors, and language in this case. The behaviorist research here resulted in breakthroughs like long-term potentiation and in-vitro reinforcement, which are vital for any process that requires an element of learning - this is the kind of thing that it would add to neurolinguistics. It won't add knowledge of modular concepts within the brain because that's not what they're studying.

Neither LTP nor Kandel's work on conditioned reflexes was research by card-carrying behaviourists.

This is another example of your Orwellian tendency to re-label all research as Behaviourists.

It would be far more accurate to call it Hebbian. And Hebb, the father of connectionism, is a systems thinker who explicitly combined the ideas of associationism and holism, principally Gestalt psychology. He stressed the importance of local feed-forward connections coupled to global feed-back connections to create the hierarchical architecture of cell assemblies.

Such a position would require us to ignore numerous breakthroughs in innate behaviors which have come about through behaviorist research, like the discovery of the Garcia effect...

The Garcia effect was considered a prime failure of Behaviourism, not a prime breakthrough - http://cognitivepsychology.wikidot.com/cognition:emergence-of-cognitive-psychology

Look at tool-use in the New Caledonian crow, where evolutionary psychologists argued that it must be innate. We separated chicks at birth...

The crow studies are about the cultural transmission of learning and are the product of multidisciplinary labs.

Yes, I agree these studies are very important because they take a careful middle road approach between the extremist positions I have argued against here - http://psyc.queensu.ca/ccbr/Vol2/Bluff.html

If you want to call them the product of Behaviourism, then that is your Orwellian choice. I agree that they contrast the paradigms of Behaviourism and cognitive innatism to create that fruitful middle ground approach.

Come on.. you're just taking the piss now, right?

If Behaviourism = crow research, then I would be happy to be a Behaviourist too. But if Behaviourism = relational frame theory, then I still think its a load of cobblers.

Your definition of Behaviourism is so elastic now as to be meaningless.

As for the implication that Skinner is my "hero", this is of course ridiculous.

Your choice to defend him.

And you seem to miss my point. Behaviourism was stultifying and people wanted to overthrow its logical positivism, its behavioural atomism. So it is quite true that they never worried too much about the veracity of Chomsky's diatribe. They just wanted an era ended so they could begin again afresh.

Too bad that cognitive science then lurched towards the other extreme of computationalism, modularity and innatism. The pendulum of public opinion swings always too far.

And here we are again talking about the extremes - Chomsky and Skinner - when there are plenty of other historical figures with more important things to say. Hebb, Luria, Kohler, Neisser, Grossberg, Vygotsky, Lashley, Broadbent, Ashby, Bertalanffy, Sperry, Sokolov, etc.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

Unfortunately I wrote a detailed reply that got eaten by the system when I hit the wrong button.

That's annoying, I've done that before. The worst is when you accidentally click outside the textbox and hit the "Backspace" key, which reloads the previous page, only to find that clicking forward again doesn't contain the information you just wrote down.

I shall respond directly to that episode of negative reinforcement with a second far shorter reply, thus demonstrating the expected extinction of behaviour.

I don't like being a pedant, but negative reinforcement increases a behavior. You might be thinking of positive punishment.

Neither LTP nor Kandel's work on conditioned reflexes was research by card-carrying behaviourists.

This is another example of your Orwellian tendency to re-label all research as Behaviourists.

It would be far more accurate to call it Hebbian. And Hebb, the father of connectionism, is a systems thinker who explicitly combined the ideas of associationism and holism, principally Gestalt psychology. He stressed the importance of local feed-forward connections coupled to global feed-back connections to create the hierarchical architecture of cell assemblies.

So you're suggesting that things like conditioned fear paradigms play no role in the establishment of LTP processes? Or that in-vitro reinforcement, a process discovered due to the fact that LTP did not seem to account for the full complexities and depths of operant learning, has nothing to do with behaviorism?

This is another example of your religious approach to whitewashing history to suit your views.

There's an interesting related article on this topic here: [Behaviorism and Neuroscience](http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/101/2/259/ ).

The Garcia effect was considered a prime failure of Behaviourism, not a prime breakthrough - http://cognitivepsychology.wikidot.com/cognition:emergence-of-cognitive-psychology

How is it supposed to be a failure of behaviorism? The article suggests that: "These findings were contrary to two basic tenets of behaviourism, according to which conditioning required (1) multiple trials, and (2) the occurrence of reinforcement shortly after a behaviour had been exhibited." which is blatantly false. Firstly, the principles of behavioral psychology (not behaviorism) suggest that learned behaviors come about through multiple trials and within a short time period of exposure. The fact that the Garcia effect violated these rules did not disprove behavioral psychology, it demonstrated that there was more the phenomenon than just learning. (And to get more technical, learning doesn't require multiple trials or immediacy in some situations. That thinking is based largely on the idea that learning is a result of associationist conditioning, where the contiguity is the important factor. In reality, learning occurs through the informational value that a stimulus has to an organism, so learning an association can occur through a single trial at a delay if the informational context is salient enough - for example, in rapidly changing environments, organisms make associations quickly due to the importance of doing so in such a situation).

