: Values are not internalized, they originate in the environment where responses to stimuli change not only the environment but the individual's probability of (future) response. Values, as Skinner famously said, are reinforcers.* What is internal is our 'perception' of reinforcers; the emission (or probability of emission) of behavior based upon reinforcers are not, however, in the perception, but in our past behavior. If doing Y has previously 'felt good,' Now, here we have precisely it, felt good, you see you reject all the Freudian drives etc, but still continue to use notions of pleasure or pain, which all result from an inituial biological entity. There are aspects of humanity beyond initial social construction, that are innate to us as biological beings...
: then the probability of doing Y (under similar circumstances) is strengthened; there is no 'internal agent' strengthening probability of response, the response has been strengthened by the consequences of prior behavior. The 'feeling' is the effect of behavior, not the cause.
But what of the consequences of previous identifications, the observed behaviour of others, what role does art and culture play in this model, because to me they seem absent (and in their absence genuine community and specific verisimititude go out the window...)
: Why do you wish to mystify behavior (and the dependent and independent variables that change the probability of its emission)?
I wish to ackowledge its greater depth, I wish to emphasise the value of individuals, I wish to encompass a notion of culture and ideology within the model of the self(which doesn't exist because it is merely a by-product of reigning linguistic/singifying practises...
Also I want to vaguely retain a notion of humanism. Basically, from what I here you say, behaviourism sounds like teh apotheosis of commodity fetishism, men no longer encouter each other as men, but as objects....
: This 'imagined self that we reference before acting,' in a behaviorological analysis, is merely an individual's history of reinforcement.
And not culturally learnt identifications, what of the role of imagination, of imagining a reinforcement from an action we have never perpetrated, but using that imagined re-inforcement as the condition for our actions when we reach proper circumstances?
: We are not affected by the future,
Right, so I'll go through the dictionaries and cross out the words hope and desire and anticipate...because they are all in the future...
: Freud introduced the notion that people could behave without knowing why and behaviorism acknowledges that reinforcers are often as inscrutable as the 'unconscious.' 'Perhaps it is because we see human behavior but very little of the process through which it comes into existence that we feel the need of a creative self.'(1) Like God (which the initiating self has replaced for many people),
How very althusserian...I believe he reffers to it as the Category of the SUbject, to Lacan it is the Other...etc....(God and subject that is...)
: one cannot 'disprove' it except to say that the burden of proof is on those who assert its existence.
I do not assert that a stable self exists, merely that an illusiory, linguistically constructed self exists, that is governed not merely by behaviour, but also by imagination and desire, a being capable of futurity, not locked in a simplistic mechanical universe...
: That intense 'gratification of self' is what I called immodest. We
The gratification of self is the basis of 'self-mastery' the desire to control our environment, and to control our own bodies. the gratification comes from someone thing or action telling us we are who we imagine ourselves to be. Whether this is as a member of a group (nationalism, class consciousness, the commune) or as the great monological 'I' of liberalism.
: resist the idea that our actions are lawful, that our personalities are the result of histories of contingencies. Such an aggrandizing perception of behavior (self) is difficult to surrender...
but its what makes us human beings and not robots, it is the necessary illusion...
: Very difficult... (As far as behavior being 'too complex,' there are too many stars to count, but astronomers continue to seek them and to document them.)
Yes, but astronomers aren't trying to arrange a system of society upon that knowledge now, are they...
: I'm sorry, but that's simply rationalizing inactivity. I again quote Los Horcones:
I'm sorry, but he is active, his actions speak for him- an MIT professor who risked jail, joined student protests, refused to pay his taxes, he does actively fight the system....
: It is especially important to note that complaining about the social
[snip]
Yes, but IIRC one of the two communities you talk about trades goods with the capitalist market, so tey are in fact continuing to aid the system. And I seem to recall you mentioning a legalistic revolution, buying up teh shares and taking over thatv way- well, if that ain't particpating in teh system I don't know what is- the system is everywhere, you can't escape it...
: Again I ask: why are there Skinnerian communities but not Chomskyite ones?
Because he does not proscribe a neat little plan for escape, he talks, more rightly, about challenging the global system.
: This expression, 'you will not receive your positive reinforcement if you get caught,' is incongruous with the central idea of behaviorism. To translate: one does not receive positive reinforcement if they do not emit behavior that produces reinforcement. The difference is not one of semantics, it is one of volition. You are very familiar with Chomsky's tactics, not familiar with behaviorism.
I've admitted as such...
:Reinforcement is not 'enforcement,' it is probability. You consider activity as stimulus-response, but (radical) behaviorism is setting-behavior-consequence (which affects setting); the difference is one of bi-directionality. That is why your Panopticon analogy is incongruous with behaviorism. Positive reinforcement doesn't require sentries or
Again, I never set it as an anology, I just wanted to see if and why behaviourism would not accept it...
: spies; it's like saying, using your language, free will requires monitoring...
Last post you said everyone was a spy, mutually watching each other to enable control? Or did I misunderstand you...
: Again: Sounds like some ripe 1984 gulag (punitive society). That's my critique.
Hmmm. Detailed, any particular reason for that critique (or should I just go pull some teeth or something...). I am trying to just see if I can get a better handle on what you are saying, so I wanted to here you say whay the panopticon would not be a behaviourist as well as a utilitarians paradise. (Don't forget, no-one offends there...)
: Again, mystification. The pattern is the contingencies (successive approximations) presented to us from the verbal community.
One question, would you say it is possible for a culture to raise children to smile when they are sad, and frown when they are happy? If not, why not...?
: That's absurd. It requires years to learn a language. '[C]onditioning---nurture not nature---starts so early that the biologist and the eugenist have no opportunity to make valid observations.'(3)
Its not absurd, reading a sentence does not give an adequet knowledge of grammar to go off and aplpy it in otehr circumstances. We clearly don't learn language parrot fashion, we learn applicable rules that we start to use for ourselves. Children of two have picked up the basic rules, and startb to apply them...given the general content of what we say to children, its unlikely that they learn all those rules from direct empirical experience...
Deathy
