Re: The animal, not the environment, controls behavior.


JGCASEY wrote:
Michael Olea wrote:
JGCASEY wrote:
It is not the car that "wants" to go to Aunt Emmie's.
However you want to define what is meant by having
"wants" it is part of the driver in this case and even
if you can trace that "want" back through the driver's
history it is the driver's history not the car's history.

This seems so clear to me I can only suspect the
behaviorists have some kind of viewpoint that they
can't seem to make clear to the average Joe such as
myself. Michael Olea seems to understand what they
are on about but so far has not explained it either.


Or, an alternative hypothesis, I have explained "stimulus
control", and you have not understood the explanation.
I'll try to make a clearer explanation, but there are
other things I "want" to focus on first.


To "explain" means something is "understood". If the paint
falls off the wall, for whatever reason, you have failed to
paint the wall. An explanation for one person may not be
an explanation for another person.



"Stimulus control" is just another word game played by MO, WK, and GS.
If the behaviorists want to contend that - in SPECIFIC situations - the
stimulus elicits certain behaviors from the organisms, that is one
thing. But they err when they broaden such affect to "control", and
attempt to "generalize" it to EVERY situation. This is just
overly-simplistic generalization, and it doesn't follow.

Skinner was the master at overly-simplistic generalizations, such as
"... all responsibility inheres to the environment ... there is nothing
for autonomous man to take credit or responsibility for ...", and his
followers simply seem to stay in lock-step. Skinner measured a few
pigeons in the lab, and then err'ed - as Mortimer Adler says - when he
tried to generalize his laboratory findings to the rest of life and
behavior.

As noted, the bottom line is that if your car were really in control,
you would never ever get to Aunt Emmie's place. The reality is that the
car, roads, etc, impose "constraints" on what you yourself intend and
attempt to do. It's as simple as that.

The key is the difference between control and constaint. The organism
[you] initiates an action [to go to Aunt Emmie's], and the environment
feeds back certain constraining effects [buy gasoline for the car, turn
the steering wheel, shift the gears, stay on the highway and don't try
to go cross-country, etc] which you need to contend with to achieve
your intentional goal [dinner with Aunt Emmie at 5PM].

.

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