On Wed, 23 May 2012 13:16:29 -0700, Michael Britt wrote: >My graduate advisor once said to me - and he was in his 70s at the time - that >"when you're young you're a democrat and when you're older you're a >republican". I think the expression is also known as, "A democrat is just a >republican who hasn't been mugged yet."
Actually, this is what Republicans/conservatives said back in the 1970s to justify their political beliefs. Nixon leaving the White House in the helicopter is still one my happiest memories. >Well, this change in political party hasn't happened to me yet, but I was >wondering if I'm becoming more behavioristic as I grow older. I remember when >I was an impressionistic lad I was all over Maslow/Rogers theory. Now I've >grown somewhat pessimistic about the efficacy of all that talk therapy and I >wonder if changing our circumstances is, in the end, more important in our >lives than all that talk. I think that you might have to be a clearer about what you mean by a "behaviorist" because there are different varieties. I was influenced by B. F. Skinner's "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" when It was published, just before I started college, and it made me want to become more knowledgeable about psychology and behaviorism. As I learned more about behaviorism during my undergraduate years, I started to develop a dissatisfaction with Skinner's theoretical (or lack or theory) approach and became more interested in information processing theories. I became interested in information processing because my experimental psych lab teacher was doing signal detection analysis of visual psychophysics in pigeons. Of course, the book to read back in the 1960s and early 1970s was Miller, Galanter, and Pribram's "Plans and the Structure of Behavior" which traced back to information theory, computer simulation of cognition, and Tolman's "purposive" behaviorism which was sketchy on cognitive processes but provided a basis for allowing them if one could show how the processes connected the original stimulus condition to the subsequent responses. In this sense, all cognitive psychology became behavioristic except for those maintaining cognitive theories that didn't connect mental operations to the world (as in some classical cognitive psychological theories that assumed human intellect arose from the soul). Of course, with neural network modeling, the behaviorist/cognitive distinction becomes meaningless outside identifying a group of thematically related models (e.g., models of conditioning versus models of symbol processing). Calling oneself a "behaviorist" is more of a label signifying membership in a group that holds certain beliefs in contrast to a class of scientific theories since, I believe, all associative learning falling under the behaviorist label can be simulated by a connectionist model, hence, it is just one instance of computational models that form a superset of theories in psychology. I have a feeling that maybe I should have left out the paragraph above. ;-) -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] . --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=17992 or send a blank email to leave-17992-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
