Russ, I'm going through past notes in relation to my talk tomorrow. I think this addresses your question:
There have been many attempts to define Radical Behaviorism. Most attempts are in terms of inclusion and exclusion, i.e. what radical behaviorists talk about, and what they do not talk about. More often definitions focus on solely on exclusion, providing a negative definition in which behaviorists are defined based on what they don’t do, rather than on what they do. However, this minimizes the profoundness of the approach. A simple, positive definition is: *Radical behaviorists claim that all questions about psychology are questions about behavior.* One is tempted to say something like “all interesting questions about psychology”, but that is unnecessary, as the converse of the above claim is also made: All questions that are not about behavior are not about psychology. These claims are historic and inclusive; the behaviorist is not trying to redefine psychology, rather to point out what psychology has always been. Thus, behaviorists are not, as is commonly believed, trying to deny the existence of phenomenon typically handled by psychology. Quite to the contrary, they are trying to argue the traditional questions can only be answered through careful observation and analysis of behavior. For example: You might ask: “At the dinner table, my child is really good at telling me what happened in school each day. How does he remember what happened earlier in the day?” The behaviorist asserts that your question can be answered completely, and without remainder, by explaining how your child’s behavior becomes a function of things that happened in the past. In particular, it sounds like you are interested in how his verbal behavior comes to be a function of what happened earlier. That is, to see how a child develops the ability to remember, we must (at a minimum) start with a child whose behavior is not a function of the past events, and observe them until their behavior is a function of the past events. If we determine what changed, we will know how he “remembers”. You might protest: “But that doesn’t *really* answer the question. A child could correctly report what happened earlier without remembering! They could be responding to cues you gave them, making lucky guesses, or remembering the homework they just finished rather than the class lesson from hours ago.” True enough. You *have* correctly identified one way in which the behaviorist’s version of the question is difficult to answer, but the term “function of” does not merely mean that the events correspond in any particular case. It is not enough to know that the verbal behavior matches a particular past event, the verbal behavior must be a function of those past events. To know that the child remembers the past event, we must demonstrate not merely that the two events correspond, but that the latter event changes as a function of the specific earlier events in question, rather than as a function of alternative past or present factors. [1] <#_ftn1> It is likely that determining whether or not a given pattern of verbal answers is a function of earlier events will require us to observe many situations that have not yet been observed, and perhaps even situations that would not occur naturally, i.e. we may need to manipulate variables in an experiment. Yes, the empirical burden is difficult to meet; however, the fact remains that once I answer the question of how behavior becomes a function of past events, I will have answered the question of how children come to “remember things.” ------------------------------ [1] <#_ftnref1> This is just as it is not enough for physicists to show that a single object happened to fall towards the center of the earth, they demonstrated that objects move as a function of the center of mass of other objects – move the center of mass, and the movements of nearby objects changes accordingly. ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Lab Manager Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20016 phone: (202) 885-3867 fax: (202) 885-1190 email: echar...@american.edu On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 7:47 AM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote: > > > *[NST==>So, I take it that from this last sentence, in red, you would > define hunger as a pattern of activity in the brain that is predictive of > feeding behavior, right. But not all feeding behavior, right? Only > feeding behavior that is preceded by deprivation? What if you got feeding > behavior that was not preceded by deprivation. What if you got > deprivation, and the rat never ate: --it just wandered around the food > filled cage looking restless and unhappy. What if all your variables > didn’t cluster as the concept “hunger” seems to demand? * > > > *If one has a set of related questions and convincing answers, then one > can talk about weaving them together into a concept. If a question is "Why > does this type of animal feed?", there could be preceding observables that > are predictive of that, especially physiological observables. Likewise for > "Why does this particular of animal fail to feed and others of its type do > when deprived of food?" If there are a lot of animals of the type that > fail to feed, when a model that predicts they should, that would not be a > very good model, and the second question would have to be investigated and > incorporated into the model. The animal is a physical system, a sort > of machine, so and it can be taken apart and studied in parts. A > concept cannot be a cause separate from the machine or the environment of > the machine, and so it serves no purpose but to constrain the kind of > spatial or temporal patterns to anticipate. * > > > *It attacks its nematocyst prey when it needs them, stops when it has > “enough.” But the nematocysts play no role in the metabolism of the > hydra. It captures other pray to feed in the ordinary sense. Is this a > hunger? In many animals, the elements of prey orientation, search, chase, > attack, immobilization, opening the prey, consumption and or storage, etc., > don’t line up in the way that the vernacular concept of hunger demands. * > > > *It is a process to be understood on its own. As an analogy, a robot > control system designed by conventional software engineering techniques > might have subroutines for identifying targets, chasing them, immobilizing > them, and so on. These subroutines could be adopted for the purpose of > securing energy resources, or for some other purpose. If it is for > securing energy, then one should look for logic conditionals in the control > system that check the battery voltage (say). Likewise in a biological > system, there better be signaling techniques in the organism that plausibly > arise from lower-level metabolic indicators.* > > > *To return to humans, and self-perception, for a moment, one of the family > of variables that would seem to need to cluster with deprivation, and food > getting activity is what we behaviorists call “self-report” : in this case, > the answer to the question, “Are you hungry?” But like many self-report > variables, hunger self-report measures do not necessarily cluster all that > well with other presumptively measures of “hunger”, whatever we might > decide it to be. So, it becomes a real empirical question to ask what, in > God’s name, the subject is speaking to when he answers the question, “Are > you hungry?”.* > > > *It seems to me to understand self-reports (higher brain function) one > should get a reference point as to whether brain stem level processing of > energy balance signals is really underway. They could be reporting "I'm > anxious and eating reduces my anxiety" or some other convoluted thing, or > they could be misrepresenting their feelings just for fun, etc.* > > > *Marcus* > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >
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