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

[apeiron]

The results from behavioral science don't need a biological basis to be validated - the results are true, regardless of whether they can point to a structure in the brain or not. A biological basis obviously strengthens the arguments made, as science works by finding general laws which are applicable across various fields, but it's not "necessary" in that behavioral science doesn't cease to be true until it can be found.

OK, we need to try to keep the thread on track. The basic question being discussed here is the difficulty of grounding mental experience in a materialistic description of causality.

Conventional science/philosophy does not seem to have the right kinds of causality available to it. The OP suggests that further research may eventually discover these missing "material causes". My reply all along the line is that this is the wrong way to look at the issue. The causality of reality is more complex, involving formal as well as material causes (ie: the material and effective causes in Aristotle's scheme of the four causes).

So what is in fact missing from the discourse is attention to formal and final cause. We already know what is lacking in the causal analysis. We are just not using these other aspects of causality in our modelling. Well, they are there implicitly in fact, and we need to make them explicit to get rid of that nagging sense of mystery that pervades the subject.

Now you have reacted to my ad hominen characterisation of Skinnerian Behaviourism. OK, of course nothing is ever so black and white when it comes to famous thinkers. They are always more nuanced. Their ideas were always evolving and even flip-flopping. It is only in the public eye that they get turned into a historic figure standing for a certain sharply defined thesis - to which other figures were the antithesis.

So the public view is "unfair" to Skinner, just as it is to Chomsky. But also, as generalisations, the view will not be that far off the mark. Besides, these guys were playing the same game themselves, as can be seen from Skinner's "unfair" characterisation of cogsci - http://www.skeptically.org/skinner/id9.html

Anyway, I accept that Skinner, and Behaviourism, offer more complexity once you get into the details. But so far as the OP goes, my criticism stands. Behaviourism represents a turning back towards arch-reductionism in mind science. It ended up a sterile exercise, contributing nothing worthwhile to the fundamental question of how a body makes a mind. Perhaps it is useful as an applied training technique in limited situations, but as a general philosophy of causality, as I say, it is a sterile retreat into reductionist thought.

Now Behaviourism is definitely not all bad. For instance, judging it from the systems perspective I am employing, it does stress the importance of contextual constraints. The brain is responding within the context of a world. The environment is a causal factor. The mind is not simply free to have thoughts and perceptions for no reason. All mental action is shaped by a wider context. And indeed, Behaviourism even works final cause into the story. Reward and punishment are the purpose that draw behaviour towards them. And all this is even pretty explicit in the theories.

But why do I then still feel it to be a barren subject, an intellectual cul-de-sac? And why, in studying mind science, does the operant perspective never crop up in the work of others?

It is not that Behaviourism is flat-out wrong. As a method of collecting observations, it collected what it collected. But as a way to connect body and mind, well it did not inspire any progress.

As you can see from Skinner's article on cogsci, he made some basic mistakes like deriding mental imagery. Yet the ability to manipulate mental imagery is clearly something that distinguishes humans from animals. In the effort to make things "very causally simple, very methodologically empirical", Behaviourism tried to turn attention away from a great many central issues like this. It employed a deliberate impoverishment of language to achieve this (one of the reasons why I felt I was being groomed for a cult when taking operant conditioning classes).

So while you can rightfully say that Behaviourism is a body of science, correct in its own terms, and needing no grounding in neurology or other field, my argument is that this isolationist mentality is what makes it pretty much irrelevant to the wider field of mind science, which has to be interdisciplinary.

The mind/brain as a system is not fundamentally simple but fundamentally complex. And that is how you have to approach it as a subject. What that looks like to me is a hierarchy of explanation along the lines of [systems science [infodynamics [neuroscience [anthropology]]]]. This is a way to begin with all four causes in play and then track their development towards the highest levels of complexity.

But anyway, in the context of the thread, does Behaviourism create a model of material causes that seem sufficient to account for mental experiences?

Chomsky has been put forward as someone saying "there must be further material causes, we just haven't got a clue what they might be." I have replied the actual problem is a failure to treat causality as irreducibly complex.

Most people would take Skinner as saying science should only deal with objective correlations and eschew causal talk - the arch-empiricist stance. Although speaking of "correlations" itself already presumes proximate cause - local effective causality. And formal cause, in the guise of an environment, proves to be a rather thin concept in Behaviourist thought - a hand waved towards an unspecified "everything" that makes up the prevailing context. So Behaviourism is still entangled in the question of causality, even though it relies on an impoverished theoretic language and observational methodology to push the issues into the unspoken background.

I prefer to deal with causality upfront. Our models of causality - implicit or explicit - end up grounding everything anyway. We are not really input-driven observational machines. We actually do project our ideas onto the world and measure it largely in terms of what we expect to find.

The job of scientific method is to give the empirical greater weight in shaping our ideas. But we also need rationalism - yes, philosophy - to refine our ideas too. And science turns out to be the most creative when both these parts of the process are in proper balance.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

Here's a review piece from Stanford on behaviourism that is relevant to this thread I think:

It should also be noted that Skinner's derisive attitude towards explanatory references to mental innerness stems, in part, not just from fears of explanatory regression but from his conviction that if the language of psychology is permitted to refer to internal processing, this goes some way towards permitting talk of immaterial mental substances, agents endowed with contra-causal free will, and little persons (homunculi) within bodies. Each of these Skinner takes to be incompatible with a scientific worldview (see Skinner 1971; see also Day 1976)...Finally, it must be noted that Skinner's aversion to explanatory references to innerness is not an aversion to inner mental states or processes per se. He readily admits that they exist. Skinner countenances talk of inner events provided that they are treated in the same manner as public or overt responses. An adequate science of behavior, he claims, must describe events taking place within the skin of the organism as part of behavior itself (see Skinner 1976). “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote in 1984 in a special issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences devoted to his work, “whatever happens when we inspect a public stimulus is in every respect similar to what happens when we introspect a private one” (Skinner 1984b, p. 575; compare Graham 1984, pp. 558–9).

http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/archives/fall2011/entries/behaviorism/

The SEP article on behaviorism is recognised as being particularly awful when it comes to facts - or to put it more simply, the wikipedia page is better (despite having many problems itself). Importantly, Skinner had no objections to using explanations that appealed to "mental innerness", and encouraged talking of internal processes. He was afterall a "radical" behaviorist, gaining the term "radical" because he wanted to extend the behaviorist paradigm to discussing inner processes.

His objection to the kinds of explanations that he regularly discussed was that they were pseudoexplanations, giving the appearance of having explained a phenomenon when really all the 'explanation' had done was redescribe the problem in a circular manner.

The second half of the above quote is correct, although I think the author misunderstands Skinner's intention. When Skinner says internal processes should be treated in the same way as overt behaviors, he obviously does not mean that internal processes should be interpreted as overt behaviors. That is, Skinner does not argue that "sadness" is the label we apply to people crying and saying, "I'm sad!" (hence why the "Perfect actor" argument is ridiculous). Instead Skinner simply argued that internal processes should be treated as natural parts of the world - with causes and effects that can be studied by science. In other words, he simply said that we should apply the scientific method to psychology.

This is quite different from Chomsky who wants to treat these mental objects as "real" as any other aspects of the world studied by science. In fact, to not pay focus on these (as Skinner's more behaviourist/instrumental approach) leads to little insight and is not what science is all about (or so he would argue, I think):

And Chomsky's quote there is a (albeit rather naive) summary of the behaviorist position.

