Dear Mike,
This is a very interesting and full response. I will digest it more carefully
before deciding whether or not I agree and whether to respond.
Thanks for taking the time to expand upon your statement.
Sincerely,
Stuart
_____________________________________________________
Sent via Web Access
"Floreat Labore"
"Recti cultus pectora roborant"
Stuart J. McKelvie, Ph.D., Phone: 819 822 9600 x 2402
Department of Psychology, Fax: 819 822 9661
Bishop's University,
2600 rue College,
Sherbrooke,
Québec J1M 1Z7,
Canada.
E-mail: [email protected] (or [email protected])
Bishop's University Psychology Department Web Page:
http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy
" Floreat Labore"
_______________________________________________________
________________________________________
From: Mike Palij [[email protected]]
Sent: 28 June 2015 13:23
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Cc: Michael Palij
Subject: RE: [tips] Oh, the Places You'll Go!
On Sun, 28 Jun 2015 04:51:02 -0700, Stuart McKelvie wrote:
>Dear Mike,
>
>Why would you say B. F. Skinner must be spinning in his grave?
If my reading of Skinner is more or less correct, he would object
to the notion that there are "place" neurons (another example of
"rank" physiologizing). As William O'Donohue writes in his 2013
"Clinical Psychology and the Philosophy of Science":
| Skinner also noted that there was much "amateurish" discussion
|of meta-scientific issues that he soon found he should avoid. He
|also judged that was too much of what he came to call "premature
|physiologizing"-that the Zeitgeist of psychology of his time thought
|it was imperative in any discussion of perception and learning must
|be cased out in terms of the physiology of the nervous system. He
|reported that at Harvard, he found a mentor W. J. Crozier who was
|a student of Jacques Loeb who "resented the nervous system" and
|talked of behavior-behavior or environment-behavior relations without
|going inside the skin to explain behavior. His mission became to find
|order in "the organism as a whole" and found important clues from
|Pavlov's study of classical conditioning-namely, "control your
|conditions and you will see order" (Skinner 1955, p. 223). He began
|to tinkerer (he was a first rate tinkerer) to develop new experimental
|apparati that could be used to study environment-behavior relationships
|in the hopes of uncovering such order.
(pages 115-116)
Though O'Donohue relies upon Skinner 1955, he could have found
similar views in Skinner's 1990's American Psychologist article, based
on his presentation at the 98th APA meeting (Skinner died after
completing this article). Quoting:
|...Theories need confirmation, however, and for that many
|have turned to brain science, where processes may be said
|to be inspected rather than introspected. If the mind is "what
|the brain does," the brain can be studied as any other organ
|is studied. Eventually, then, brain science should tell us what
|it means to construct a representation of reality, store a
|representation in memory, convert an intention into action,
|feel joy or sorrow, draw a logical conclusion, and so on.
|
|But does the brain initiate behavior as the mind or self is
|said to do? The brain is part of the body, and what it does
|is part of what the body does. What the brain does is part
|of what must be explained. Where has the bodycum-brain
|come from, and why does it change in subtle ways from
|moment to moment? We cannot find answers to questions
|of that sort in the body-cum-brain itself, observed either
|introspectively or with the instruments and methods of physiology.
(page 1206)
And:
|The history of psychology is informative. It began,
|100 years ago, with an introspective search for mind.
|Watson attacked introspection in his behavioristic manifesto
|of 1913, and for that or other reasons introspection
|was essentially abandoned. Behaviorists turned to the
|study of behavior for its own sake, and nonbehavioristic
|psychologists turned to the behavior of teachers, students,
|therapists, clients, children growing older year by year,
|people in groups, and so on.
|
|Cognitive psychologists tried to restore the status
|quo. Behaviorism, they declared, was dead. They could
|not have meant that psychologists were no longer studying
|behavior, of animals in laboratories and of teachers, students,
|therapists, clients, and so on. What they hoped was
|dead was the appeal to selection by consequences in the
|explanation of behavior. The mind or, failing that, the
|brain must be restored to its rightful position.
(pages 1209-1210)
So, as Skinner said:
|...Physiology tells us how the body works; the sciences of
|variation and selection tell us why it is a body that works that way.
(page 1208)
Among the "sciences of variation and selection" which affect
behavior, for Skinner, are ethology, operant conditioning/behavior
analysis, and anthropology insofar it identifies the evolution of
social environments that prime and expand the ranges of
operant behavior.
In summary, the Skinnerian position is that physiological studies,
such as do "place" neuron fire while a rat sleeps (which is
interpreted as the rat dreaming of possible environments that
it may wander in), tell us little about why the rat behaves as it
does and perhaps distracts us from more important factors that
may affect behavior.
So: Place Neurons + Rats dreaming of roaming = Skinner spinning
Does that your question?
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
P.S. I didn't say much about cognitive processes involved in spatial
cognition but I think one can read the following to get a sense of what
Skinner may think about all that:
O'Donohue, W., & Szymanski, J. (1996). Skinner on cognition. Journal
of Behavioral Education, 6(1), 35-48.
This article ends with a quote from Skinner (1974) "About Behaviorism":
|No one can give an adequate account of much of human
|thinking. It is, after all, probably the most complex subject
|ever submitted to analysis... No matter how defective a
|behavioral account may be, we must remember that mentalistic
|explanations explain nothing (Skinner, 1974, p. 246).
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Palij [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, June 28, 2015 7:45 AM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Cc: Michael Palij
Subject: [tips] Oh, the Places You'll Go!
Did you know that rats dream about places they would like to visit? But
don't
take my word for it, there is research -- brain-based neuroscience no
less! --
that shows this to be "True". The mass media version of this research
is
presented on various websites but here's the Discover magazine version:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/06/26/rats-dream-places/#.VY_azVK_7-o
The original research article was published in eLife; see:
http://elifesciences.org/content/4/e06063
The nickel summary of the research involves (a) the assumption that
activation
of "place" neurons are the equivalent of spatial knowledge (though
whether this
knowledge takes the form of muscle programs, 2-D cognitive maps, 3-D
imagined
terrains, abstract representations without sensory content, verbal
descriptions
of what actions to take and where to do -- kind of questionable in rats,
I know
-- and so on is unclear) and (b) the activity of "place" neurons during
sleep
are doing the same things that they do when awake and engaged in
purposive or
goal directed behavior.
Fred Skinner must be spinning in his grave.
---
You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected].
To unsubscribe click here:
http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13510.2cc18398df2e6692fffc29a610cb72e3&n=T&l=tips&o=45582
or send a blank email to
leave-45582-13510.2cc18398df2e6692fffc29a610cb7...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
---
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=45583
or send a blank email to
leave-45583-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
