- Capitalism and Alternatives -

I am glad Chomsky takes apart operant conditioning.

In Reply to: Forgotten Things posted by Hank on February 09, 19100 at 13:02:49:

That does NOT mean that Behaviorism is useless, even in other fields of linguistics such as second language acquisition. In fact, when it comes to "real-life" applications as they stand now, Chomskyan linguistics will get the ax before Behaviorism.

As someone who has developed behavioral programmes in psychiatric hospitals and having seen positive reinforcment applied almost to the point of cruelty to attempt to gain some minor change I am glad Chomsky takes apart operant conditioning. In fact the real cutting edge of Psychology is taking place in a newer psychology based on Transformmational Grammar. Skinner was always overly deterministic and thus rejects any notion of creativity in the response reaction. I'm not sure of your politics but i would guess Marxist as over -detrminism is an essential feature that aided its collapse as a model-Why wouldn't those working class rise up in the face of such provocation? Chomsky's grammar enables us to examine the subjective nature of representation in an individual and then to make a number of useful assumptions about the way in which an individual represents their internal experience. It is this freedom from simple determinism that allows us, not only to slay some of psychiaty's sacred cows, but to take a genuinely more effective approach to the problems people bring us.

Follow Ups:

None.