Chomsky, has in fact, argued, that "behavioral sciences" suggests a fundamental confusion between evidence and subject matter. Psychology, for example, he claims is the science of mind; to call psychology a behavioral science is like calling physics a science of meter readings. One uses human behavior as evidence for the laws of the operation of the mind, but to suppose that the laws must be laws of behavior is to suppose that the evidence must be the subject matter. (Searle, 1972)

Chomsky and Searle both misunderstand what is meant by "behavior" when we talk of the definition of psychology. "Behavior" has a deeper philosophical meaning than just "overt actions". Psychology, of course, is not the studying of 'jumping' or 'pulling levers' or 'pushing buttons', but when we understand what 'behavior' is (that which an organism does) we realize that behavior encompasses a range of things, including overt actions, physiological and chemical reactions in the brain, mental processes, thoughts, feelings, etc.

Behavior is thus the fundamental subject matter which is to be studied by psychologists.

Now you have reacted to my ad hominen characterisation of Skinnerian Behaviourism. OK, of course nothing is ever so black and white when it comes to famous thinkers. They are always more nuanced. Their ideas were always evolving and even flip-flopping. It is only in the public eye that they get turned into a historic figure standing for a certain sharply defined thesis - to which other figures were the antithesis.

I don't think you presented any ad hominem? It was simply an inaccurate representation of his position. Of course, the public perception of complex academic issues will be simplistic and black and white to some degree, but you seem to be presenting Skinner as a blank slatist who argued that language is entirely formed by the environment. This is as wrong as claiming that Darwin was a creationist.

Some inaccuracies or simplifications are understandable and acceptable in standard discourse. Describing a person's position as the complete antithesis of his actual stance is just wrong.

So the public view is "unfair" to Skinner, just as it is to Chomsky. But also, as generalisations, the view will not be that far off the mark. Besides, these guys were playing the same game themselves, as can be seen from Skinner's "unfair" characterisation of cogsci - http://www.skeptically.org/skinner/id9.html

No disagreements there. Skinner's handling of cognitive psychology was unfair, and this is why no other behaviorist accepted his position on that issue. That was his personal position, not one of behaviorism.

Anyway, I accept that Skinner, and Behaviourism, offer more complexity once you get into the details. But so far as the OP goes, my criticism stands. Behaviourism represents a turning back towards arch-reductionism in mind science. It ended up a sterile exercise, contributing nothing worthwhile to the fundamental question of how a body makes a mind. Perhaps it is useful as an applied training technique in limited situations, but as a general philosophy of causality, as I say, it is a sterile retreat into reductionist thought.

I'm not sure how you can say that. Do you argue that the entire fields of behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience and ethology have contributed nothing to our understanding of the mind? Remember, they were all made possible by the philosophy of science of behaviorism that underpin them all.

But why do I then still feel it to be a barren subject, an intellectual cul-de-sac? And why, in studying mind science, does the operant perspective never crop up in the work of others?

Firstly, behaviorism is not wedded to the idea of operant conditioning, so even if operant conditioning was not accepted by any other field and was entirely disproven, it would not affect behaviorism. Secondly, operant conditioning is discussed in every single area that deals with behavior or learning.

It is not that Behaviourism is flat-out wrong. As a method of collecting observations, it collected what it collected. But as a way to connect body and mind, well it did not inspire any progress.

I simply cannot fathom how you can conclude this, unless you are taking the position that science itself cannot answer the fundamental questions of the mind (i.e. arguing for a 1st person perspective of mind that cannot be accessed by third person methodology). If that's the case, then I of course agree but that is not a criticism of behaviorism or science. If not, then again I point out the results of behavioral and cognitive psychology, neuroscience and ethology.

As you can see from Skinner's article on cogsci, he made some basic mistakes like deriding mental imagery. Yet the ability to manipulate mental imagery is clearly something that distinguishes humans from animals. In the effort to make things "very causally simple, very methodologically empirical", Behaviourism tried to turn attention away from a great many central issues like this. It employed a deliberate impoverishment of language to achieve this (one of the reasons why I felt I was being groomed for a cult when taking operant conditioning classes).

Behaviorism didn't turn away from mental imagery, as it has always studied it. Skinner personally rejected it as an explanation for behavior when there was no evidence to support it. That is, when asked why it takes so long for people to solve mental rotation tasks, it is not appropriate to point out that it takes "time" to rotate it in the mind. This explanation is useless and tells us nothing new - hence why it is not the accepted explanation in psychology. Instead the explanation that is accepted is the behaviorist explanation that appeals to the research on stimulus generalisation.

Behaviorists simply cautioned us to be careful of believing we had an explanation when really we didn't. They didn't reject talk of mental imagery, and even used it as fundamental evidence for various theories, but the point is that the introspection used to generate such observations are to be treated as verbal reports which are subject to their own contingencies. (You might find such an explanation familiar, as it is this behaviorist approach which underpins cognitive psychology).

So while you can rightfully say that Behaviourism is a body of science, correct in its own terms, and needing no grounding in neurology or other field, my argument is that this isolationist mentality is what makes it pretty much irrelevant to the wider field of mind science, which has to be interdisciplinary.

There is no isolationist mentality, you've misunderstood what I've said. Behaviorism does not need to ground itself in other sciences to be valid, in the same way that chemistry does not need to ground itself in physics or mathematics to be valid. Mixing certain chemicals will still produce consistent and observable results. However, grounding it can produce useful predictions for us.

With that said, behaviorism is obviously already grounded in various areas. It's closest relationship is with cognitive psychology, where researchers usually work with each other all the time. This is easy to do because they both use the same methodology, study the same phenomena, and reach the same conclusions. But it also has ties to other areas, like neuroscience, which relies solely on behaviorist methodology to conduct much of its research.

But anyway, in the context of the thread, does Behaviourism create a model of material causes that seem sufficient to account for mental experiences?

It certainly has accounted for a number of mental experiences. Whether it has accounted for the entire topic of how the body creates mind, then of course not, as nobody has.

Most people would take Skinner as saying science should only deal with objective correlations and eschew causal talk - the arch-empiricist stance.

Indeed, and those people have probably never read a book by Skinner, otherwise how could they have so badly misread Skinner as saying that science should only deal with objective correlations?

Although speaking of "correlations" itself already presumes proximate cause - local effective causality. And formal cause, in the guise of an environment, proves to be a rather thin concept in Behaviourist thought - a hand waved towards an unspecified "everything" that makes up the prevailing context.

...How can you argue that? Behavioral psychology is the study of context. It's not a hand wave, it's an entire field with journals upon journals filled with data on what constitutes context in any given situation, and what variables are important when considering specific phenomenon.

The job of scientific method is to give the empirical greater weight in shaping our ideas. But we also need rationalism - yes, philosophy - to refine our ideas too. And science turns out to be the most creative when both these parts of the process are in proper balance.

And this is why Skinner argued that we should not rely only on objective measures, because this would cause us to rule out cognition and thoughts. Instead we need to study things as objectively as possible, and when we create hypothetical entities to explain certain things, we need to support them with logical arguments.

This is why he was "radical" - he rejected the methodological behaviorist thought that we can only study the objective, observable behaviors.