That article also goes on to suggest that the Brelands work "disproved" behaviorism as well! Haha, no wonder you view behaviorism as a blank slate approach - every time a behaviorist demonstrates a phenomenon that can't be explained by blank slatism, you view it as a refutation of behaviorism. You've constructed a mental defence that makes it impossible for you to be wrong, regardless of any facts or truth.

The crow studies are about the cultural transmission of learning and are the product of multidisciplinary labs.

Yes, I agree these studies are very important because they take a careful middle road approach between the extremist positions I have argued against here - http://psyc.queensu.ca/ccbr/Vol2/Bluff.html

If you want to call them the product of Behaviourism, then that is you Orwellian choice. I agree that they contrast the paradigms of Behaviourism and cognitive innatism to create that fruitful middle ground approach.

They use operant and classical conditioning paradigms to demonstrate the role of learning in the tool-use behavior of the crows. The members working on them (including myself at one point) call themselves behaviorists. They publish in behaviorist journals. Most of the researchers in the area present their findings at behaviorist conferences...

What more do you need?

If Behaviourism = crow research, then I would be happy to be a Behaviourist too. But if Behaviourism = relational frame theory, then I still think its a load of cobblers.

Your definition of Behaviourism is so elastic now as to be meaningless.

Both areas fall under behaviorism. Behaviorism is the study of behavior and mental processes using science.

In a sense, yes the term is almost meaningless now because everybody agrees with the behaviorist methodology when doing their research (in comparison to when behaviorism began, where introspective methods and anthropomorphism reigned supreme). But now everybody agrees that things like behaviors, thoughts, beliefs, etc should be studied objectively, using quantifiable measures, and self-reported data should be treated with care, then the term "behaviorism" does become somewhat meaningless in that all rational people and scientists agree to it.

But with that said, the examples I've presented have only included those people or research approaches which explicitly identify themselves as behaviorist, like the crow studies and RFT. (And to be fair, I'm not a big fan of RFT either - but the field is a refutation of the claim that Skinner's Verbal Behavior did not stimulate any valid scientific research, as RFT has come up with useful results).

Your choice to defend him.

Anybody interested in science or historical accuracy would defend him here. Equally so, I'd defend Chomsky or even Fodor is someone misrepresented them - although my knowledge of their work is not as extensive, which makes me less likely to step in unless I know I'm right.

And you seem to miss my point. Behaviourism was stultifying and people wanted to overthrow its logical positivism, its behavioural atomism. So it is quite true that they never worried too much about the veracity of Chomsky's diatribe. They just wanted an era ended so they could begin again afresh.

Methodological behaviorism was caught up in the tide of logical positivism that swept over psychology in the early 1900s, but it was Skinner's radical behaviorism which overthrew it. Although initially influenced by aspects of logical positivism and operationism, Skinner ultimately found such an approach to science to be inadequate and unsatisfying, hence his scathing attacks on the positivists' Stimulus-response psychology and the idea that behavior can be thought of as "reflex chains". There's a good article on it here: Some historical and conceptual relations among logical positivism, operationism, and behaviorism.

Basically, if you think behaviorism (i.e. the kind practiced now and for nearly 100 years) is positivist, then you need to go back to Psych 101.

Too bad that cognitive science then lurched towards the other extreme of computationalism, modularity and innatism. The pendulum of public opinion swings always too far.

And here we are again talking about the extremes - Chomsky and Skinner - when there are plenty of other historical figures with more important things to say. Hebb, Luria, Kohler, Neisser, Grossberg, Vygotsky, Lashley, Broadbent, Ashby, Bertalanffy, Sperry, Sokolov, etc.

But the point is that Skinner is not in an extreme position - the fact that he was one of the first scientists to recognise that the nature-nurture distinction was meaningless surely supports this claim. This isn't to say that he should be the be-all and end-all of scientific discussion when it comes to behavior, language, and certainly not neuroscience. Hell, you won't even find many ardent behaviorists agree with more than half of what Skinner said.

But that doesn't give us license to blatantly misrepresent him.

 

[MarcoD]

Behaviorism comprises the position that all theories should have observational correlates but that there are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions) and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling).[4]"

'Philosophical' differences may not exist, but that doesn't imply one can explain behavior from observance.

Actually, I don't know what to do with the above sentence. It's mostly meaningless except for that it seems to claim that behaviorism ascribes to materialism.

Even your wikipedia article disagrees with you, because you've misunderstood what it means. The idea that behaviors can be understood without recourse to physiological or mental events does not mean that physiological and mental events are not used to describe behaviors.

Behaviorism is plain wrong from a mathematical point of view. You cannot explain, hope to model, a complex entity from behavior solely, period.

We can understand the internal workings of an individual from studying the outside, and subsequently describing it in 'layman' terms of the inside? Idiotic.

