: I have appreciated your comments, Bill, and I have benefited immensely from being able to express my views in such a forum. My views on behaviorism were, I believe, clarified a good deal during the exchanges that we have had. However, repetition has set in and I have felt less and less reinforced by my exchanges of late... Hopefully I can re-envigor you, I just want to clarify one wee point...
: In a nutshell: we don't cry because we feel sad and we don't feel sad because we cry (as James had it); we feel sad and we cry because of environmental events that control our behavior.
This is a sidetrack to what I wanted to ask, but still I'll raise it anyhow. Wouldn't it be perfectly acceptable within a deterministic framework to suggest that environmental contingecnies cause feelings which cause actions, rather than your stance which is that the feelings are the ephemera of environmental and active causation?
Thus environment causes sadness, sadness causes crying, etc. An unthought out side point...
: On the other hand, the awareness that we do things because we know there are antecedent environmental events emitting or eliciting behavior is no reason to presume that behavior will then cease or become unpredictable (i.e., autonomous). Being aware of why we do things will not make humans more like horses, Bill, such awareness will make humans more like humans. (Such awareness may even assist socialistic cooperation.) : Behaviorism is the opposite of determinism.
Yes, 've addressed this point before, but I would like it clarified, particulalry in the light of you last sentencce (which I have moved here. How can you actually reckon teh category of science and knowledge to be extra-determination? I'm afriad I can't see how that can be, because what I learn is environmentall determined, and the conlcusions I draw are environmentally etermined, etc? How can you claim a special category for thought when all thought is but the ephemera of bahaviour?
My own point of view, clearly is that it cannot be, but rather, one should look at thought, and feeling as a processing of teh environment, rather than a passive reflection, which perhaps allows some scope for a category of experience and practicality. Dunno, even that is environmentally determinate...
: While you may be confident that appeals to reason or emotions will change human behavior, your own behavior (like mine) shows that it, in fact, does not. (Our 'reasoning' with one another has accomplished nothing; your position is as it was, and so is mine.)
An internet forum is a poor place for reasoning, face to face discussion achieves much more. And you never know, you both may have altered one another perceiptions, slightly redefined each others vocabulary, added social discourses which will effect furture reasoning...
:I believe behavior (and 'points of view') can only be changed by actual contingent variables, not by 'reasons' or appeals to feelings. To assume that these contingencies are 'in our minds,' inaccessible to functional control, strikes me as one of the most hopeless of philosophies.
But how, short of forcefully changing folks' environments can you achieve this? A leninist would certainly agree with your position here. Perhaps you would be helped if you redefined persuation and thought as a contigent behaviour, speech as speech acts.
In teh terms of raymond williams, any theory which reduces thought to mere ephemera is not sufficently material, until thought is accounted for in material social praxis our theories must be incomplete..
None.