This discussion just keeps confusing me more and more. You keep saying that you find the behaviorist position barren, and that it doesn't cover this or that, but the more you describe your position, the more consistent it appears to be with behavorism.

 

[bohm2]

Chomsky and Searle both misunderstand what is meant by "behavior" when we talk of the definition of psychology. "Behavior" has a deeper philosophical meaning than just "overt actions". Psychology, of course, is not the studying of 'jumping' or 'pulling levers' or 'pushing buttons', but when we understand what 'behavior' is (that which an organism does) we realize that behavior encompasses a range of things, including overt actions, physiological and chemical reactions in the brain, mental processes, thoughts, feelings, etc...Behavior is thus the fundamental subject matter which is to be studied by psychologists.

Chomsky's criticism of Skinner's behaviourism is below. I'm sure you read it. Which part do you think Chomsky misunderstands:

A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1967----.htm

 

[Mr.Samsa]

Chomsky's criticism of Skinner's behaviourism is below. I'm sure you read it. Which part do you think Chomsky misunderstands:

A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1967----.htm

MacCorquodale's "On Chomsky's Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior" analyses it quite well:

The fact that the review has never been systematically
replied to (although partial replies
have appeared in Wiest, 1967 and Katahn and
Koplin, 1968) has become the basis for an apparently
wide-spread conclusion that it is in
fact unanswerable, and that its criticisms are
therefore essentially valid, a belief which
Chomsky shares (Jakobovits and Miron, 1967,
p. 142). There are, in truth, several sufficient
reasons for the lack of rejoinder and none of
them have anything to do with the merits of
either Chomsky's or Skinner's case. First, because
not all S-R psychologists are sympathetic
to Skinner's version many of them felt themselves
out of Chomsky's range and were not
moved to defend themselves or Skinner. This
is somewhat ingenuous of them, however, since
Chomsky's actual target is only about one-half
Skinner, with the rest a mixture of odds and
ends of other behaviorisms and some other
fancies of vague origin. No behaviorist escaped
untouched. On the other hand, most Skinnerians
correctly concluded that their behaviorism
was not particularly the focus of the review,
much of which they frankly did not
understand. For example, the review devotes
six utterly bewildering pages (Chomsky, 1959,
pp. 39-44) to yet another refutation (they must
number now in the hundreds) of the drive-reduction
theory of reinforcement, which has
long since disappeared from everyone's behaviorism,
I believe, and which never characterized
Skinner's (Wiest, 1967, makes the same
observation). Finally, and it must be said,
probably the strongest reason why no one has
replied to the review is its tone. It is ungenerous
to a fault; condescending, unforgiving,
obtuse, and ill-humored. For example, the
perfectly well-defined word "response" is consistently
called a "notion" which creates, in
time, an overwhelming atmosphere of dubiety
with respect to the word. The review's one
kind word is in a footnote (Chomsky, 1959,
p. 32). It is almost impossible to reply to whatever
substantive points the review might have
made without at the same time sounding either
defensive and apologetic, or as truculent
as the reviewer.

(Apologies for the awkward PDF formatting).

MacCorquodale deals with the only three relevant criticisms that he can salvage from Chomsky's review, but I found the above excerpt to be quite a good summary of the issues with Chomsky's review. The fact that he spends a lot of his time attacking S-R psychology, and drive-reduction theorists, just goes to show that he didn't know anything about Skinner or his behaviorism. If he did, then he would have realized that Skinner had already dismantled those positions 20 years earlier.

Chomsky's severe misunderstanding of Skinner, behaviorism and "Verbal Behavior" are why his review is given little-to-no weight in academia. And obviously it, despite popular opinion, did not affect the continual growth and work of behaviorism.

 

[apeiron]

This discussion just keeps confusing me more and more. You keep saying that you find the behaviorist position barren, and that it doesn't cover this or that, but the more you describe your position, the more consistent it appears to be with behavorism.

The only reason for the confusion is that you keep switching the level of your definitions. Sometimes its Skinner's radical Behaviourism, sometimes it is Behaviourism as a field that includes Watson, Thorndike, Tolman and others who believed there are rules of learning that generalise directly from animals to humans, and then there is behaviourism with a small "b", which is what really everyone apparently does.

It is interesting that there is a lot of negative feeling about Behaviourism, and Skinnerism in particular.

It seems a lot of people are wishing it dead...
http://www.baam.emich.edu/baammiscpages/baamdeathwatch.htm

Behaviorism, founded in 1913 by John B. Watson, is almost a century old. For almost as long, behaviorism has been declared "dead," "dying," "moribund," or at least not in good health. Behaviorists know different, of course.

But I thought this APS editorial gave a balanced summary...
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=1540

Particularly this comment...

Another framing to the previous answer (owing to Endel Tulving) is that there are several valid sciences of psychology. He wrote to me in an e-mail comment on an earlier draft of this column that: "It is quite clear in 2004 that the term 'psychology' now designates at least two rather different sciences, one of behavior and the other of the mind. They both deal with living creatures, like a number of other behavioral sciences, but their overlap is slim, probably no greater than psychology or sociology used to be when the world was young. No one will ever put the two psychologies together again, because their subject matter is different, interests are different, and their understanding of the kind of science they deal with is different. Most telling is the fact that the two species have moved to occupy different territories, they do not talk to each other (any more), and the members do not interbreed. This is exactly as it should be."

I think this makes it clearer what divides people. Some of us want to understand the general architectural principles of the mind. Others want to be able to predict and control its manifestations.

So one wants to have a general systems theory of mind of the kind that is explicitly causal - that presents the deep principles in a way that is philosophically satisfactory, and can be used to actually make mind-like machines.

The other says philosophical satisfaction is not the business of science (the familiar logical positive position). And second, the desired pay-off in terms of application is the repair or control of systems with minds. It does not actually matter how the minds work. But because they seem to be quite good at learning and adapting, you just need precise descriptions of the environmental variables you have to control to achieve control over the minds.

OK, no reason why you can't not want to do everything in the one package. But I think this explains a lot about the social dynamics. Cogsci took off largely because of the promise of artificial intelligence. You could get big bucks from Darpa for investigating the systems principles by which mind-like devices could be mass produced.

(This, by the way, I have to mention because it is so funny - Skinner's pigeon guided missiles - http://historywired.si.edu/object.cfm?ID=353).

Likewise, Behaviourism continues, even thrives, as applied remedial learning. And applied behavioural control. That is the kind of technology that results from the field's focus, and it pays its way.

But it is not about the generalised principles of mind. Maybe Skinner thought it might be. Yet I don't see anything that Behaviourism invented that has been of any note.

I haven't actually read Skinner's own writings such as mentioned here...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1389767/

Thirty-six years later in a chapter on “What is Inside the Skin?” in About Behaviorism (1974, pp. 207–218), Skinner reaffirmed the importance of a reductionist framework, and again rejected attributing the cause of a behavior to a single neurobiological entity, whether it was a synapse, an anatomical structure, an emotion, or a motivation. The possible exception he noted was appealing to neural events to fill inevitable gaps in an operant account. For example, because behavioral accounts of reinforcement are “necessarily historical,” they leave gaps between events that might be filled in by neural processes related to memory. It was clear, though, that any large-scale integration remained far in the future, following the establishment of comprehensive and independent behavioral and neural sciences.

But also nothing that has been said so far has changed my opinion that operant concepts don't create a natural bridge to theories of cognition.

