It is not only a spurious profundity that promotes a mentalistic account. Certain advantages are gained from its weaknesses. Those who must make important decisions suffer when things go wrong. They are held responsible for their action in the sense that they are punished (by criticism, by dismissal, by loss of office) if they fail. A convenient way to avoid punishment is to call for a change of mind rather than for action...It is safe to call for changes in feelings and states of mind precisely because such an appeal can never lead to any situation for which one is held responsible.
---Skinner, 'Why Don't We Use the Behavioral Sciences?,' Human Nature, March 1978.
_______________: Reinforcer, as Bill said (Fine name Bill) is starting to sound a tad nebulous now.
I've defined reinforcer a dozen times. 'A reinforcement is defined as an event which increases the rate of a response which it follows.'(1) For more info, read The Behavior of Organisms, chapter 3 or Science and Human Behavior, section 2.
: 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?
I have lost my patience with Chomskyesque 'examples' that define behaviorism with violent images. (Apply what I wrote about generalized reinforcers in my last post.)
: 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?
'Purely' through culture and language---with absolutely no contact with actual life (reality)? Consider: people were reinforced by the representatives of heaven in the absence of heaven's ability to reinforce... Again, generalization (secondary reinforcement). Verbal behavior is the behavior of an individual which achieves its effect through someone else's behavior. (Eventually we become secondarily reinforced by the generalized verbal community that is 'conscience.') 'The consequences of [verbal] behavior are mediated by a train of events no less physical or inevitable than direct mechanical action, but clearly more difficult to describe.'(2) Nonetheless, Skinner does describe them. For more info, see the entirety of Verbal Behavior.
: But surely a desire for survival is the same as a Lacanisn drive for self mastery (i.e. survival) or a Freudian pleasure principle, can you Prove such a drive exists?
Not familiar with Lacan; Skinner's 'survival value' is most unlike Freud's 'pleasure principle' because for behaviorism there is no absolute criteria. (Recall Freud's admonitions in Civilization and Its Discontents that socialism would fail because it was not 'human nature.') Behaviorism does not use 'drives' as descriptive units (as I said before).
: : 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?
The situations in the past create the expectation (probability) of how we are going to act in a situation, not the feelings.
: But you encounter [people] as objects, you take what sounds like the anglo/US-empricicism run wild into another version of post-modern antihumanism...
? (We're at an impasse here.)
: : There is almost infinite individuality in behaviorism's account of the individual...
: However its processes seem excessively mechanical.
Only in your descriptions of behaviorism. 'The point [that behaviorism is dehumanizing] is often made by arguing that a scientific analysis changes man from victor to victim. But man remains what he has always been, and his most conspicuous achievement has been the design and construction of a world which has freed him from constraints and vastly extended his range.'(3) Again: '[E]very personal history is unique.'(4) To not know why we do the things we do as we do them does not prevent us from doing these things; behaviorism seeks to understand human behavior so humans may change it---and that is not mechanical, that is liberating.
: : How can our behavior be affected by something that has not happened yet?
: We can imagine new things, as a synthesis of the old, as an extrapolation of the old.
Yes, that is what I said. Behavior---mediated or direct---has an orientation towards the future. However:
As in natural selection, the environment must be relatively stable; behavior which is strengthened under a given set of circumstances will continue to be effective so long as the circumstances do not greatly change. The process 'takes into account' a future which resembles the past.(5)
For more info, see 'Selection by Consequence,' Upon Further Reflection (chapter 4).
: When I desire so to do, I lift my arm, that is self mastery...
Let us not forget this: then 'I raise my arm,' my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?'How do you know that you have raised your arm?'---'I feel it.' So what you recognize is the feeling? And are you certain that you recognize it right?---You are certain that you have raised your your arm; isn't this the criterion, the measure, of the recognition?(6)
: We do have distinct identities, that we can through art and discourse alter and recreate, for ourselves...
Again: behaviorism has never denied individuality!
We do not alter our behavior by altering our art, we alter our art when our behavior, altered, calls for new representations of behavior. Behavior becomes ideology---not the other way around. Culture reflects the society that produces its reflection. Ideology is the 'virtues,' 'morals,' 'established beliefs' of society---of society's practice.
Imagine a propaganda campaign that asserted that all millionaires were biologically or socially inferior. Such a campaign would be confronted with the ostentation of success that wealth infers, and most likely would fail to convince. On the other hand, a propaganda campaign that asserted that low income populations were biologically or socially inferior would have a much greater explanatory power because the material conditions of low-income life, being inferior to the material conditions of millionaires, would assert convincingly that something about low-income populations was indeed inferior. (Of course, the reasons low-income populations are low-income are missing in this tautological description.)
: We can imagine new things, as a synthesis of the old, as an extrapolation of the old. We would not be able to talk to the lion because we share no physical experience with it.
'We understand anything which we ourselves say with respect to the same state of affairs. We do not understand what we do not say.'(7) This, I believe, is the heart of what Wittgenstein had to say. The issue is one of context---and behaviorism puts context in the environment (where behavior meets it and---importantly---changes it). You seem to say that context can exist independently in the 'mind.'
: : Children without a verbal community do not learn a language, grammatical or otherwise...
: I agree with that last part, but the emergence of greater capacity could be linked to the
biological development of the brains speech centres, just as physical control develops over years, co-ordination etc. with the development of body and brain, it is reasonable to think that language may well do.
No, apparently you do not agree. Instead of acknowledging that usage forms language, you are placing the learning inside the individual again. Without the usage, all the 'biological development of the brains speech centers' etc., etc., would not transpire for children without a verbal community.
: You have, unless I'm mistaken ignored my presented example of just such an occasion when the children of two different tribes produced a single working language.
And would that disprove the above? '[A] word is "appropriate" not with respect to its form alone but in relation to a situation.'(8) Grammar, as I see it, is context---and context (like all behavioral interactions with environment) is bidirectional, not unilateral or created 'within.' For more info, see Verbal Behavior, chapter 12.
_______________
In post 3359, I said '[y]ou are very familiar with Chomsky's tactics, not familiar with behaviorism,' and you responded 'I've admitted as such.' Your objections have been many, which I welcomed; however, you have ignored many statements simply by bringing up identical points (already dispatched). You continually insist that behaviorism 'dehumanizes' people, treats them as identical, and infer that it is a tool of tyrants. Because of this circularity, I feel that you are not listening to me, but merely---reflexively---opposing all statements and quotes (which have been many). It has not been my intention to change your opinion (no behaviorist would claim that words without environmental substantiation could possibly change behavior), only to state---with the simplicity necessitated by this forum---the main points. This I feel I have done to the best of my ability. If you wish to disagree (and I'm sure you do), fine, but I have nothing further to add (I feel like a juke box). There's always the literature if you are interested in learning more about behaviorism...
_______________
Notes:
1. Holland and Skinner, The Analysis of Behavior (McGraw-Hill, 1961), § 37-11.
2. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957), p. 2.
3. Skinner, About Behaviorism (Knopf, 1974), pp. 239-40.
4. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Knopf, 1971), p. 209.
5. Skinner, 'Are We Free To Have a Future?,' Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (Prentice-Hall 1978), p. 19.
6. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, 1958), §§ 621 and 625.
7. Skinner, Verbal Behavior, op. cit., p. 278.
8. Ibid., pp. 320-21.
None.