"Radical behaviorism is a philosophy developed by B.F. Skinner that underlies the experimental analysis of behavior approach to psychology. The term radical behaviorism applies to a particular school that emerged during the reign of behaviorism. However, radical behaviorism bears little resemblance to other schools of behaviorism, differing in the acceptance of mediating structures, the role of private events and emotions, and other areas.[1]"

I am from CS, so I don't understand everything. But I can tell you one thing: It is impossible to derive the internal workings/behavior of an entity from studying its behavior, except for essentially stateless entities. It is also impossible to derive the behavior from studying physiology of entities, except for essentially stateless entities. These are hard mathematical facts.

"John B. Watson argued against the use of references to mental states and held that psychology should study behavior directly, holding private events as impossible to study scientifically. Skinner rejected this position conceding the importance of thinking, feelings and "inner behavior" in his analysis. Skinner did not hold to truth by agreement, as Watson did, so he was not limited by observation.

Watson may be right that it is impossible to study the inside, but that doesn't imply that one can derive behavior from the outside. Seems Skinner developed some common sense.

The term radical behaviorism refers to just this: that everything an organism does is a behavior.[/I]"

Meaningless semantics. Everything is behavior for a sufficiently broad definition of behavior, just as everything is cake for a sufficiently broad definition of cake.

"Many textbooks, in noting the emphasis Skinner places on the environment, argue that Skinner held that the organism is a blank slate or a tabula rasa. Skinner wrote extensively on the limits and possibilities nature places on conditioning. Conditioning is implemented in the body as a physiological process and is subject to the current state, learning history, and history of the species. Skinner does not consider people a blank slate, or tabula rasa.[8]

Noted.

Many textbooks seem to confuse Skinner's rejection of physiology with Watson's rejection of private events. It is true to some extent that Skinner's psychology considers humans a black box, since Skinner maintains that behavior can be explained without taking into account what goes on in the organism. However, the black box is not private events, but physiology. Skinner considers physiology as useful, interesting, valid, etc., but not necessary for operant behavioral theory and research."

As I said before, mathematically one can show that studying the outside isn't sufficient, and that studying the physiology of an entity, is also insufficient. So a mathematician can simply prove Skinner wrong.

(I would say it's even worse. Mathematically, for a sufficiently complex entity, understanding it is impossible from observing behavior, and worse, simple physiology is sufficient to generate incredibly complex behavior, so studying the physiology will tell you almost nothing about behavior. Behaviorism, from a math point of view, is flawed beyond believe.)

It's important to note that Skinner's ideas on thoughts not being possible causes of behavior was not widely accepted by behaviorists, and so most behaviorists reject that aspect of Skinner's thinking. His ideas on the role of physiology was also largely a product of his time, where little was known about the human brain and he thought it was problematic to invoke specific parts of the brain as causes of behavior when such claims had little explanatory value. Later in his career though, and as neuroscience grew as a field, he was impressed with the breakthroughs in that area and emphasised the importance of behavioral research needing to combine with neuroscientific research.

Well, behaviorism caved into reality and common sense. What else was there to do?

And when discussing universal behavioral laws which apply to both human and non-human animals, "organism" is an appropriate and accurate term. But even ignoring that fact, I see no reason to give human life any particular "respect" when we're discussing scientific issues. Doing so can produce biases in our thinking, and we might be fooled into thinking that humans are 'special' or 'unique' in some sense, without evidence or support for such a position.

I say nonsense. I'll give it to you that behaviorism only talks about organisms since it cannot explain anything except for essentially the most simple entities, microbes, a mathematical fact. Since practitioners cannot admit that, they therefor proceed to conflate humans with microbes which is an immoral act.

 

[bohm2]

So strong rationalism (of the true Platonic kind) says the existence of these kinds of fundamental truths - the efficiency of hierarchical organisation - exist "somewhere" that is external to the systems they constrain. Which is what makes them so mysterious. It is the old debate about the nature of maths - is it Platonically existent or merely socially constructed?

I think Chomsky would argue that there's no inconsistency in treating such mental representations as "physical" phenomena just as many mathematical formulations are accepted as statements of physical law. While it may true that such mental phenomena, ‘special categories cannot even in principle be specified in physical terms' (as presently understood) that isn't a convincing argument against this position for reasons stated before and which is at the heart of this thread, I think:

The mind-body problem can be posed sensibly only insofar as we have a definite conception of body. If we have no such definite and fixed conception, we cannot ask whether some phenomena fall beyond its range. The Cartesians offered a fairly definite conception of body in terms of their contact mechanics, which in many respects reflects commonsense understanding...[However] the Cartesian concept of body was refuted by seventeenth-century physics, particularly in the work of Isaac Newton, which laid the foundations for modern science. Newton demonstrated that the motions of the heavenly bodies could not be explained by the principles of Descartes’s contact mechanics, so that the Cartesian concept of body must be abandoned...

There is no longer any definite conception of body. Rather, the material world is whatever we discover it to be, with whatever properties it must be assumed to have for the purposes of explanatory theory. Any intelligible theory that offers genuine explanations and that can be assimilated to the core notions of physics becomes part of the theory of the material world, part of our account of body. If we have such a theory in some domain, we seek to assimilate it to the core notions of physics, perhaps modifying these notions as we carry out this enterprise...