This is in interesting contrast to orienting reflexes and other post-Pavlovian work. I think the difference there is that the step is quite small between reflexive behaviour and the brain organisation needed to make it happen.

Whereas for operant level behaviour, you are now into the high level brain stuff, which is very plastic and memory/attention/anticipation/goals based. You are into the complexity, and need to come at it in terms of theories about processing architectures rather than observed patterns of behavioural contingencies.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

The only reason for the confusion is that you keep switching the level of your definitions. Sometimes its Skinner's radical Behaviourism, sometimes it is Behaviourism as a field that includes Watson, Thorndike, Tolman and others who believed there are rules of learning that generalise directly from animals to humans, and then there is behaviourism with a small "b", which is what really everyone apparently does.

It changes depending on what the discussion requires. Generally when I mention behaviorism in reference to what I view as currently valid arguments, ideas or conclusions, I'll be referring to radical behaviorism as all other forms are dead or have been replaced.

And the idea that the rules of learning generalise directly from animals to humans is not limited to any particular philosophy, it's just a scientific fact.

It is interesting that there is a lot of negative feeling about Behaviourism, and Skinnerism in particular.

It seems a lot of people are wishing it dead...
http://www.baam.emich.edu/baammiscpages/baamdeathwatch.htm

Haha yeah, it's interesting how often behaviorism is declared dead. I think that's mostly due to people not understand what behaviorism is (like those in the article I linked to earlier, that tested students' knowledge of Skinner and behaviorism).

But I thought this APS editorial gave a balanced summary...
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=1540

Indeed, Roediger's article is brilliant - I've linked to it a few times in the past to correct people's misconceptions of behaviorism.

Particularly this comment...

Another framing to the previous answer (owing to Endel Tulving) is that there are several valid sciences of psychology. He wrote to me in an e-mail comment on an earlier draft of this column that: "It is quite clear in 2004 that the term 'psychology' now designates at least two rather different sciences, one of behavior and the other of the mind. They both deal with living creatures, like a number of other behavioral sciences, but their overlap is slim, probably no greater than psychology or sociology used to be when the world was young. No one will ever put the two psychologies together again, because their subject matter is different, interests are different, and their understanding of the kind of science they deal with is different. Most telling is the fact that the two species have moved to occupy different territories, they do not talk to each other (any more), and the members do not interbreed. This is exactly as it should be."

I think this makes it clearer what divides people. Some of us want to understand the general architectural principles of the mind. Others want to be able to predict and control its manifestations.

I'm not sure I accept that explanation, but maybe I'm misunderstanding. When behaviorists study mental imagery, dreams, signal processing, thoughts, etc, what are they studying if not the mind? Using self-reports and introspection to determine what the person is perceiving inside their mind, is surely a study of the mind?

I prefer the following explanation that Roediger gives:

Perhaps the most radical answer to the question I posed is that behaviorism is less discussed and debated today because it actually won the intellectual battle. In a very real sense, all psychologists today (at least those doing empirical research) are behaviorists. Even the most cognitively oriented experimentalists study behavior of some sort. They might study effects of variables of pushing buttons on computers, or filling out checklists, or making confidence ratings, or patterns of bloodflow, or recalling words by writing them on sheets of paper, but they almost always study objectively verifiable behavior. (And even subjective experiences, such as confidence ratings, can be replicated across people and across conditions). This step of studying objectively verifiable behavior represents a huge change from the work of many psychologists in 1904. Today the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience are highly behavioral (if one includes neural measures of behavior). True, there is nothing necessarily inherently interesting about pushing buttons on computers, but on the other hand, the basic laws of behavior in the animal lab were worked out on rats pushing levers and navigating runways, or pigeons pecking keys - not exactly riveting behaviors in their own right. In all these cases, the scientist's hope is to discover fundamentally interesting principles from simple, elegant experimental analyses. The cognitive researcher goes further and seeks converging evidence from behavioral observations on internal workings of the mind/brain systems. But as experimentalists, both cognitive and behavioral researchers study behavior. Behaviorism won.

So one wants to have a general systems theory of mind of the kind that is explicitly causal - that presents the deep principles in a way that is philosophically satisfactory, and can be used to actually make mind-like machines.

The other says philosophical satisfaction is not the business of science (the familiar logical positive position). And second, the desired pay-off in terms of application is the repair or control of systems with minds. It does not actually matter how the minds work. But because they seem to be quite good at learning and adapting, you just need precise descriptions of the environmental variables you have to control to achieve control over the minds.

I can't understand which one is which in these explanations. The former appears to be referring to behaviorism, since the progress in areas like creating "mind-like machines", and finding causal theories of mental processes, is largely led by behaviorist theorists. The cognitive scientists tend to lag behind because they took a while to reject Fodor's mistaken computational theory of mind.

OK, no reason why you can't not want to do everything in the one package. But I think this explains a lot about the social dynamics. Cogsci took off largely because of the promise of artificial intelligence. You could get big bucks from Darpa for investigating the systems principles by which mind-like devices could be mass produced.

I think cogsci took off because behaviorism paved the way for it. It developed the experimental method for studying behavior, and then highlighted how this methodology could be applied to cognition and other mental processes. From there, the cognitive scientists followed on. This is why psychologists reject the idea of a "cognitive revolution", as there was no real revolution. There was nobody to overthrow, everybody accepted that the mental world should be studied, and they all agreed on the method to do so.

(This, by the way, I have to mention because it is so funny - Skinner's pigeon guided missiles - http://historywired.si.edu/object.cfm?ID=353).

Indeed. It was hugely successful, and apparently if computer guidance hadn't been developed around the same time, they would have actually been dropping pigeons with their missiles.

Likewise, Behaviourism continues, even thrives, as applied remedial learning. And applied behavioural control. That is the kind of technology that results from the field's focus, and it pays its way.

But it is not about the generalised principles of mind. Maybe Skinner thought it might be. Yet I don't see anything that Behaviourism invented that has been of any note.

I'm not sure why you keep saying this though. My area of research is purely in the experimental side of behaviorism. I don't do any applied stuff, and I'm not interested in overt physical behaviors. I study mental processes and cognition. Where do I fit in your picture here?

I haven't actually read Skinner's own writings such as mentioned here...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1389767/



But also nothing that has been said so far has changed my opinion that operant concepts don't create a natural bridge to theories of cognition.

But again you're confusing operant conditioning with behaviorism. Behaviorism is the general philosophy which resulted in the science that discovered operant conditioning. It's not vital or important to behaviorism as a philosophy. It's only important to science as a whole, due to it repeatedly being demonstrated as a fundamental aspect of how all animals (including humans) function.

With that being said, I can't think of any theory of cognition which could possibly exclude operant processes.

This is in interesting contrast to orienting reflexes and other post-Pavlovian work. I think the difference there is that the step is quite small between reflexive behaviour and the brain organisation needed to make it happen.

Whereas for operant level behaviour, you are now into the high level brain stuff, which is very plastic and memory/attention/anticipation/goals based. You are into the complexity, and need to come at it in terms of theories about processing architectures rather than observed patterns of behavioural contingencies.

You understand that the principles of memory, attention and goal generation (and probably 'anticipation' if defined more concretely) are driven by operant contingencies, right? That is, you can't discuss things like memory in any level of detail without discussing operant processes.

