I think Paul's interpretation of Skinner is right. I think Skinner knew
as well as any of his critics that such a claim was not presently
amenable to empirical test -- if it ever could be. I do not know
Skinner's work exhaustively, so I could be shown wrong. But what I have
read of him leaves me with the sense that the thought he had developed a
complete explanation for behavior that did not require mental events.
He acknowledged that it might even be impossible _in practice_ to
explain some behaviors, but that _in principle_ it could be done.
I think Skinner went at it two ways.
One was an argument from parsimony. If you can explain the behavior
with genetics, situation and history, then you have no need to resort to
mentalisms to explain the behavior, and thus probably should not. In
fact, Skinner (as I read him) proposed that mental objects were things
that themselves needed explanations, so using them as explanans was very
wrong.
The second was an inductive argument rather than a directly empirical
one. He showed that many behaviors could thus be explained, and with
the exception of language (to my thinking, not his), there are no
qualitative differences between keypecks and complex human behavior;
ergo, complex human behavior could be explained in the same way.
But! I could be wrong. That's just how I read him.
m
-------
"Mauchly's Test of Sphericity:
Tests the null hypothesis that the error covariance matrix of the
orthonormalized transformed dependent variables is proportional
to an identity matrix."
---
SPSS
________________________________
From: Paul Brandon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 12:15 PM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Subject: [tips] Re: Fwd: Great books of science (top 25 anyway)
At 12:52 PM -0500 12/11/06, David Epstein wrote:
If Skinner had said only that, I'd have nothing to
criticize.
"Contingencies work" has been my bread and butter (I
help to run
clinical trials that use contingency management for drug
abuse).
But he said far more: as you pointed out, he criticized
"inner
agents." He said, flat out, that thoughts and feelings
are not causes
of behavior. That assertion can't be logically derived
from any
amount of data that say "contingencies work." It
appears to derive
from no source at all. Yet Skinner strongly implied
that he had data
to back it up.
I don't know how to make it any plainer!
I believe that his point was that it was not necessary to invoke
inner agents in order to understand and predict behavior.
His point in regard to data was that it supported his statement
that he could adequately account for (control and predict) behavior
simply through knowledge of contingencies past and present, within the
bounds set by genetics.
--
The best argument against Intelligent Design is that fact that
people believe in it.
* PAUL K. BRANDON [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* Psychology Dept Minnesota State University *
* 23 Armstrong Hall, Mankato, MN 56001 ph 507-389-6217 *
* http://krypton.mnsu.edu/~pkbrando/
*
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