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- Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 20:19:46 -0500
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- From: psy_delprato@EMUNIX.EMICH.EDU
- Subject: Skinner and Deprivation: Reply
- Lines: 59
-
- [FROM: Dennis Delprato (930106)]
-
- >(Bill Powers (930105.2130))
-
- >Did Skinner ever face the problem of the specificity of the
- >relationship between deprivation and reinforcement? Why is food
- >deprivation the best way to make food a reinforcer, water
- >deprivation the best for making water reinforcing, exercise
- >deprivation the best way to make ... etc. ? And, of course, the
- >converse of these questions: why does free access to food, water,
- >exercise, etc. make these things, specifically these things in
- >1:1 correspondence, less effective as reinforcers?
-
- I am fairly certain he would invoke evolution. When the organism
- is deprived of certain opportunities (to eat, sometimes exercise...),
- it is more likely to eat, be active... when given the opportunity
- than under conditions of nondeprivation. "In the evolutionary
- sense this 'explains' why water deprivation strengthens all
- conditioned and unconditioned behavior concerned with the intake
- of water" (Science and Human Behavior, 1953, p. 142). Also,
- ontogenic factors can come into play, e.g., conditioning or
- "history of reinforcement."
-
- >You say "he viewed deprivation procedures as simply controlling
- >variables (= variables of which behavior is a function) in his
- >terminology." Did he never suspect that there was a pattern here?
- >Didn't it ever occur to him that something is reinforcing BECAUSE
- >of deprivation? Of course that would have led him into deep
- >waters, philosophically, because he would have had to see that
- >lack of something is a deprivation only if the organism wants it
- >and actively (spontaneously!) seeks it out. You can deprive a
- >fish of air indefinitely without making air reinforcing to a
- >fish.
-
- I intepret him as taking the position that one way to make
- an object or activity reinforcing is by way of deprivation.
- Thus, his theory agrees with the statement that something is
- reinforcing (functions as a reinforcer) because of deprivation.
- The level of deprivation is an environmental variable
- that an experimenter can manipulate as an independent variable.
-
- He would object to adding that deprivation leads to a want
- that in turn enters into the control of behavior. To him,
- want is an inner cause that is of no use in predicting
- and controlling behavior. He would ask how would we
- produce a want, how do we know what the organism wants?
- Only by environmental manipulations and/or observations
- of overt behavior. And he might go on and point out that
- want is a prescientific concept that his experimental
- analysis of behavior finds unnecessary to go about the
- job of understanding behavior.
-
- Note the relevance of phylogeny (in Skinner's view) to the
- fish case.
-
- Dennis Delprato
- De Psychology
- Eastern Mich. Univ.
- Ypsilanti, MI 48197
-