The terms] 'body' and 'the physical world' refer to whatever there is, all of which we try to understand as best we can and to integrate into a coherent theoretical system that we call the natural sciences . . . If it were shown that the properties of the world fall into two disconnected domains, then we would, I suppose, say that that is the nature of the physical world, nothing more, just as if the world of matter and anti-matter were to prove unrelated.

Fiona Roxburgh makes the same point:

We may, therefore, start out in the study of mind just as other sciences started out: by identifying abstract concepts, prior to any knowledge of the particular mechanical or biological realisations of these abstractions. Consequently, the positing of abstract architecture, or of concepts of cognitive science and linguistics, is perfectly legitimate:

'When we speak of the mind, we are speaking at some level of abstraction of yet-unknown physical mechanisms of the brain, much as those who spoke of the valence of oxygen or the benzene ring were speaking at some level of abstraction about physical mechanisms, then unknown.' (Chomsky 1988a, 7).

Returning to the dissolution of the mind-body distinction, any persistent use of some supposedly well established or clear notion of “solid matter” constitutes a refusal to respect the development of scientific terms. In a similar way, assumptions to the effect that we have already completed or exhausted the full set of physical scientific explanations also stand in direct contradiction with the allowance for scientific terms (and indeed theories) to progress.

Revised Kantian Naturalism: Cognition and the Limits of Inquiry
https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/33046/1/2011RoxburghFCPhD.pdf

 

[apeiron]

The terms] 'body' and 'the physical world' refer to whatever there is, all of which we try to understand as best we can and to integrate into a coherent theoretical system that we call the natural sciences . . . If it were shown that the properties of the world fall into two disconnected domains, then we would, I suppose, say that that is the nature of the physical world, nothing more, just as if the world of matter and anti-matter were to prove unrelated.

There are two views of the hard problem. One is that there must be further material causes "down there". There must be extra fundamental properties, even if this is dualistic (as in panpsychic and quantum consciousness dual aspect theories). The other is the systems view where what is missing is a richer model of causality, one that includes downwards acting constraints, as argued for instance by Bishop in post #338, or more especially by Pattee.

You have failed so far to show why the systems view does not do the job.

 

[apeiron]

The OP is about models of causality sufficient to account for the mind/brain. With perhaps the human language function as a focal case (because of Chomsky's claim that material causes are apparently not enough and another kind of cause is also needed).

So Bohm2 is focused on Chomsky's musing about the possible incompleteness of our current knowledge of material causes. The answer may lie "down there". Yet Chomsky in fact seems far more interested in the extra possibility of global formal causes - the kind of explanations that very often cross over into Platonism. So when he is talking about recursive hierarchies or optimal computing constraints, he is indeed pointing in a different direction than material causes.

But I don't believe he gets the ontology right. He isn't getting the systematic relationship between upwards construction and downwards constraints that stops the acceptance of formal causes getting bogged down in the mire of Platonic mysterianism.

A key piece of evidence here is the fact that Chomsky has boiled UG down to the minimal grammatical operation of "merge". The claim is that there are naturally semantic objects that can be syntactically constructed into hierarchical organisations. While this is true, it is not the fundamental story. Instead, we have to first account for the formation of those semantic objects. And to do this, we need to invoke the causality of top-down constraints.

So instead of "merge", what is important is how syntax is the successive constraint of meaning. A word like "cat" weakly constrains a meaning. Your understanding of the word is still rather general. To create a more specified mental object, you need to add further constraints (perform further merges in Chomsky's terminology). So you might say the "cat which is sitting on the mat". Or the "fat and lazy cat that is sitting on the expensive persian rug". Semantics starts out as generalised, vague possibility. Before a word is uttered, anything within our experience and imagination might be the case. But as each word is uttered, our thoughts become more constrained to be about something utterly specific.

This is an incredibly powerful trick, and so it is obvious why syntactical speech made such an immediate difference to H.sapiens. And why the study of the mentality of animals is never going to give us the proper story about the mentality of humans, embedded in a new world of sociocultural semantics and constraints.

Anyway, the point was that Chomsky is sort of right. Material cause alone does not cut it. One possibility - the one Bohm2 seems generally to favour, given he appears to seek the same kind of answer to QM's interpretation issues - is that there may be "hidden variables" still to find in material causality, so rescuing the reductionist project. But Chomsky more generally appears to be trying to appeal to notions of formal causality.

However I think he is confused, and this shows in the vaguely Platonic tone of his writings, and the return to simple material causality in his actual theories - that idea of "merge". And also his arguments that language was special in being hierarchical. The systems view is that hierarchy is instead the most general possible kind of organisation as causality itself is hierarchical.

The brain is of course hierarchical. And physical reality as a whole is hierarchical (as of course is recognised in the idea of natural laws that constrain material atoms, or better yet, by gauge symmetry approaches where the global forms actually produce the system's material atoms).

