: 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.Which in itself is a fairly nebulus statement, because many copnsequences of many types may be said to do that...
: 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.)
Now, I have lost my patience with your seeming inability to look at a question at its face value, instead of judging it by light of past debates. my basic point was if you could kill someone, with no re-enforement or control or whatever to prevent you, why would you not/ This is a simple question, if there is nothing excempt teh 'reenforcement' of your own hatred and wish to end this persons life, why would you not? Basically, the example was meant to show how internalised 'conscience' would still operate even in an evrion,ment entirely devoid of controling factors. You seem really jumpy and dfensive sometims, you know man...
: 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).
But it does use them as an a priori and asocial (or presocial) constant? Answer in another post sometime...
: The situations in the past create the expectation (probability) of how we are going to act in a situation, not the feelings.
So, when reading a book, or even persuing pornography, you have never experienced the feeling of what it would be like to be in that imginary situation...
: ? (We're at an impasse here.)
Well, I refer you to Foucualt and Althusser, easilly found. I assume you're not lost by what I mean by extreme empricism...
: 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.
It is machanical in its extent that it denies ratiocination and desire and imagination as operative factors in human beings. It is mechanical as it denies culture and concsiousness any operative role in human functioning, it is mechanical as it seeks to elide the variable of human concsiousness from its model, it is mechanical in the narrowness of its empricism, it is mechanical in that it replaces the practicality of human consciousness with immediacy of the environment.
: 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)
Hmm, however, ideas that are predicated upon a changed future come from teh here and now, or teh past. Socialism is a fine example, it has never existed, certainly it had never existed at the time the movement for it began, and yet the idea, teh future was there...
: 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?
Erm, we get the knowledge that previous to that I wanted to 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)
Erm, usually I can see it as well...
: We do not alter our behavior by altering our art, we alter our art when our behavior, altered, calls for new representations of behavior.
Exactly, this is what I complain about and object to, changes in teh signifying structures of humanity can lead to a change in the the behaviour of humanity, your model badly reproduces a highly reductive version of base and superstructure...
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.
Like I say, you'd love Althusser, 'Ideology is lived' consciousness is an illusion...culture is a whole way of life, but to say that only the lived part of it is real, and that the imagined part is false basically does not conform to reality, very often ideology and values are at significant odds with the practical life of society- the good burghers execrate adultery whilst committing it all teh time, murder is wrong, except when performed by teh right people, ideas have power...
: 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.
Actually I have seen campaigns thus, from teh late seventies, Labour party political broadcasts about folk born with silver spoons in their mouths, with the title right honorable, and otehrwise known as teh upper class twit...
: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.)
Yes propoganda works best when it conforms somewhat to real experience, however it can often work with things of which we have no experience. Entire worlds have been made in the sky, and for those who belive in them, they are very very real...
: '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.'
I say that context can be structured in teh mind- when talking to someone I recognise as a king the context is mostly in my mind, but I would still behave differently towards that King...
: No, apparently you do not agree. Instead of acknowledging that usage forms language, you are placing the learning inside the individual again.
Body building devlops muscles, but in a thirteen year old boy, puberty devlops muscles as well...
:Without the usage, all the 'biological development of the brains speech centers' etc., etc., would not transpire for children without a verbal community.
entirely true, but all I am arguoing for is a recognition that langugae is not entirely imposed from without, that we move to meet the language, and our capacity to pick it up from without devlops within, not exactly startling stuff, except that it finally kills some social darwinist bollocks about society being a result of the imposition of the wills of the strongest over generations, rather than an innate human thing...
: 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.
But why did they not, from the same contexts as the adults, just adopt the pidgin language they use? How does context determine where I stick my adverbials? Why in german must I stick to a conveluted and hiseous sentence structure, as well as inflect my articles? How do I know which words in a sentence the 'both' belongs to?
Even if we rely on context, we have the maxims of H.P.Grice (Relation, Manner, Quality and Quantity) to suggest that contextual langugae is rules driven, and these maxims work universally, so they must be common to all human language...again, a part of universal grammar?
dispatched). You continually insist that behaviorism 'dehumanizes' people, treats them as identical, and infer that it is a tool of tyrants.
1:I suggest continually that bahaviourism treats people as objects, which it does, your proper response to that should be thats teh only way to scientifically study them.
2:I have neer inferred tyrannical pretensions in behaviourism, I have suggested how a certain metonymical connexion may exist in some accademics minds, but the rest has come from your excessive imaginations...
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).
I have changed my responses many times, I have reacted and absorbed your points, most often the repeated points are ones where you have failed to grasp teh intent of teh point and I've had to go back to get the answer I was looking for. For teh most part where I agree or accept your point I drop that line, and I have accepted many, I merely just wsh to exhaust all teh possibilities...
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.
Thank you...
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...
I was merely exploring as far as I could with you, I find teh best way to understand theory is through debate, I actually think I have less against your theories than when I began, but obviously during debate I'm not going to say that, now am I?
None.
