Vaguely (but don't ask me what I had for dinner last night ;-).
And it sounds vaguely right.
Unfortunately my library is in boxes in the basement right now, so I
can't grab Skinner's autobiography to what he had to say about the
affair.
Anyway -- thanks for the update.
On Dec 24, 2008, at 8:42 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Remember this?
---------------------------
Paul Brandon wrote:
Was Hebb the one who coined the term "Conceptual Nervous System
(CNS)"? It's not indexed in his "Essay on Mind"; unfortunately I no
longer have the copy of his textbook that I used when I first took
psychology in 1960.
Stephen Black wrote:
Yes. It's right there in the title of one his most famous essays:
Hebb, D.O. (1955). Drives and the C.N.S. (Conceptual nervous
system). Psychological Review, 62, 243-254.
-------------------------
No, of course you don't. That exchange took place almost a decade ago
(November 11, 1999) but the Internet has a long memory. Just the other
day Holly the graduate student at Laurentian University (No? It's in
Sudbury, Ontario) wrote to tell me I was wrong when I gave Paul that
response.
I'm sorry, Paul. Holly is right. It wasn't Hebb who invented the
term--it
was Skinner. But it was Hebb's fault I got it wrong. In _Drives and
the
C.N.S._ (available at Chris's http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/
Hebb/), in
his opening paragraph Hebb casually links Skinner to that term, but
there
is no explicit citation, so it was far from clear that it was
Skinner's
invention.
But as Holly pointed out to me, Hebb admitted in an essay on his
famous
paper (Citation classic at
http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1979/A1979HZ26100001.pdf)
that
the title of Hebb's paper was a little joke inspired by Skinner who
had
said that the "C" in "CNS" stood for "conceptual". But still no
reference.
But the Internet has a long memory. A quick google shows that Skinner
used the term in his "Are theories of learning necessary" paper (Psych
Review, 1950; see http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Skinner/Theories/ at
Chris's site again).
Skinner actually said there:
"The writer's suggestion that the letters CNS be regarded as
representing, not the Central Nervous System, but the Conceptual
Nervous
System (2, p. 421), seems to have been taken seriously."
The reference (2) is to his great (1938) work, _The Behavior of
Organisms_.
So there you have it. Nine years after Paul posed the question, we
have
the definitive answer. It was Skinner who coined the phrase, not Hebb.
Thank you Holly (but not you, Donald Hebb).
Paul Brandon
Emeritus Professor of Psychology
Minnesota State University, Mankato
[email protected]
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