ERIC P. CHARLES wrote circa 10-05-05 02:43 PM: > Ooooh, that is a much more specific question than it initially seemed!
Yes, exactly! Imagine my surprise when ethics entered the discussion. [grin] > I suppose there is a practical answer and a philosophical answer. The > philosophical answer would set out some criterion that would be correct in > some > global sense. I fear that would get us back to ethical stuff, and keep things > muddled. I think there's an answer in between... the methodological answer, which you begin to treat with your 9 (18) methods below. > Punishment (aka 'positive punishment') > Penalty (aka 'negative punishment') > Punishment by prevention (of access to other contingencies) > Differential punishment of high rates > Extinction > Differential reinforcement of low rates > Differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior > Differential reinforcement of alternative behavior > The establishing operation > > We could write an almost parallel list for methods of increasing the rates of > desirable behaviors. Such techniques are routinely used with people even with > sever Alzheimer to positive effects. Of course, whether you think increasing > the rate of coherent sentences from 30% to 60% is a miracle or just an okay > job > depends on your perspective. Probably the rate of your grandmother's offensive > behaviors could have been cut in half with a pretty simple plan. > Unfortunately, > the difficulties in getting every single person who goes into her room to > follow the 'pretty simple plan' can be quite difficult. For example, if we try > extinction, we might need to let her spit on us without reacting, and good > luck > getting the night shift worker to follow that plan at 3 in the morning. These are the issues I was hoping to get out of the "behaviorist" response to the JRC defense. In that defense, they tout that some of their skin shock and restraint methods have worked to good effect; but they don't really talk about the numbers other than citing Carr, where _only_ 38% of the 60 no longer required skin shocks ... and anecdotal stories like those of the former JRC "students" are nice; but we need a larger sample and a method for determining successful treatments over that larger sample. In other words, I (currently) don't care whether you increase the rate of coherent sentences in my dad _alone_, regardless of whether it's 30-60% or 1-100%. What I care about is whether you increase the rate of coherent sentences in a statistically significant portion of the population of patients by X-Y%. What percentage of patients, treated with the same method (to be scientific, we must be isometric and isotemporal), in a large population, respond to the 9 (or 18) methods you list above? If you reach 50/100, do you consider that a successful behaviorist method? Or do you need more or less? My point is (somewhat obviously, I think) that it seems behaviorism is dancing around some fuzzy line between the particular and the general that many other -isms won't dance around. Hysterical (those involving hysteresis - historical dependence) systems require a certain particularness, case-study oriented, approach. And hysterical methods are often characterized as unscientific because they are so case-study driven. My questions are targeting the degree to which behaviorism is hysterical. And, finally, it's perfectly reasonable to say that the JRC is a poor example of competent behaviorism. I'm just using them because they were in the headlines. It gave me a practical reason to become interested in this otherwise filosofickle topic. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