 

[bohm2]

Chomsky's severe misunderstanding of Skinner, behaviorism and "Verbal Behavior" are why his review is given little-to-no weight in academia. And obviously it, despite popular opinion, did not affect the continual growth and work of behaviorism.

I'm not qualified enough to comment in detail on that review/criticism, but at least with respect to cognitive science (where I do arguably, have some qualifications) his works (e.g. Syntantic Structures, etc.) are arguably among the most important (if not the most important overall) papers influencing cognitive science in the 20th century:

The one hundred most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th century
http://www.cogsci.umn.edu/OLD/calendar/past_events/millennium/final.html

Even his review of Skinner's verbal behaviour ranks 19th on this particular list. So I'm not sure what you mean his work is "given little-to-no weight in academia"?

 

[apeiron]

Using self-reports and introspection to determine what the person is perceiving inside their mind, is surely a study of the mind?

This is not a study of how mind - conscious experience - arises. A description of the apparent contents is not the same thing as a description of the production of the contents. Which again, to remind, is what the OP is about.

So the cognitive paradigm is based on the belief that an "internal processing architecture" can account for the mind as a material phenomenon.

It would seem that a behaviourist description of the mind would apply even if minds were immaterial souls. If I say I see red or have a toothache because my verbal behaviour is being reinforced by a social community in the presence of an inner qualia, then that qualia could equally well be the product of a complexity of neural activity, or some immaterial soul-field.

That is why Behaviourism seems detached from the questions that cognitive science returned to.

Of course, behaviourism with a small "b", would correctly point out that architecture-based approaches to mind need to be ecologically valid, embodied, evolutionary-rooted, etc. And with computationalism and functionalism, cogsci strayed away into abstract, disembodied and otherwise unrealistic thinking.

Thinking about it this way, I can see a big part of my objections to Skinnerian Behaviourism is that its idea of behavioural context was so shallow. This was why in the 1970s I went off looking for the way that the brain adapts to its contexts over multiple temporal scales, from the evolutionary through the developmental and habitual right up to the anticipatory.

The cognitive scientists tend to lag behind because they took a while to reject Fodor's mistaken computational theory of mind.

Yes I agree that Fodor was a wrong turn and modularity did appear to dominate the conversation. But it is interesting how many on Bohm2's millenium list were hierarchical and distributed architecture thinkers. This list makes cogsci look much more balanced and reasonable than I remember.

Again, this seems to be social dynamics at play. Fields become remembered for their extremes. They become generalised in the academic memory so that what was asserted as "right" can be then definitely rejected as wrong, so allowing paradigms to shift, "progress" to be made.

And I don't think cogsci ever really recovered and took the right turn. A belief in strong modularity has persisted into evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

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?

The reasonable view is that it is always somehow both. But reductionist logic does not allow that answer. The law of the excluded middle must apply. One proposition must be true, the other false.

Which is why I focus on more complex models of causality - hierarchical or systems causality - where dichotomies are not a bug but a feature. They are the process by which hierarchies naturally arise.

Again, this was explicit in Luria's classic, The Working Brain. His first law of brain organisation was that it is a functional hierarchy. His second and third laws were then about the fundamental dichotomies in this organisation - plasticity~stability and fringe~focus.

I study mental processes and cognition. Where do I fit in your picture here?

Great, then you should have no problem offering specific examples of Behaviourism in practice.

Is it a reasonable question to ask how operant constructs like mands and tacts have fruitfully led to new neurolinguistic insights? How have they guided us in investigating functional brain architecture, in making sense of the brain's complexity.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

I'm not qualified enough to comment in detail on that review/criticism, but at least with respect to cognitive science (where I do arguably, have some qualifications) his works (e.g. Syntantic Structures, etc.) are arguably among the most important (if not the most important overall) papers influencing cognitive science in the 20th century:

The one hundred most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th century
http://www.cogsci.umn.edu/OLD/calendar/past_events/millennium/final.html

Even his review of Skinner's verbal behaviour ranks 19th on this particular list. So I'm not sure what you mean his work is "given little-to-no weight in academia"?

I said that his review is given little-to-no weight in academia, not his work in general. And yes, it was an influential piece of work but that wasn't quite what I was getting at - I was more highlighting the fact that the ideas contained within it have mostly been rejected and discredited (obviously with Skinner's ideas coming out trumps in a lot of areas).

So the review was definitely influential, in that it's viewed as being one of the works that sparked the "cognitive revolution", and it also resulted in a massive amount of research in areas of language - like the language acquisition device, etc. Most of his ideas in the review were found to be poorly thought out and ruled out pretty quickly, or they were wrong and unproductive, and ruled out after research came back negative.

This is not a study of how mind - conscious experience - arises. A description of the apparent contents is not the same thing as a description of the production of the contents. Which again, to remind, is what the OP is about.

So the cognitive paradigm is based on the belief that an "internal processing architecture" can account for the mind as a material phenomenon.

Except the behaviorist account also discusses the internal processing architecture, just using different terminology. That's what is confusing me here. 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.

And this is ignoring the fact that cognitive psychologists use behaviorism as their philosophy of science.

It would seem that a behaviourist description of the mind would apply even if minds were immaterial souls. If I say I see red or have a toothache because my verbal behaviour is being reinforced by a social community in the presence of an inner qualia, then that qualia could equally well be the product of a complexity of neural activity, or some immaterial soul-field.

That is why Behaviourism seems detached from the questions that cognitive science returned to.

I'm not sure behaviorism could apply to immaterial minds because it studies the inner workings of the mind, and if the entity is immaterial, then it wouldn't be able to study it. Remember, behaviorism isn't a black box approach - it studies what goes on inside the mind in the exact same way cognitive scientists do.

If it helps, keep in mind that there is no practical reason for having separate labels for cognitive science and behavioral psychology. They are the same field (hence why behavioral psychologists and cognitive scientists hop between the fields with ease, no particularly new training, or changing their methods or subject matter). The only reason there are separate labels is for political and historical reasons.

Of course, behaviourism with a small "b", would correctly point out that architecture-based approaches to mind need to be ecologically valid, embodied, evolutionary-rooted, etc. And with computationalism and functionalism, cogsci strayed away into abstract, disembodied and otherwise unrealistic thinking.

Thinking about it this way, I can see a big part of my objections to Skinnerian Behaviourism is that its idea of behavioural context was so shallow. This was why in the 1970s I went off looking for the way that the brain adapts to its contexts over multiple temporal scales, from the evolutionary through the developmental and habitual right up to the anticipatory.

Shallow in what sense? Since behaviorism includes neuroscience, how does investigating the brain constitute escaping behaviorism?

And I don't think cogsci ever really recovered and took the right turn. A belief in strong modularity has persisted into evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

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?

The reasonable view is that it is always somehow both. But reductionist logic does not allow that answer. The law of the excluded middle must apply. One proposition must be true, the other false.

But didn't you accuse behaviorism of being reductionistic? How can it be both reasonable (in that it balances nature and nurture, hardwired and learnt, etc), but also reductionistic (which you claim doesn't allow that)?

Great, then you should have no problem offering specific examples of Behaviourism in practice.

What particular area are you interested in?

Is it a reasonable question to ask how operant constructs like mands and tacts have fruitfully led to new neurolinguistic insights? How have they guided us in investigating functional brain architecture, in making sense of the brain's complexity.