So the mind/body problem can be solved by taking a fuller approach to causality. There will still be a residual Hard Problem along the lines of the "why anything" question. Even when we have an architecture of the brain that accounts for all its phenemology (why do we have mental images?, because they are anticipatory states, etc), we will still be able to ask why something rather than nothing. Why is red like red, and not like blue or shmoo?

But if the Hard Problem of Consciousness is reduced to the hard problem we have about everything, then it becomes just part of our general epistemological limits and something we can not worry about, or explore further, according to our tastes. That is, it is no more of a challenge to mind science than it is to any other branch of science.

As an aside, it might be interesting to ask what model of causality Skinner had in mind. Behaviourists did generally favour the simplest possible kind of reductionism - material/effective cause. The fought hard against anything that smacked of explanation in terms of global constraints - memories, wishes, thoughts, images, reasoning, etc.

This was a worthy thing in the sense that the animal mind is actually fundamentally different - and less - than a human mind. Without language, it is a simpler ball game. So all those familiar folk psychology terms need to be deflated.

So the basic justification was there. People think too much is going on inside the heads of animals. Science needed to break it down. But the criticism I have of Behaviourism was that it failed because it never actually had a clear model of the difference that language makes (as opposed to Vygotskian psychology, which did create a deflationary account based on a formal semiotic model).

Anyway, then we come to Skinner. Now he seems to have wanted to be more positive that the logical postivists, more strictly operationalist than the operationalists. And apparently, his was a subtle and comprehensive model of mentality that went way beyond the other Behaviourists. A very misunderstood figure it seems.

But I have yet to see anything that cashes out this view. Nothing has been put forward here that explains his view of causality in other than a positive's search for observational correlations that stand outside the system to be actually explained (or deflated).

Maybe he wasn't a simple minded materialist. But is that because he was so uber-positive that he was saying even material causality is a dangerously mental construct? He eschewed any modelling of causality?

I certainly don't get the sense Skinner was in any way a systems thinker, or a semiotician. He was not wrestling with the issues of downward causality, global constraints, or the richer architecture of causality in general.

Behaviourism certainly waves a hand at global constraints because it stresses the role of environment, of context, and of operant effectiveness (a nod even to final cause here, as I mentioned). But everyone always ends up waving a hand at these things. The difference with systems approaches is that they actually model these further aspects of causality. They are not merely left as particular measurements (a collection of environmental variables that the Behaviourist records) but instead are part of the general theory, part of the architectural model of a system's causes.

 

[bohm2]

One is that there must be further material causes "down there". There must be extra fundamental properties, even if this is dualistic (as in panpsychic and quantum consciousness dual aspect theories). The other is the systems view where what is missing is a richer model of causality, one that includes downwards acting constraints, as argued for instance by Bishop in post #338, or more especially by Pattee. You have failed so far to show why the systems view does not do the job.

I read Bishop's article you linked and also his other article: "Whence chemistry?". They were both really good articles. I still, however, don't see anything there, that argues against Chalmer's/Nagel's skepticism that "systems theory" or physics (as presently understood) can close this gap or shed any insight into the "hard" problem/consciousness. And just to be clear, so I'm not seen as misinterpreting/misrepresnting Chomsky's position, he may not be unsympathetic to Bishop's/your view of emergence and novelty, for he writes:

In Nagel’s phrase, “we can see how liquidity is the logical result of the molecules ‘rolling around on each other’ at the microscopic level,” though “nothing comparable is to be expected in the case of neurons” and consciousness...It is built into the notion of emergence that emergence cannot be brute in the sense of there being no reason in the nature of things why the emerging thing is as it is.” This is Strawson’s No-Radical Emergence Thesis, from which he draws the panpsychic conclusion that “experiential reality cannot possibly emerge from wholly and utterly non-experiential reality.”...

It should be noted that the molecule-liquid example, commonly used, is not a very telling one. We also cannot conceive of a liquid turning into two gases by electrolysis, and there is no intuitive sense in which the properties of water, bases, and acids inhere in Hydrogen or Oxygen or other atoms. Furthermore, the whole matter of conceivability seems to be irrelevant, whether it is brought up in connection with the effects of motion that Newton and Locke found inconceivable, or the irreducible principles of chemistry, or mind-brain relations. There is something about the nature of Hydrogen and Oxygen “in virtue of which they are intrinsically suited to constituting water,” so the sciences discovered after long labors, providing reasons “in the nature of things why the emerging thing is as it is.” What seemed “brute emergence” was assimilated into science as ordinary emergence—not, to be sure, of the liquidity variety, relying on conceivability. I see no strong reason why matters should necessarily be different in the case of experiential and nonexperiential reality, particularly given our ignorance of the latter, stressed from Newton and Locke to Priestley, developed by Russell, and arising again in recent discussion.

So here, I think Chomsky is either unwilling to speculate or perhaps would be somewhat unsympathetic to Nagel's/Chalmers arguments as when Chalmer writes:

Both consciousness and the quantum measurement case can be seen as strong varieties of emergence in that they involve in-principle non-deducibility and novel fundamental laws. But they are quite different in character. If I am right about consciousness, then it is a case of a strongly emergent quality, while if the relevant interpretations of quantum mechanics are correct, then it is more like a case of strong downward causation...

