Re: Against Behaviorism

On 9 Giu, 21:58, stevendaryl3...@xxxxxxxxx (Daryl McCullough) wrote:
I've had numerous exchanges with Glen Sizemore and various other
behaviorists in which I cavalierly dismissed behaviorism. This is
in *spite* of the fact that I agree with behaviorists on the importance
of behavior in understanding the mind. I just feel that behaviorism is
a very *poor* way to study behavior.

Let me make an analogy with machines---for example computers or cars.
For our machines, typically the thing that we care care about is
how they behave: how the car responds when I step on the gas,
or step on the brakes, or turn the ignition key. But if something
is *wrong* with the car's behavior---it isn't accelerated properly,
or it won't start, or it makes funny sounds when I put on the
brakes---I *don't* bring my car to a "car behaviorist". I don't
try to improve its behavior by reinforcing good behavior and
punishing bad behavior.

I don't think this is a proper analogy. A car doesn't have the ability
to learn.

Instead, I bring my car to mechanic,
someone who understands what's going on *inside* the car to
produce its behavior. And if the mechanic doesn't understand
well, enough from the symptoms, he looks inside to get more
information. The idea of trying to understand a car from its
external behavior is just *ludicrous*.

So why in the world do behaviorists think that that's a good
way to understand human beings, who are *much* more complicated,
internally, than cars? Behaviorists talk about "reinforcement"
as if that explains behavior. It *doesn't*. To say that a
dog wags his tail when his owner comes through the door because
that behavior was reinforced doesn't explain *anything*. Why
does reinforcement *work* on a dog?

Is it actually so? It doesn't seem that dogs are trained or even
involutary rewarded for waging their tails to their owners. I think
that it's most likely an instinctive behavior.
Even if it is a learned behavior, simply saying that is reinforced
doesn't explain many things:
how the dogs recognizes his owner, an human, an animal, for instance.

It certainly doesn't work
on my car: I can't get better behavior from my car by using
operant conditioning (or whatever the expression is). If it
works on my dog, then *that* is a fact that needs to be explained
by a true science of behavior. It isn't an explanation, it is
an observation, and observations are what scientific theories
are supposed to explain.

I don't think that Behaviorism is completely without merit.
If I understood it properly, in it's general form Behaviorism attempts
to describe the expected output of an organism given an history of
inputs.
This is a good start. However, claiming that nothing should or can be
known about the internal processes that implement this input-output
response is anti-scientific.

.

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