On Sun, 10 Dec 2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] went:
I can't speak to Harris' work, but what kind of data would David Epstein like Skinner to have included in BF&D, short of reviewing several hundred pages of papers published elsewhere?
I can't think of any data that would falsify (or support) what Skinner wrote about the irrelevance of thoughts and feelings to behavior. And that's all right, I guess. What's not all right is how Skinner sets it up in chapter 1. Take a good, hard look, especially at the final sentence: "In what follows, these issues are discussed 'from a scientific point of view,' but this does not mean that the reader will need to know the details of a scientific analysis of behavior. A mere interpretation will suffice. [...] The instances of behavior cited in what follows are not offered as 'proof' of the interpretation. The proof is to be found in the basic analysis." That passage probably comes across like this to a reasonable lay reader: "Every assertion I make in the following pages is supported by a basic analysis of experimental data; I'm just not citing it. You can find it elsewhere." But that's not true, as every commentator here on TIPS seems to have acknowledged. In implying that it's true, Skinner was being--at best--sloppy. He could have been far clearer about what was backed by evidence and what wasn't. He chose to be utterly opaque about it. That's a funny thing to do when you're making far-reaching social prescriptions in the name of psychological science.
He published what he published and here we are 30+ years later discussing it. Will we be able to say the same for Harris' work?
Now, that's a question we can settle empirically! My guess is yes. Meet me here in 30 years and we'll know. On Sun, 10 Dec 2006, Paul Brandon went:
Chomsky's rebuttal seems to put some pretty big dents in it, too: <http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19711230.htm>
Haven't waded through this one (I'm skeptical about people who publish commentaries supposedly about science in the New York Review of Books ;-) but I doubt that Chomsky read BF&D any more carefully than he did Verbal Behavior (his 'rebuttal' to that was better rhetoric than science since it is filled with errors and misstatements of Skinner's positions).
I read the Chomsky rebuttal immediately after having finished _Beyond Freedom and Dignity_ and I didn't catch anything that seemed like a misrepresentation of what I'd just read in Skinner. It was a very negative assessment--much more negative than mine had been--but if it was factually unsound, I didn't know enough to see where. I'm open to being set straight on that (I mean that honestly, not as some kind of rhetorical flourish). --David Epstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