My own view is that, relative to the physical domain, there is just one sort of strongly emergent quality, namely, consciousness. I do not know whether there is any strong downward causation, but it seems to me that if there is any strong downward causation, quantum mechanics is the most likely locus for it. If both strongly emergent qualities and strong downward causation exist, it is natural to look at the possibility of a close connection between them, perhaps along the lines mentioned in the last paragraph.

While I don't think I agree with Chalmer's interpretation of QM, the difficulties with interpretating and resolving the meaning of the wave function/configurational space may ultimately shed some light into this mind-body problem; however, I still don't see anything in "systems theory" that sheds light for the reason Chalmers gives and as outlined in post #339. Then again, I might be just dumb and not understand Pattee, which is quite possible because I do find his stuff quite difficult to understand and it may be my fault not his.

Strong and Weak Emergence
http://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf

 

[Mr.Samsa]

'Philosophical' differences may not exist, but that doesn't imply one can explain behavior from observance.

Nobody has suggested we can. Given this response, and few others down below, I think you seem to be under the impression that the behaviorism under discussion here is logical/analytical behaviorism. That form of behaviorism has nothing to do with what is used in science, and I think is mostly dead in philosophy circles as it's a pretty hollow position to try to hold.

I know the terms can get confusing, and more so when behaviorists themselves mix them up, but radical behaviorism is really the only kind that is still relevant and is still alive. It is the analytical behaviorists who argue that we can infer mental states from public behavior - but no other behaviorist accepts this position. Skinner rightly points out that it's obviously absurd to suggest that 'being sad' is frowning and saying, "I'm sad".

The statement you quoted is simply a position of science - the idea that theories of behavior and mind must include observational elements. This doesn't mean that we should only study external behaviors, or that the mind has to be observable, but that if we are to make claims about the mind which are not empirical, then we have to have logical support for doing so.

Actually, I don't know what to do with the above sentence. It's mostly meaningless except for that it seems to claim that behaviorism ascribes to materialism.

Behaviorism is a philosophy of science, so it holds no real ontological position. It ascribes to methodological naturalism solely because that's what is necessary to do science, but beyond that no further assumptions are made. Of course, people and behaviorists themselves can make extra claims about what they believe, but they aren't central to behaviorism itself.

Behaviorism is plain wrong from a mathematical point of view. You cannot explain, hope to model, a complex entity from behavior solely, period.

We can understand the internal workings of an individual from studying the outside, and subsequently describing it in 'layman' terms of the inside? Idiotic.

This 'objection' was actually the defining feature of radical behaviorism. The identifier "radical" refers to the idea that inner states cannot be studied or understood by studying the observable/external behavior.

I am from CS, so I don't understand everything. But I can tell you one thing: It is impossible to derive the internal workings/behavior of an entity from studying its behavior, except for essentially stateless entities. It is also impossible to derive the behavior from studying physiology of entities, except for essentially stateless entities. These are hard mathematical facts.

Agreed.

Watson may be right that it is impossible to study the inside, but that doesn't imply that one can derive behavior from the outside. Seems Skinner developed some common sense.

Exactly. Skinner rejected the "behaviorist" position you're attacking.

Meaningless semantics. Everything is behavior for a sufficiently broad definition of behavior, just as everything is cake for a sufficiently broad definition of cake.

Not meaningless at all, actually. By describing everything an organism does as 'behavior', it conceptualises previously 'immaterial' entities as something that can be studied. The term 'behavior' can be changed to whatever you want, but the important part was that everything has a cause and effect.

As mentioned above, this claim is not controversial and people may accuse it of being trivial or meaningless, but this is because everybody accepts this claim now. But this wasn't always so acceptable - in the times of William James and Freud, and to an extent Watson, the idea that inner states can be studied scientifically was something that was unheard of.

As I said before, mathematically one can show that studying the outside isn't sufficient, and that studying the physiology of an entity, is also insufficient. So a mathematician can simply prove Skinner wrong.

(I would say it's even worse. Mathematically, for a sufficiently complex entity, understanding it is impossible from observing behavior, and worse, simple physiology is sufficient to generate incredibly complex behavior, so studying the physiology will tell you almost nothing about behavior. [STRIKE]Behaviorism, from a math point of view, is flawed beyond believe.[/STRIKE])

And the behaviorists agree with you.

Well, behaviorism caved into reality and common sense. What else was there to do?

I'm not sure if "caved in" is the right phrase, as that seems to imply that it ignored evidence or refused to shift from an unreasonable position.

I say nonsense. I'll give it to you that behaviorism only talks about organisms since it cannot explain anything except for essentially the most simple entities, microbes, a mathematical fact. Since practitioners cannot admit that, they therefor proceed to conflate humans with microbes which is an immoral act.

But behavioral psychologists regularly study and explain human behavior, including complex behaviors like language, and even how people converse. Not to mention the applied area of the field, applied behavior analysis, which regularly uses behavioral principles to study, predict and control the behavior of individuals in a wide range of contexts and behaviors, which includes cognitive-behavioral therapy which is a successful treatment for depression.