Well Verbal Behavior led directly to Relational Frame Theory. This article discusses some of its findings in relation to neuroscientific findings. And obviously, the fact that Skinner's approach resulted in us understanding how language is learned and made it possible for us to develop language therapies - surely a fairly impressive neurolinguistic insight.

 

[bohm2]

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

 

[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.

 

[Q_Goest]

The Bishop article is worth reading: http://rsfs.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/09/02/rsfs.2011.0065.full

Did you notice that the author, Robert Bishop, was a professor at Wheaton? I would be suspicious that his intent in writing about "downward causation" is to support his christian beliefs.

 

[apeiron]

Did you notice that the author, Robert Bishop, was a professor at Wheaton? I would be suspicious that his intent in writing about "downward causation" is to support his christian beliefs.

Yes, I certainly noticed that. But thank you for the ad hominen anyway. If you can show that Bishop has a motivation that distorts his account of the science (which is frequently an issue with intelligent design, etc) then please highlight it for us.

Systems science - like quantum mechanics - does attract fellow travellers. If you are religious or in other ways dualist/mysterian, you are naturally drawn to the kinds of science that seem to be asking the same questions, offering possibly similar answers.

It is just the same with Darwinian evolution, Newtonian determinism, or other arch-reductionist theories. They attract their fellow travellers too. Neo-liberal economists, eugenists, etc.

Science is always getting co-opted to support prejudices about the way the world should work.

So here you yourself seem to be making the argument, if an approach to science can be used to give credence to a belief system I don't like, then I don't want to believe that science either.

I don't see that as valid. I would rather you made an attempt to understand the science and address it directly.

Bishop is one of a dozen papers in a Royal Society special issue on interdisciplinary approaches. Do you really think if Bishop was a religious crank posing as a scientist they would publish him?

So your "suspicions" don't even seem to be very far thought through. My suspicion is you saw "religious college" and thought oh goody, I don't even have to have an argument against an argument I don't want to believe. Instead, I can offer a prejudice to counter a prejudice.

But of course, you may have actually read the paper and so have some critique of it as science...

 

[bohm2]

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.

Weren't psychotropics available back then that could somewhat alter a psychic process? Not that they were very good. And how successful are behavioural therapies in comparison to person-centred therapies/psychotropic drugs/other methods? I mean, is the scientic studies for efficacy much more so than other less behaviorally-guided methods?

 

[Mr.Samsa]

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

I've read extensively on the history of behaviorism, including Skinner's work, and yes it certainly is consistent with his work. The section of "Why Organisms Behave" chapter, where Skinner discusses how inner variables like the subject being "afraid" of an experimental condition, or purposely wants to disprove the experimenter, is quite good for demonstrating how Skinner thinks that "[o]ther variables may, of course, affect the result". This is expanded on in the chapter "The Individual as a Whole", where he discusses thinking and private events.

I think it's important to distinguish between what he refers to as explanatory fictions, and inner states. Skinner slammed explanatory fictions, where the explanation that appeals to some unobservable inner state is inferred directly from the behavior making it redundant, and people often confuse this with the idea that Skinner rejects inner states - probably compounded by the fact that this was the position of the methodological behaviorists. His discussion on inner states largely revolves around how useful they are in scientific explanations, and when it is feasible or possible to include then into scientific explanations.

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.

Not quite - behavioral science is focused on the explanation, control and prediction of behavior, where "behavior" includes cognition.

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.

Read the behaviorist research of the time and look at the cognitive research. For example, look at Tolman's concept of "cognitive maps" - how does that differ from the cognitive concept of mental maps and schemata? It doesn't at all, because the cognitive research in that area stemmed directly from Tolman's work.

Look at the methodology that cognitivists use when studying cognition - do they assume that thoughts have causes and effects? Do they treat self-reported data as distinct from the phenomenon under study? Do they base their hypothetical constructs on empirical and observable evidence? Yes, yes, and yes. These are all major contributions to psychology that behaviorism brought along.

Just look at that list of most influential works in cognitive psychology that was presented earlier, where there were about 5-10 behaviorists on that list. Why would a "revolution" be significantly shaped and influenced by the paradigm it's attempting to overthrow?

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

That's certainly too far. An argument can be made that cognitive psychology and behavioral psychology are distinct fields, but no argument can be made that they are different paradigms. One of the defining features of opposing paradigms is that they are incommensurable, but that clearly isn't true in this case. Look at the major fields of cognitive psychology; thinking, memory, psychophysics, etc, and where did some of the major breakthroughs come from? Behaviorists.

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.

The two are the same thing. General architectural and systematic principles are based on what we can be certain about when investigating the mind in terms of observables. Keep in mind that the "observable correlates" that behaviorism discusses does not mean that the mind has to be observable. It means that our logical inferences and hypothetical constructs must be grounded in reality to some degree. Otherwise we are simply speculating and guessing.

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.

Well he went further than that. He said that intervening mental processes can be studied and control, and then laid out the methodology for experimenters to do so. He, for the most part, wasn't personally interested in studying mental processes, but other behaviorists obviously took up his methodology and did so.

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.

But that's what cognitive psychology does as well, it adopted that policy directly from Skinner. Cognitive psychology does not talk about intervening variables that can't be backed by theory or data. Such work is rejected from science and is appropriately labelled "pseudoscience".

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?

Massive amounts of information is passed between the two - as I've mentioned, cognitive psychologists and behavioral psychologists routinely work together and publish in the same journals. Look at the work on memory and the behaviorists' discovery of memory decay and interference, look at signal detection and the behaviorists' inclusion of the discriminability parameter, etc.

Go to any university with a cognitive and behavioral psych department, and have a look around. As well as using the exact same equipment to studying the same things, you'll also find that the two groups of researchers will often pop into each others labs, either working directly together, or at least discussing things with each other.

The idea that cognitive psychologists study something different from behavioral psychologists, or in a different way using different methods, is just so foreign to me.

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.

You seriously don't know where behaviorism is in the fields of evolutionary and cognitive psych, neuroscience, comparative cognition, development, social fields, etc?

Evolutionary psychologists use behaviorist techniques all the time because to determine whether a behavior has an innate element or not, they need to rule out learning as a possible cause. For example, the New Caledonian crow example I gave before, which is one of the shining jewels of the evolutionary psychology world. Cognitive psych, I've already pointed out various areas where it's important (including the entire field itself) but for a concrete example look at psychophysics which is entirely behavioristic. Neuroscience, we've been discussing already the breakthroughs that learning theory has provided both directly (breakthroughs in the discovery of neural processes like in-vitro reinforcement) and indirectly (the use of behaviorist techniques to test theories, e.g. conditioned fear paradigms). Comparative cognition - you're just taking the piss now. This area is dominated by behaviorists. And development and social areas, there's "social learning theory" which has had a significant impact in the area, not to mention the fact that behaviorist methods are used to test various theories (e.g. testing whether babies look at faces due to an innate feature, or through reinforcement contingencies).

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.

Behavioral psychology persists, and flourishes, as an interdisciplinary field of experimental and applied science. The majority of work done in behavioral psychology is experimental studying how organisms behave and think, and the applied work is a happy side-effect of this research.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

Weren't psychotropics available back then that could somewhat alter a psychic process? Not that they were very good.

