NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/sci/psycholo/4478

Text File | 1992-11-22 | 1.9 KB | 39 lines

Newsgroups: sci.psychology
Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!utcsri!psych.toronto.edu!christo
From: [e-mail] (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: Roll Over, Pavlov.
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <[e-mail]>
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1992 18:24:40 GMT
Lines: 28

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Ruth Ginzberg) writes:
>
>There's been a debate going on in rec.pets.dogs that is driving me *nuts*, over
>whether or not one must have a model (or a guess, or knowledge, or whatever) of
>what a dog is *thinking* in order successfully to train it, or whether just
>being able to observe its *behavior* is enough.
>
The whole point of the behaviorist movement was that you did not. In fact,
many behaviorists claimed that there was no such thing as thinking to model.
The experimental facts seem to show, however, that there are many associations
that are much more difficult to condition than others. This points to the
existence of something more than a "black box" mediating the learning of
such associations.  Behaviorists have a series of explanations for this
problem as well (most of which amount to, "it's not our problem; it's the
problem of the brain scientists/evolutionary theorists"). Also, there are
very few real behaviorists left in psychology (they call themselves
"experimental behavior analysts" now), though they always claim their
numbers are growing. Almost veryone believes that an understanding of
an organism's "cognition" is crucial to understanding it behavior (provided
of course you're interested in animals much above the frog in the phylogenetic
scale).


--
Christopher D. Green                [e-mail]
Psychology Department               [e-mail]
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1