So I can't understand your position. Are you arguing that behavioral psychologists don't study humans, or are you arguing that all the studies on humans are just made up or something?

As for conflating microbes with humans being "immoral", I don't understand that at all. Under what moral system is such an act immoral? I don't think even religious people would argue that such a position is immoral, they just disagree with it.

 

[bohm2]

Behaviorism is a philosophy of science, so it holds no real ontological position. It ascribes to methodological naturalism solely because that's what is necessary to do science, but beyond that no further assumptions are made. Of course, people and behaviorists themselves can make extra claims about what they believe, but they aren't central to behaviorism itself.

I think this is the claim that is disputed by many rationalists/nativists like Chomsky. Pierre Jacob writes:

Chomsky‟s major input to the cognitive revolution lies in his criticism of the behaviorist confusion between evidence and subject-matter:

I think that there is some significance in the ease and willingness with which modern thinking about man and society accepts the designation “behavioral science”. No sane person has ever doubted that behavior provides much of the evidence for this study — all of the evidence, if we interpret “behavior” in a sufficiently loose sense. But the term “behavioral science” suggests a not-so-subtle shift of emphasis toward the evidence itself and away from the deeper underlying principles and abstract mental structures that might be illuminated by the evidence of behavior. It is as if natural science were to be designated “the science of meter readings”. What in fact would we expect of natural science in a culture that was satisfied to accept this designation for its activities? (Chomsky, 1968, 1972: 65)

The advent of the cognitive revolution was in turn responsible for the shift away from the study of human behavior towards the study of internal mental states and processes that may or not give rise to observable behavior.

Chomsky, Cognitive Science, Naturalism and Internalism
http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/05/32/33/PDF/ijn_00000027_00.pdf

 

[Mr.Samsa]

I think this is the claim that is disputed by many rationalists/nativists like Chomsky. Pierre Jacob writes:

Chomsky, Cognitive Science, Naturalism and Internalism
http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/05/32/33/PDF/ijn_00000027_00.pdf

But Jacob makes the exact same mistake that I've been discussing throughout this entire thread. Behavioral science is not a turning away from private events and abstract inner states - it is the direct study of those things. In other words, Skinner did not suggest that we study external behaviors to infer internal workings (i.e. "meter reading"), as he explicitly rejected such a simplistic position. He suggested that we attempt to study the inner workings directly.

This all stems from Chomsky's misunderstanding of the subject matter. The "cognitive revolution" was a rejection of S-R psychology. But psychologists tend to reject the notion that it was a "revolution" because it wasn't like there was any significant paradigm or resistance that they had to overthrow. The groundwork that needed to be done to convince the world of psychology that it needed to study the inner workings of the mind had already been done by Skinner and the radical behaviorists. Look at the work of Tolman and Guthrie, with their discussion of "cognitive maps" and thoughts causing behavior. Nobody at the time rejected the idea that cognition is something that should be studied.

Cognitivism therefore wasn't a "revolution", but just an extension of the ideas that were already in place. The behaviorists had already set out the methodology for studying cognition - the idea that organisms are information processors that are controlled by internal states. The only real transition was in the late 60s with Neisser's text "Cognitive Psychology", where the idea of information processors was taken from the behaviorism methodology and adapted using the metaphor of the computer.

There's a good article on this here: http://www.radford.edu/~tpierce/622%20files/Leahey%20(1992)%20The%20mythical%20revolutions%20of%20american%20psychology.pdf

Conclusion. The coming of cognitive psychology is
best regarded, not as the revolutionary creation of a new
paradigm slaying the older one of behaviorism, but as the
appearance of a new form of behavioralism based on a
new technology, the computer. By the 1950s, mediational
S-R behaviorists were already looking for ways to represent
internal processing of stimuli, and the computer
metaphor provided a better language than mediational
r-s notation did. Moreover, the existence of artificial intelligence—
the manufacture of information-processing
devices behaving intelligently and purposively—bolstered
faith in mediating mental processes by showing they could
be embodied in material devices rather than immaterial
souls (J. Miller, 1983). Information-processing psychology,
no less than any form of historical behaviorism, aims
at the description, prediction, control, and explanation
of behavior, without any special attention being given to
conscious experience (Tulving, 1989). Perhaps during the
feverish days of the 1960s, another, less behavioral, road
might have been taken—but it was not taken, at least not
by the main body of experimental psychologists. The
mainstream of psychology in 1992 remains as firmly behavioralistic
as it was in 1910.

 

[bohm2]

But Jacob makes the exact same mistake that I've been discussing throughout this entire thread. Behavioral science is not a turning away from private events and abstract inner states - it is the direct study of those things. In other words, Skinner did not suggest that we study external behaviors to infer internal workings (i.e. "meter reading"), as he explicitly rejected such a simplistic position. He suggested that we attempt to study the inner workings directly.