Most of Skinner's work regarding the building of the foundation for behaviorism was done between the 30s and 70s (and realistically, after the 40s-50s, the field was not under his personal control as other researchers had begun to shape it in various ways) - for example, the book you linked to above was published in 1953. So during his time, psychotropics were crude at best. Yes, they could change neural processes but not with the precision that's needed to base a science of thought and behavior on. As the field progressed though, and things like fMRIs etc were invented, Skinner began discussing the importance of looking at changing neural processes (leading to works like Edelman's neural darwinism).

And how successful are behavioural therapies in comparison to person-centred therapies/psychotropic drugs/other methods? I mean, is the scientic studies for efficacy much more so than other less behaviorally-guided methods?

It changes depending on what you're specifically looking at, and it's not like a behavioral therapy will be best for all conditions all the time (as behavioral therapies can only help with conditions that can be modified by learning). With that said, behavioral therapies have proven to be hugely successful in a number of areas, like Cognitive-behavioral therapy which is one of the leading treatments for depression and anxiety (often in conjunction with medication). For phobias, there is systematic desensitisation which (as far as I know) is unparalleled. And it has various behavioral techniques for other problems, like eating disorders, self-injurous behaviors, and is currently the only treatment for autism (and arguably, it can be a "cure" in the sense that behavioral therapy can often help a child reach the point where they no longer meet the requirements for a diagnosis of autism). And, of course, one of the advantages of behavioral techniques is that they aren't limited to people with learning or mental disorders, and has been successfully applied to school settings to improve a variety of things, like the children's enjoyment of school and general happiness, their on-task behavior, their academic scores and later success in life, etc.

 

[apeiron]

Weren't psychotropics available back then that could somewhat alter a psychic process? Not that they were very good. And how successful are behavioural therapies in comparison to person-centred therapies/psychotropic drugs/other methods? I mean, is the scientic studies for efficacy much more so than other less behaviorally-guided methods?

Making a broad generalisation, most chemical or medical approaches to controlling/repairing the mind are quite unbelieveable a-theoretic. Drugs, lobotomies, electric shock - you are talking about "science" that is often about the level of kicking a TV set to make it work. With the difference that the brain is a self-organising system and so sometimes a scrambling blast of ECT does indeed cause some kind of homeostatic reset.

Cognitive talking therapies and densitisation therapies at least put theory and practice in reaching distance of each other.

You know how it still is for drugs. For people with mild problems, how much of any efficacy is placebo or nature doing the healing? For those with serious problems, either the treatment is still the metaphoric kick to the TV set or a way to make the symptoms go away to the extent that society is not bothered by them.

The record of other methods in Skinner's day - either medical or psychoanalytic - was in fact so bad, so lacking in a credible theoretic basis, that this would be one of the reasons to see Behaviourism as a great leap forward for science.

So no, the efficacy of the theory as applied science is in fact a prime justification of Behaviourism. And it didn't go round claiming to be able to cure organic problems like schizophrenia. Another proof that it knew more about what it was doing.

Well, there was the "refrigerator mother" hypothesis of childhood autism/schizophrenia - a contextual explanation for behaviour. But this came out of Freudian psychiatry rather than Behaviourism. And was utter nonsense of course.

Behaviourism could probably be blamed for aversion therapy - as still apparently used to cure people of homosexuality. But again, that is mostly psychiatrists mis-applying psychological theory to organic traits.

So on the whole, the record for Behaviourism seems very good on this score. And yeah, don't get me going on psychiatry and its history of voodoo thinking. Or big pharma's record on responsible medical research. The doctoring establishment still has a lot to live down.

 

[apeiron]

Read the behaviorist research of the time and look at the cognitive research. For example, look at Tolman's concept of "cognitive maps" - how does that differ from the cognitive concept of mental maps and schemata? It doesn't at all, because the cognitive research in that area stemmed directly from Tolman's work.

We keep coming back to your intent to claim all psychological schools are examples of behaviourism, making the term so elastic it is no longer useful in tracing the history of ideas.

Tolman is seen as a proto-cognitivist...

Tolman's purposive behaviorism was not as widely received in its day as other psychological theories. This was largely due to the fact that many did not consider its foundation to being in line with behaviorism at all, which was the dominating force in psychology at the time. However, the insistence on studying implicit mental concepts as opposed to looking solely at explicit behavior was an idea that opened the door to the school of cognitive psychology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purposive_behaviorism

And there were many more sub-schools like dynamic psychology...

Woodworth introduced and popularized the expression Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) to describe his functionalist approach to psychology and to stress its difference from the strictly Stimulus-Response (S-R) approach of the behaviorists in his 1929 second edition of Psychology[5]. He later published the theory in Dynamic psychology (1918) and Dynamics of Behavior (1958). Within his modified S-O-R formula, Woodworth noted that the stimulus elicits a different effect or response depending on the state of the organism. The “O” (for organism) mediates the relationship between the stimulus and the response.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Woodworth

Yes, I am interested in the similarities and the differences that mark the history. And there were many "proto-cognitivists" who were reacting to the patent oversimplification of the Watson and Thorndike style S-R approach. Skinner reacted by reaffirming he was not modelling the "O", whereas other contemporaries wanted to - and that led them to the kinds of experiments that showed there was something there worth studying in its own right.

You may want to sweep every one into the one bag so as to make the transition from behaviourism to cognitive science appear seamless and non-revolutionary. But maybe because in the 1970s I felt that there was recruitment campaign going on - "join us, we are the true science", "no join us, the others are all old fools" - I see the history through different eyes.

 

[bohm2]

With that said, behavioral therapies have proven to be hugely successful in a number of areas, like Cognitive-behavioral therapy which is one of the leading treatments for depression and anxiety (often in conjunction with medication). For phobias, there is systematic desensitisation which (as far as I know) is unparalleled. And it has various behavioral techniques for other problems, like eating disorders, self-injurous behaviors, and is currently the only treatment for autism (and arguably, it can be a "cure" in the sense that behavioral therapy can often help a child reach the point where they no longer meet the requirements for a diagnosis of autism). And, of course, one of the advantages of behavioral techniques is that they aren't limited to people with learning or mental disorders, and has been successfully applied to school settings to improve a variety of things, like the children's enjoyment of school and general happiness, their on-task behavior, their academic scores and later success in life, etc.

I had CBT on two different occassions. The last institutionally-based one was about ~1 year ago, although you're supposed to practise till forever. I have both anxiety (GAD and performance anxiety) and sensory issues (possibly due to mild form of ASD?) and I've also used many different medications. It's really hard to make a call on which was better for me. They all helped a bit but not enough. I also did an internship (both in medicine and pharmacy) at a large psychiatric hospital and was apparently using CBT, first as an intern and then as a patient). The funny thing is that I didn't even know at the time. I agree about systemic desenitization. I found gradual exposure therapy to be the most useful non-drug approach. But without medication, I'm sure I'd be screwed. I'm still doing that gradual exposure stuff now, I guess.

I'm still confused though. I think Chomsky's nativist/rationalist stance is pretty clear as I pointed out in a previous post where environmental cues/influence are considered to play a very minor role (equivalent to the development of other organs) whereas I'm guessing behaviourists, Piaget (empirical constructivists) and semioticians put a much greater empasis on environmental influence. So what is it that differentiates these 3 different perspectives? Is there a major difference with respect to the importance of environmental/social/cultural influence on behaviour/cognitive development/language/thought between these 3 perspectives or is it just "window dressing"?

