: This says a lot about relations to sense, but little with regards to internalized values or ideology.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,' 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.
Why do you wish to mystify behavior (and the dependent and independent variables that change the probability of its emission)?
: [I]t is this imagined self that we reference before acting, whenever we contemplate action, or try to read through our desires.
This 'imagined self that we reference before acting,' in a behaviorological analysis, is merely an individual's history of reinforcement. We are not affected by the future, we are affected by the past---specifically, the consequences of our past behavior; that is what we are referencing. Like the future, however, the past is not often easy to see. 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), one cannot 'disprove' it except to say that the burden of proof is on those who assert its existence.
: [I]mmodestly???? You don't think that some people are intensely gratified to think they exist, or are terrified at the prospect of the loss of self identity?
That intense 'gratification of self' is what I called immodest. We 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...
: [W]hat I say is that because self identity is very bendy and highly variable, and is too complex for us to be able to predict scientifically each time, that systems set up to reinforce behaviour will always face some random awkward sod...
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.)
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: : I thought the point was not to interpret the world, but to change it...
: Indeed, his actions do change the world, his analysis is revealing, he leaves it up to the rest of use also to decide how to change the world...
I'm sorry, but that's simply rationalizing inactivity. I again quote Los Horcones:
It is especially important to note that complaining about the social system does not necessarily involve ceasing to contribute to it...We believe that those who work under inappropriate social conditions perpetuate those conditions by continuing to work, because work produces money, and money maintains the behavior of the exploiter. If the workers quit---assuming, of course, that they have a reinforcing alternative that will provide a livelihood---this amounts to initiating the process of extinction for the behavior of those who have been exploiting them. A Walden Two community breaks the cycle of reciprocal reinforcement between the exploiter and the exploited, between the unjust and the victim of injustice, and between the oppressor and the oppressed.(2)
Again I ask: why are there Skinnerian communities but not Chomskyite ones?
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: I said nothing about punishment, you could say, you will not receive your positive
reinforcement if you get caught.
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. 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 spies; it's like saying, using your language, free will requires monitoring...
: I wasn't actually comparing the Panopticon with Behviourism, just asking for a
behaviourist critique of it, which you have failed to provide.
Again: Sounds like some ripe 1984 gulag (punitive society). That's my critique.
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: At birth the language around me is raw data, I need a form, a pattern to store it in, so that it means something, and becomes information. The LAD is the form which makes the data make sense.
Again, mystification. The pattern is the contingencies (successive approximations) presented to us from the verbal community.
: There is simply not enough data to allow use to learn language from its use around us, there must be some input on our part from somewhere...
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)
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* 'Even as a clue, the important thing is not the feeling but the thing felt. It is a glass that feels smooth, not a "feeling of smoothness." It is the reinforcer that feels good, not the good feeling. Men have generalized the feeling of good things and called them pleasure and the feelings of bad things and called them pain, but we do not give a man pleasure or pain, we gives him things he feels as pleasant or painful...What is maximized or minimized, or what is ultimately good or bad, are things, not feelings, and men work to achieve them or avoid them not because of the way they feel but because they are positive or negative reinforcers.' Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Knopf, 1971), p. 107.Notes:
1. Skinner, 'The Initiating Self,' Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior, (Merrill, 1989), p. 27.
2. Horcones, 'Walden Two and Social Change: The Application of Behavior Analysis to Cultural Design,' Behavior Analysis and Social Action, 7: 1 & 2, 1989, p. 40.
3. Watson, The Ways of Behaviorism (Harper & Bros., 1928), p. 28.
