: Skinner certainly believed in irony (and thoughts). To sum a behavioral principle, an individual responds to many variables, often simultaneously. Sometimes conflicting environmental variables produce incompatible behaviors (algebraic summation), sometimes tandem behaviors (multiple causation), while various 'ratios' of positive and negative reinforcement explain the lack of sterotypy in responses. Irony is a form of multiple causation, an instance where a speaker addresses both positive and negative audiences simultaneously and successfully. To wit:Well, that example is a good example of polysmical punning, and teh use of different speech genres/registers, but it doesn't entirely account for Irony. If I were to say:
'Frankly I think Nelson mandella ought to be hanged, vile terrorist fiend that he is.' among people that know me, they wil, on the basis of shared knowledge recognise the lack of personal investment or intention behind that statement, I simply do not mean it. This can, in literary circles be a bastard, is Jane Austin being Ironic here or ot, we can't always know, sometimes a text can structure Irony, but sometimes without the assumed shared knwoledge we can't know.
My objection to Behaviourism is that in its very seeing of people as malleable it neglects intention and the complex overdetermination of subjectivity. For instance, what if, following your matching law principle a person forgoes immediate material gratification of desire, for the greater gratification of assertion of self identity. This would mean that no matter how well planned and designed the system of re-enforcment or control or whatever, there may always be awkward buggers...
Likewise, lets take Kant. He sets up a moral scenario. take a libertine. Offer him a gorgeous woman, to do with as he please, but say, if you take her, we will execute you in teh morning. Of course, self interest takes over, and teh libertine declines.
But what, asks Lacan, if said Libertine was a psychopath, and teh threat of death made him want teh woman more, made him enjoy cutting her into peices even more? We can't account for that before hand.
The internal workings of relations to the moral law, and to self identity are unnassable empircally, and are certainly beyond mechanical materialism, the internal maind is Das Ding an sich, the Thing, which is imperitrable, unkowable, but which garantees knwoledge, in teh case of Behaviourism, by its exclusion.
Without intentionality we can have no conept of lying, or ture irony, what described was teh mechanics of Irony, not how it is understood to be ironic.
Marx did see a difference between intention and action. His definition of ideology: 'Sie tuen, aber Sie wissen nicht.' 9they do it, but they do not know that they are doing it) demonstrates a working assumption of difference between consciousness and action, a difference species form was meant to overcome.
: * I believe you have some ambivalence on the subject of control. In post 3267, you ask me---after I propose socialism only for those who readily choose it---
BTW- thats not what I was quibbling about, I was quibbling with your answer to my question about people living in geographically poor areas, and teh fact that you seem to think the poor unfit to join your utopia, because they wish for riches...I agree socialism can only be enacted voluntarilly, but the question is one of sharing teh worlds resources...
None.
