Russ,
The behaviorist's point, first and foremost, would involve
comparing the questions "Why did he choose to turn left?" with the
question "Why did he turn left?" They are the same question, the behaviorist
claims,
except perhaps, at best, that the first question does a little bit more to
specify a reference group of alternative circumstances
and behaviors that our explanation needs to distinguish between. For example,
we might read it as saying "Why did he turn left under circumstances in which
other people turn right?"
As for the acceptable answer to such a
question... well... there are several varieties of behaviorism, and the
acceptable answers would vary. The stereotypical villain of Intro Psych stories
is a behaviorist who insists on explanations only in terms of immediate
stimuli. However, those are mostly mythical creatures. Most behaviorists have a
bias towards developmental explanations, and as members of this list will
readily recognize, behavioral development is complex. The most standard forms
of behaviorism make heavy use of drooling dogs and lever-pressing rats as their
primary metaphors. In this case we might prefer a maze-running rat. Upon his
first encounter with choice point C, which has vertical stripes, rat 152 turns
left. Why? Because, in the past, this rat has been reinforced (i.e., got to the
peanut butter faster) when it turned left (the critical behavior) at
intersections that have vertical stripes (a discriminative stimuli). The nature
of the contingencies and stimuli can be quite complex, but we have lots of data
about how those complexities reliably produce certain patterns of behavior.
Similarly, we might argue that the person turns left because in his past, under
circumstances such as these, he has been reinforced for turning left. What
circumstances, well, I would have to elaborate the example a lot more: When
following directions which state "turn left at the next light" and at "an
intersection with a light". The individual's choice is thus explained by his
long-term membership in a verbal community that rewards people for doing
certain things (turning left) under certain conditions consisting of a
combination of discriminative stimuli (which are complex, but clearly possible
to define in sufficient detail for these purposes). This training started very
young, for my daughter it formally started at about 1 and a half with my saying
"look right, look left, look right again" at street corners.
--
Admitted, the above explanation for the person's behavior is a bit hand-wavy
and post-hoc, but the explanations for the rat's behavior is neither.
Behaviorism, loosely speaking consists of two parts, a philosophy of
behaviorism and an application of behaviorism (applied behavior analysis). We
could take our person, subject him to empirical study, and determine the
conditions under which he turns left. This would reveal the critical variables
making up a circumstance under
which such turns happen. The science also allows us to determine some aspects
of the past-history based on the subjects present responses. Further, just as
we built our rat, we could build a person who would turn left under such
circumstances, and for that person, all the conditions would be known and no
hand-waving or further investigation would be necessary. The fact that we
usually cannot perform these kinds of investigation, is no excuse for
pretending we wouldn't get concrete results if we did. --
In the
absence of an observed past history, the behaviorist would rather speculate
about concrete past events than about imaginary happenings in a dualistic
other-realm.
Personally, I think many behaviorists overdo the role of
conditioning. I have a bias for a more inclusive view of development, such as
that advanced by the epigeneticists of the 60's and 70's, the kind that leads
directly into modern dynamic systems work. Those behaviorists I most like
recognize the limitations of conditioning as an explanation, but argue that
conditioning is particularly important in the development of many behaviors
that humans particularly care about. Pairing the verbal command "left" with the
contingency of reinforcement for turning left, they argue, is just as arbitrary
pairing the visual stimuli "red light" with the contingency of reinforcement
for pressing the left lever in the skinner box. A reasonable position, but I've
never been completely sold. I will admit though that conditioning is important
in unexpected places - you cannot even explain why baby geese follow the object
they imprint on without operant (skinner-box style) conditioning.
How
was that?
Eric
P.S. Returning to Robert's query: It should be
obvious that the above explanation, if accepted as an explanation for the
behavior, is also an explanation for all concurrent neural happenings.
Eric, Can
you provide an example of an acceptable behaviorist answer to your question
about why a person turned left instead of right. By example, I'm looking for
something more concrete than "the explanation for the choice
must reference conditions in our protagonists past that built him into
the type
of person who would turn left under the current conditions." What might such an
explanation look like?
-- Russ
Abbott
______________________________________
Professor,
Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles
cell:
310-621-3805
blog:
http://russabbott.blogspot.com/ vita:
http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
______________________________________
On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 4:03 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES
<epc2@...> wrote:
Robert,
You accuse Nick of talking about "the brain", when he was
talking about "the mind".
The most basic tenant of behaviorism is that
all questions about the mind are ultimately a question about behavior. Thus,
while some behaviorists deny the existence of mental things, that is not a
necessary part of behaviorism. On the other hand, the behaviorist must deny
that the mind is made up any special substance, and they must deny that the
mental things are somehow inside the person (hence the comparison with soul,
auras, etc.). If the behaviorist does not deny tout court that mental things
happen, what is he to do? One option is to claim that mental things are
behavioral things, analyzed at some higher level of analysis, just as
biological things are chemical things analyzed at some higher level of
analysis. So, to answer your question: There IS a brain, and the brain does all
sorts of things, but it does not do mental things. Mental things happen, but
they do not happen "in the brain". As Skinner would put it, the question is:
What DOES go on in the skull, and what is an intelligible way to talk about it?
The obvious answer is that the only things going on in the skull are
physiological.
For example, if one asks why someone chose to go left
instead of right at a stop sign, one might get an answer in terms of the brain:
"He turned left because his frontal cortex activated in such and such a way."
However, that is no answer at all, because the firing of those neurons is a
component part of the turning left! Ultimately, the explanation for the choice
must reference conditions in our protagonists past that built him into the type
of person who would turn left under the current conditions. In doing so, our
explanation will necessarily give the conditions that lead to a person whose
brain activates in such and such a way under the conditions in question.
Put another way: To say that he chose to turn left because a part of
his brain chose to turn left misses the point. It anthromorphizes your innards
in a weird way, suggests homunculi, and introduces all sorts of other ugly
problems. Further, it takes the quite tractable problem of understanding the
origins of behavior and transforms it into the still intractable problem of
understanding the origins of organization in the nervous system. Neuroscience
is a great field of study, and it is thriving. Thus, people hold out hope that
one day we will know enough about nerve growth, etc., that the origin of
neuronal organization will become tractable. One day they will, but when that
day comes it will not tell us much about behavior that we didn't already know,
hence they won't tell us much about the mind we didn't already know.
Or
at least, so sayith some behaviorists,
Eric
On Sun, May
2, 2010 05:09 PM,
"Robert J. Cordingley" <robert@...>
wrote:
Nick
Let me try this on(e)... it's because the brain is the physical
structure within which our thinking processes occur and collectively
those processes we call the 'mind'. I don't see a way to say the same
thing or anything remotely parallel, about soul, aura, the Great
Unknown and such. Is there an argument to say that the brain, or the
thinking processes don't exist in the same way we can argue that the
others don't (or might not)?
Thanks
Robert
On 5/2/10 12:52 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
</snipped>
How is banging on about mind any
different from banging on about soul, or aura, or the Great Unknown?
Nick
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied
Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's
College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant
Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA
16601