: response. Values, as Skinner famously said, are reinforcers. What is internal is our 'perception' of reinforcers; the emission (or probability of emission) of behavior basedReinforcer, as Bill said (Fine name Bill) is starting to sound a tad nebulous now.
Question: If I presented to you, your greatest enemy, gave you a knife, and a free pardon, and left you with them in a secret room, no-one need ever know, would you kill that person. No come back, no reinforcers, just you, and a knife?
: upon reinforcers are not, however, in the perception, but in our past behavior. If doing Y has previously 'felt good'...
But what if we have 'heard' others say it feels good, what if we have been led to believe it, purely through culture and language?
: The use of the term 'good,' perhaps you noted, was enclosed in descriptive quotes---and for a reason. Behaviorism does not decree a 'good' or a 'bad.' People do not do things (are not subjected to reinforcement) because anything feels 'good' or 'bad'---responses either have survival value or not (the genesis of reinforcement). What has survival value---say, eating---is 'good,' is
But surely a desire for survival is teh same as a Lacanisn drive for self mastery (i.e. survival) or a Freudian pleaure rinciple, can you Proove such a drive exists?
: As I explained, our 'feelings' (such as good and bad) 'narrate' our responses, they do not cause them.
But they can create an expectation of how we are going to act in a situation?
: I must be doing a poor job of discussing behaviorism to have it sound like 'the apotheosis of commodity fetishism'! (?) Because there are laws of behavior (as there certainly are with every other organic thing under the sun), does that mean that 'men [and women] no longer encounter each other as men [and women], but as objects'?
But you encounter them as objects, you take what sounds like the anglo/US-empricicism run wild into another version of post-modern antihumanism. There is more to science than naked empiricsim, if we dig out Davy Hume, we can empricially deny all causation....
:There is almost infinite individuality in behaviorism's account of the individual, there is a deep respect for the value of individuals, and there certainly is acknowledgement of both culture and ideology (verbal behavior) in behaviorism. What there is not, however, is the age-old mind-matter dualism and aggrandizing explanatory fictions concerning environmental interdependence. This distinction provides the socialistic implications of behaviorism...
However its processes seem excessively mechanical. The respect for individuality and culture does not seem to acknowledge any role for culture in subjective futurity, when it is possibly that aspect of humanity, the future tense, that allowed for our greatest developments...
: How can our behavior be affected by something that has not happened yet? (Think of tasty but unheathy foods...) You claim that
If it can't, then humanity would have died the first time an unexpected disatser struck, we wouldn't be able to react to enviornmental change, we'd never devlop- our future grows out of our imaginings of that future, we take the elements of now, put them together in new ways, and design our future...
'imagination' and 'desire' are the progenitors of behavior, but as Wittgenstein taught us (in great detail) we cannot successfully imagine anything outside of what we have been accustomed to imagine. (That is why if a lion could talk, we would not understand...)
We can imagine new things, as a synthesis of the old, as an extrpolation of teh old. We would not be able to talk to teh lion because we share no physical expeirence with it.
What we understand are our histories of reinforcement---not literally, not in discrete units of behavior, for certainly verbal behavior has allowed the human species a wide ability to generalize amongst reinforcers (and more specifically, amongst discriminative stimuli and discriminative reinforcers)---but nonetheless what we generalize from are our interactions with our environments, not our interactions with our imaginations. (Where do imaginations come from?---Other imaginations?)
Yes from our past, from other peoples actions, from accdients, from halucinagenic substances, from many places otehr than direct personal experience...
: 'Self mastery' is self-control---and self-control is not the 'self' controlling the 'self,' but rather one set of reinforcers (usually long-term, inconspicuous) instead of another (usually immediate, conspicuous).
When I desire so to do, i lift my arm, that is self mastery, alone among animals I can control may anal sphincter. As a child I looked in teh mirror, saw the form there respond exactly to my desires and intents, and I was happy...
A variable-ratio schedule will 'inspire' self-control in either pigeon or human, but it is not the human (or pigeon) that has 'inspired' controlled behavior, it is the schedule that has emitted the 'inspiration' and the controlled behavior. A mistake 'is to regard purpose as a characteristic or essence of the topography of behavior rather than as a relation to controlling variables.'(1) Self 'mastery' requires a relation to variables outside our (immediate) control---otherwise we would need no 'mastery' skills in the first place (we would already be 'masters')...
I agree, in part, but self mastery, and specifically teh illusion of self mastery, has a powerful imaginative control over our lives, we will act in ways in which we inagine we will act, ways that are metynimically appropriate to the signier that we are...
: The illusion of autonomy, the illusion of freedom, is precisely the thing that prevents inconspicuous controls from being noticed, from being countered, and from being used by the people instead of the minorities that possess them.
We do have distinct identities, that we can through art and discource alter and recreate, for ourselves, we are not teh passive reflection of a mass ideology, we are a biological entity in dialogue with the world around us, the category of experience frees us from teh overwhelming piower of discourse, discourse frees us from teh narrow limits of experience...
: Humans do not learn language as parrots do---simply because parrots face (almost) no discriminative reinforcement; they make a sound---in any context---and receive a reward. With humans, early praise for basic sounds---often out of context---becomes slowly withheld until basic sounds are more shaped, more specific in enunciation and in context.
Nurgle boxmier nittertwit.
:This process takes years, even decades; millions of words are uttered, usually ungrammatically, until application has presented enough instances to emit 'proper' usage, usage that receives specific reinforcement. The rules of language are learned, not in the rules (as some autonomous 'program'),** but in the application, and application is behavior. Children without a verbal community do not learn a language, grammatical or otherwise...
I agree with taht last part, but the emragence of greater capacity could be linked to the biolgical evlopment of the brains speech cnetres, just as physical control devlops over years, co-ordination etc. with the devlopment of body and brain, it is reasonable to think that langugae may well do.
Why does English initiate loan words as weak verbs? Why isn't it a fifty fifty split? COuld there be some rule governance at work? Loan owrds and neologism are not subject to reinforcment...
: ** 'Nothing which could be called following a plan or applying a rule is observed when behavior is a product of the contingencies alone. To say [as Chomsky did in his review of Verbal Behavior] that "the child who learns a language has in some sense constructed the grammar for himself"
You have, unless I'm mistaken ignored my presented example of just such an occaision when the children of two different tribes produced a single working language.
is as misleading as to say that a dog which has learned to catch a ball has in some sense constructed the relevant part of the science of mechanics.'
It has, in an inexpressable way worked out how to understand parabolla, how to watch a ball, etc...