Let's forget all the reviews and assume these guys are wasted on drugs and just look at Skinner's papers. Have you read any of Skinner's works, in particular his "Science and Human Behavior" including the section "Why Organisms Behave"? Do you still feel like that part I bolded above, is consistent with his works?

Science and Human Behavior
http://www.bfskinner.org/BFSkinner/Society_files/Science_and_Human_Behavior.pdf

 

[apeiron]

Let's forget all the reviews and assume these guys are wasted on drugs and just look at Skinner's papers. Have you read any of Skinner's works, in particular his "Science and Human Behavior" including the section "Why Organisms Behave"? Do you still feel like that part I bolded above, is consistent with his works?

Skinner's position is completely reasonable because he carefully describes the limits of his project. But this is also why it does not scratch the mind~body problem. It carefully just does not go there.

As he says, his is a science devoted to the control of behaviour. And this then left open to cognitive science the question about the architecture of cognition.

The second link is useless in the control of behavior unless we can manipulate it. At the moment, we have no way of directly altering neural processes at appropriate moments in the life of a behaving organism, nor has any way been discovered to alter a psychic process. We usually set up the second link through the first: we make an animal thirsty, in either the physiological or the psychic sense, by depriving it of water, feeding it salt, and so on. In that case, the second link obviously does not permit us to dispense with the first. Even if some new technical discovery were to enable us to set up or change the second link directly, we should still have to deal with those enormous areas in which human behavior is controlled through manipulation of the first link. A technique of operating upon the second link would increase our control of behavior, but the techniques which have already been developed would still remain to be analyzed.

So in contrast to the public bashings that Skinner gave cogsci, and Chomsky gave Behaviourism, everything Skinner says here is good commonsense. There is no reason the two fields can't live alongside each other, and even complement each other.

Skinner correctly identifies the "enemy" as folk psychology and Freudianism (Freud being guilty of dressing up folk psychology as science). But even here his tone is reasoned rather than polemic.

What I don't accept is Mr Samsa's sweeping claim that Radical Behaviourism created the jargon, the causal concepts, the methods, the observation data, which then transferred seamlessly to become later the study of "the second link". And that this expansion of the field was so smooth, cognitive scientist are behaviourists, and behaviourist are cognitive scientists.

All mind scientists should have studied both to some level. But they are also different paradigms in terms of concepts, aims and methods.

Calling it empiricism vs rationalism is rather simplistic - I am tempted to call this folk philosophy. But there is something of this dichotomy in the division of the two fields. One asks what can we be most certain about if we are investigating the mind in terms of observables. The other is asking the same question in terms of general architectural or systematic principles.

Are cogsci and behaviourism opposed, or are they complementary? I of course would argue that they are both. Breaking things apart creates clarity, re-connecting them creates understanding.

And here Skinner is being very reasonable. He says I am not studying the intervening mental processes because I don't see how I could control them. So I am creating a methodology that puts all the attention on the contextual factors that I can control. But equally, these mental processes clearly exist, and someone else could study them.

Did Behaviourism pave the way for this study? Well yes it did in the sense that it did a deflationary job on folk psychology. Perhaps it also split off the field of "contextual factors" leaving cogsci to be purely a study of "the architecture of reason" - but in fact to me that was a bad thing so far as cogsci went, because it went far too far in becoming a study of the disembodied mind.

But I don't see that Behaviourism provided anything that helped very much in shaping specific cogsci hypotheses about the general architecture of cognition. Again, if you ask what kind of processing concepts were talked about in Behaviourism, you come back to simple associative chaining as the implicit architecture of thought.

I accept now, having read his critique of Thorndike (p67) that Skinner again carefully ruled out making any interpretations about cognitive architecture. It was clear to him that mind was much more than simple associative learning and so a science of behaviour should not start imposing simplistic explanations on intervening variables. If it couldn't talk about them in a way backed up by theory/data, then it should just remain silent on the matter.

This is sound policy. But again, it is why Behaviourism is seen as putting the question of mind off-limits (to a methodology) and so why a different methodology might arise to fill that gap.

Now I judge all this from a multidisciplinary perspective. Cogsci was in its way as deliberately limited in scope as Behaviourism. And there is a real problem of how much knowledge can be transferred in either direction between these domains. They certainly broke things apart in a specific way, but did they ever come to complement each other much?

In the 1970s - and I was only a hot-head teenager of course - my quick judgement was that these two fields, either jointly or separately, were not cutting it. To understand the mind, you had to bring in evolution, development, semiotics, anthropology, neurology, systems science.

If you are starting out now, of course, mind science is much more interdisciplinary. There is evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, comparative cognition, social anthropology, biosemiotics, etc. The fusions are happening.

But where is Behaviourism in all this? Perhaps it is pervasive as Mr Samsa argues because all these richer fields are indeed situating cognition in its various contexts - evolutionary, developmental, social, neurological. These give the empirical facts that constrain the otherwise dangerously unfettered imaginings of the rationalist tradition.

Or if we just define Behaviourism as the science of the control of behaviour (that avoids attempting to model intervening variables), then it is not much part of any of these fields. Although it persists, and even flourishes, as its own field of applied science.