 

[apeiron]

Evolutionary psychologists use behaviorist techniques all the time because to determine whether a behavior has an innate element or not, they need to rule out learning as a possible cause. For example, the New Caledonian crow example I gave before, which is one of the shining jewels of the evolutionary psychology world. Cognitive psych, I've already pointed out various areas where it's important (including the entire field itself) but for a concrete example look at psychophysics which is entirely behavioristic. Neuroscience, we've been discussing already the breakthroughs that learning theory has provided both directly (breakthroughs in the discovery of neural processes like in-vitro reinforcement) and indirectly (the use of behaviorist techniques to test theories, e.g. conditioned fear paradigms). Comparative cognition - you're just taking the piss now. This area is dominated by behaviorists. And development and social areas, there's "social learning theory" which has had a significant impact in the area, not to mention the fact that behaviorist methods are used to test various theories (e.g. testing whether babies look at faces due to an innate feature, or through reinforcement contingencies).

You are not getting it are you? You keep making reference to the experimental methods of behaviourism being part of the kit-bag of tools used by cognitive science to test its theories.

Good old behaviourial analysis can be used to rule out the simple stuff to leave you then with the hard bit that a more complicated cognitive architecture theory must explain.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

We keep coming back to your intent to claim all psychological schools are examples of behaviourism, making the term so elastic it is no longer useful in tracing the history of ideas.

Tolman is seen as a proto-cognitivist...

Yes he's seen as a proto-cognitivist now because he was a behaviorist studying what Skinner termed "private behaviors" - i.e. cognition. He was a behaviorist though, there was no difference between his research, methods, philosophy, beliefs, than that of any other behaviorist at the time.

The fact that one of the major behaviorists at the time is now termed a "proto-cognitivist" is evidence that the divide between behavioral and cognitive psych is not so wide.

And there were many more sub-schools like dynamic psychology...

Tolman's behaviorism was inconsistent with the behaviorism at the time (i.e. methodological behaviorism). We've been discussing throughout this thread, and I've presented numerous lines of evidence, that Skinner and the radical behaviorists did not accept just studying explicit observable behavior - so how can Tolman's philosophy be at odds with the behaviorists on the grounds that he did not agree with simply studying the explicit observable behavior?

Yes, I am interested in the similarities and the differences that mark the history. And there were many "proto-cognitivists" who were reacting to the patent oversimplification of the Watson and Thorndike style S-R approach. Skinner reacted by reaffirming he was not modelling the "O", whereas other contemporaries wanted to - and that led them to the kinds of experiments that showed there was something there worth studying in its own right.

Not quite true. Skinner's model was dependent entirely on the organism. What he was modelling was the organism. However, rather than having the organism as a discrete entity in a causal chain, he thought that the divide between the organism and environment was more vague, and that at times the organism itself was an environmental variable. This is why he held, more or less, to a Stimulus-Response-Stimulus approach - where an initial cue generates a response which produces a contingent consequence. The whole equation is the "organism", as it describes the feedback process that occurs within an organism as it interacts with its environment.

You may want to sweep every one into the one bag so as to make the transition from behaviourism to cognitive science appear seamless and non-revolutionary. But maybe because in the 1970s I felt that there was recruitment campaign going on - "join us, we are the true science", "no join us, the others are all old fools" - I see the history through different eyes.

In the 70s? The "cognitive revolution" was well over by then, according to all accounts. It began in the late 40s with the symposium where Chomsky gave a talk on syntactic structures, and was fully complete by the time Neisser formulated the computational theory of mind. If students at the time were battling amongst themselves, it doesn't seem to have affected the opinions of psychologists at the time - nobody described it as a revolution, and nobody was aware of any particular uprising or overthrowing. It wasn't until the 80s when Baars described it as a "revolution" that subsequent students began to call it such. By that time, most were under the impression that behaviorism was a blank slate theory of behavior that ignored thoughts and feelings - so of course such a ridiculous paradigm needed to be replaced! Even Baars, writing just a few decades after the action supposedly took place, had little understanding of what behaviorism was and is. And now we have writers like Pinker continuing the misunderstanding and misrepresentation.

I had CBT on two different occassions. The last institutionally-based one was about ~1 year ago, although you're supposed to practise till forever. I have both anxiety (GAD and performance anxiety) and sensory issues (possibly due to mild form of ASD?) and I've also used many different medications. It's really hard to make a call on which was better for me. They all helped a bit but not enough. I also did an internship (both in medicine and pharmacy) at a large psychiatric hospital and was apparently using CBT, first as an intern and then as a patient). The funny thing is that I didn't even know at the time. I agree about systemic desenitization. I found gradual exposure therapy to be the most useful non-drug approach. But without medication, I'm sure I'd be screwed. I'm still doing that gradual exposure stuff now, I guess.

Yeah it's not always a case of "one or the other", as sometimes problems are caused by a biological issue that can only be solved by medication or even surgery, and behavioral approaches can only help to a degree. For example, suppose someone has an extreme problem with aggression - teaching some meditation or relaxation methods isn't going to help if they have a problem with their pituitary gland pumping out adrenaline.

I'm still confused though. I think Chomsky's nativist/rationalist stance is pretty clear as I pointed out in a previous post where environmental cues/influence are considered to play a very minor role (equivalent to the development of other organs) whereas I'm guessing behaviourists, Piaget (empirical constructivists) and semioticians put a much greater empasis on environmental influence. So what is it that differentiates these 3 different perspectives? Is there a major difference with respect to the importance of environmental/social/cultural influence on behaviour/cognitive development/language/thought between these 3 perspectives or is it just "window dressing"?

Mostly the difference is just in degree. Chomsky largely argues for innateness, he believes that there are specific modules in the brain that control things like language generation. Skinner argued that there is a significant amount of learning that occurs during language acquisition, and he outlined exactly how this process occurs when we learn words and grammar, etc. But he still argued that there were important brain structures that were necessary for learning language, he was just less certain of the idea that there were structures for highly specific aspects of language. Piaget's ideas I'm less sure on, to be honest. As far as I know, he wasn't particularly interested in the details of language acquisition, and instead he came up with the stages of development in a child - and he argued that children need to reach these particular stages before certain levels of language development can be reached.

For Chomsky and Skinner, the general difference can be explained in the sense of domain-specific and domain-general brain processes. Both believed that the brain played a vital role, but Skinner argued that a lot of the linguistic elements that Chomsky argued had to be innate because they were too complex to be learnt, were in fact learnt.

You are not getting it are you? You keep making reference to the experimental methods of behaviourism being part of the kit-bag of tools used by cognitive science to test its theories.

Good old behaviourial analysis can be used to rule out the simple stuff to leave you then with the hard bit that a more complicated cognitive architecture theory must explain.

"Simple stuff"?

But I think you missed where I pointed out that a number of evolutionary psychologists are behaviorists, not only studying the "simple stuff", but developing theories to explain the complex world of behavior and thought. For example, the work on empathy and altruism in the area (and in comparative cognition) is predominantly done by behaviorists. Surely those areas are relatively complex?

And as for the section on neuroscience, that was an example of an indirect influence of behaviorism in that area. If you don't like it, then you can just ignore it and focus on the more direct influences and works.

By the way, what area are you in? I assume you're not a psychologist as your perspective on the issue seems to be more from a pop-science perspective which, whilst detailed, seems to fall into the traps of looking in from the outside.