I can't trace the interchange between Hebb and Skinner back further, but
it's plausible that (as I've been told) Hebb's title, "The Organization of
Behavior" (1949) is a play on Skinner's "The Behavior of Organisms"
(1938). The Brelands' "The Misbehavior of Organisms" (1961) also comes to
mind.
> Date: Fri, 12 Nov
1999 09:45:07 -0600 > From: Paul Brandon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: Hebb and the CNS (conceptual nervous system)
> Message-ID: <l03130301b451e6198f84@[134.29.11.43]>
>
> I'm ashamed to admit it; I shoulda know! ;-)
> BFS uses the term in The Behavior of Organisms (1938, p421) and certainly
> sounds like he's coining it.
>
> At 3:13 PM -0500 11/11/99, John Serafin wrote:
> >on 11/11/99 12:00 PM, Stephen Black at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Paul Brandon wrote:
> >>> Was Hebb the one who coined the term "Conceptual Nervous System (CNS)"?
> >>> It's not indexed in his "Essay on Mind"; unfortunately I no longer have t$
> >>> copy of his textbook that I used when I first took psychology in 1960.
> >>
> >> Yes. It's right there in the title of one his most famous essays:
> >>
> >> Hebb, D.O. (1955). Drives and the C.N.S. (Conceptual nervous
> >> system). Psychological Review, 62, 243-254.
> >
> >But the phrase appears earlier than that 1955 paper, so either Hebb coined
> >it earlier, or someone else coined it earlier. I had actually thought that
> >Skinner had first used the term in his 1950 paper, "Are theories of learning
> >necessary?" Skinner certainly used the phrase in that earlier paper.
--
Jonathan Vaughan Psychology, Hamilton College [EMAIL PROTECTED]
