[Wittrs] Re: some helpful guidelines for reading Wittgenstein's philo...
- From: "Stuart W. Mirsky" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:42:58 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "gerardoprim" <gerardoprim@...> wrote:
>
> (Stuart) I guess what I'm saying, Gerardo, is that if you change a concept by
> expanding its scope of application, after a point you have something very
> different.
> (Gerardo) Yes, it´s something very different, we´ve agreed on that. Let´s
> move on and analyse what this new usage implies for our goals.
>
> (Stuart) If behaviorism originally referred to overt behaviors (meaning what
> we can see) and then was expanded to include covert behaviors (what we can't
> see as a matter of fact because its concealed but which could be seen if it
> wasn't) and then its expanded still further to include things that only the
> individual can see, after a while all we've done is redefine things like
> mental phenomena, originally specifically excluded from behaviorism, as
> "behavior" too. And now all we've done is expand the idea of behaviorism so
> far as to cover even what was once not considered behavior.
> (Gerardo) Don´t forget that the expansion doesn´t include all that was
> considered as "mental", but only a subset of it (activity detectable at least
> by one person). I see nothing wrong with proposing a new usage and see what
> happens. The issue is how the new conceptual framework works with respect to
> our goals.
>
Neither do I but I question whether you should retain the old name in such a
case. More, I'm not sure what you're leaving out once you've included what were
once called mental events. After all, those we have access to are, necessarily
(given our understanding of brains and minds), undergirded by events and
processes to which we have no access (some of which may have been included in
the Freudian notion of the unconscious but others no doubt would have to
include the constituent processes that make mental events happen).
> (Stuart) I'm not disputing that we can change meanings of words, expand their
> applications, etc. I'm just saying that, if behaviorism was originally
> formulated to account for human behavior without invoking the idea of minds
> (understood as a private realm), then you have substantially altered the
> meaning of "behaviorism"
> (Gerardo) You´re oversimplifying the motivations that elicited the
> behaviorist proposals.
I'm not addressing the motivations. I'm sure they are sincere. I'm only trying
to say something about the outcome of the move.
> There were several motivations, and therefore several proposals. You should
> ask how each behaviorist answered some questions: "what´s mind?", "what´s
> wrong with mind?" and "what should we do about it?". For Watson, what´s wrong
> is that "introspection is > unreliable for doing scientific research",
He would be right though I don't think his answer to the problem is.
> and what we should do is "rely on observable behavioral data". For Kantor,
> what´s wrong is "the postulation of supernatural entities", and what we
> should do is "remain within a naturalistic description of observable fields
> of events".
I would agree again (this is similar to Dennett's attack on the notion of
"qualia") but there is nothing "supernatural" about recognizing that we have
mental images, memories, etc.
> For Skinner, what´s wrong is that "postulation of mental stuff is a
> pseudoexplanation" and what we should do is "rely on experimental analysis",
> but "private activity" is not the "mental stuff" that should be avoided. The
> "mental stuff" that should be avoided (in scientific research) is the concept
> of "inner causal agency" and "inner world of ghostly copies".
>
I would also tend to agree with this. The "inner causal agency" leads to an
homunculus like infinite regress while the "inner world of ghostly copies"
sounds overly simplistic (that is, I wouldn't want to say that we have
representations that simply mirror what's out there but I also wouldn't want to
say that we have no "representations" at all as part of this mechanism -- of
course "representations" has lots of meanings, too, so we would have to get
clear on these first).
> (Stuart) if you now say but those elements that are private are really
> behavior, too. And if you've done that, then it's not a defense against a
> criticism of the original behaviorism nor does it establish that everything
> is still about behaviors only, just because we are now calling a broader
> range of things "behavior".
> (Gerardo) You insist on saying that "it´s not really behavior", but you´re
> begging the question, because your premise for saying so is precisely the
> rejection of the conceptual change. If there´s a conceptual change, it´s
> obvious that some features will remain and others will be modified, and the
> assessment of what should or shouldn´t remain and what can or cannot be
> modified depends on each conceptual usage´s purposes. So, instead of
> repeating that "it´s not really behavior", let´s analyse what is similar and
> what is different in each conceptual usage, and what are their effects on our
> purposes.
If you want to argue that mental images are behaviors, you would have to
radically redefine the latter term ("behaviors") in my view. You can do it but
then you aren't talking about what we ordinarily mean by "behavior" inn which
case all you've got left is the same word (the same assemblage of sounds) which
was used to denote the earlier psychological discipline/thesis.
> For example, would you consider that "seeing a dog" is behavior? I´d say that
> we could apply the term and consider it a "perceptual behavior" under the
> control of the actually observed stimulus and the previous learning
> contingencies with similar stimuli. You may want to retain the word
> "behavior" only for muscular responses that act on the world and are publicly
> observable by other people, but even if you want to distinguish them from
> muscular responses, you should acknowledge that there´re many features that
> are closer to the concept of "behavior" than to the other (non- episodic and
> non-interactional) mental concepts: "seeing a dog" is an event (it has a >
> beginning and an end),
Well you could call it "eventism" or "event behaviorism" I suppose.
> a kind of interactional activity between the organism and its environment, a
> response modifiable by conditioning principles, and it is composed by many
> physiological changes in the organism, most of
> them not easily observable by other people.
That would still be "behavior" of course albeit not the overt kind behaviorists
were originally enamoured of. More important, though, is how the approach deals
with private mental events such as some of those I've described.
> The same could be said about other sensory dimensions such as hearing,
> feeling, and smelling. And all these examples already have the issue of
> privacy: a person staring at a dog might not be seeing a dog. How would you
> see these examples?
>
> Regards,
> Gerardo.
>
As somewhere in between but clearly not amenable to the original behaviorist
thesis as I have come to understand that. I agree that THAT behaviorism needed
modification and I think the direction you've undertaken is the right one. It
might even bring this kind of psychology closer in line with Wittgenstein -- at
least on my view.
SWM
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