On 28 Dec 2003 07:29:59 -0800, erayo@bilkent.edu.tr (Eray Ozkural
exa) wrote:

} Let the readership decide who is an idiot:

Fine. Let's make it easy on them and take it a bit at a time. You can
help.

} 1. A computer scientist who explores the philosophical problems
} regarding the computational view of the mind.

A field which is as close to drowning in irrefutable rhetoric as any
other fundamentalist religion. Typically they jump into "quantum" or
"holographic" or similar improperly understood and applied concepts,
and generate untestable "theories".

Quite so. Part of my reaction was due to my own viewpoint, which I
described just prior in my response to Glen. Not anti-thetical, but
definitely the required extension, as per Skinner himself.

As for my delivery, I'll make no apologies. Sometimes it takes deft
application of a clue by four to make a point, and sometimes that
point really just focuses on "shut up".

Consider it corrective phrenology.

Doktor DynaSoar <targeting@OMCL.mil> wrote in message
news:<lslvuvgbkgc4ubf2ag4enmvmkqa76t5ea0@4ax.com>...
Quite so. Part of my reaction was due to my own viewpoint, which I
described just prior in my response to Glen. Not anti-thetical, but
definitely the required extension, as per Skinner himself.

As for my delivery, I'll make no apologies. Sometimes it takes deft
application of a clue by four to make a point, and sometimes that
point really just focuses on "shut up".

Consider it corrective phrenology.

I suppose you could make a great argument if you didn't rely on your
clue by four to make a point.

Please read my other post in which I retract my statement that you
ought to be a behaviorist. I was mistaken in labelling you a
behaviorist only because of the way you speak.

On 28 Dec 2003 12:07:48 -0800, erayo@bilkent.edu.tr (Eray Ozkural
exa) in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:

I'm not sure I can give examples in the sense you mean. I think what
I'm suggesting is that if one cannot define some specific key concept
such as behavior, it is often better to complicate the analysis with
variants of the key concept that you can define. In other words if one
cannot define behavior exactly one might be better off embracing
variants of behavior like public, private, emitted and so on because
these latter terms are much more easily defined and will leave the
impression that one has defined behavior when all one is doing is
repeating the undefined term behavior in different contexts.

In point of fact we have no idea whether such things as public,
private, emitted and so on kinds of behavior represent necessary
distinctions in mechanical terms because we don't have any exact
understanding of what behavior itself means and behaviorism doesn't
shed any light on that subject. Just because behavior is public or
private or emitted or not doesn't mean it's significantly different in
mechanical terms from behavior in general. In other words these are
trivial distinctions unless the idea of behavior in cognitive beings
is defined first. And that is something behaviorism is unable to do.

So I think in response to your question I would have to say that
behaviorists are actually embracing complex behavioral issues to avoid
dealing with the simple issue of what behavior means in mechanical
terms. They simply evade the issue by claiming the definition of
behavior has been done somewhere else and quickly move on to the
analysis of behavioral variants they feel more comfortable with.

This is really the reason behaviorists insist on their own jargon. It
isn't that the terms they use are more precise. It's that their own
terms are all they understand behavior in terms of. They don't know
what behavior in cognitive beings actually means apart from those
variants of behavior so they have no way to relate the significance of
behavior in general to anyone elses ideas on the subject. The only
thing they have are those terms cast in terms of a subject they don't
understand. So they have to convey whatever thoughts they have on the
subject in those terms.

As for the attacks of behaviorists, I would suggest that you not
concern yourself so much. I really think that you, Omega, and some
others take behaviorists much too seriously. I've seen some very
esoteric arguments attacking the validity of behaviorism but what the
problem really amounts to is that behaviorists don't understand what
behavior is. So anything they have to say on the subject of behavioral
variants is really beside the point.

Now I don't necessarily think that cognitive science knows what
behavior represents in mechanical terms either. But at least they have
the locus of cognition much more firmly and correctly established.
Behaviorists on the other hand are out there in outer space looking
for environmental circumstances whose relevance they don't even
understand because they don't understand the nature of behavior to
begin with.

In article <fa69ae35.0312290514.31a6f336@posting.google.com>, Eray
Ozkural exa <erayo@bilkent.edu.tr> writes
Doktor DynaSoar <targeting@OMCL.mil> wrote in message
news:<lslvuvgbkgc4ubf2ag4enmvmkqa76t5ea0@4ax.com>...
Quite so. Part of my reaction was due to my own viewpoint, which I
described just prior in my response to Glen. Not anti-thetical, but
definitely the required extension, as per Skinner himself.

As for my delivery, I'll make no apologies. Sometimes it takes deft
application of a clue by four to make a point, and sometimes that
point really just focuses on "shut up".

Consider it corrective phrenology.

I suppose you could make a great argument if you didn't rely on your
clue by four to make a point.

Please read my other post in which I retract my statement that you
ought to be a behaviorist. I was mistaken in labelling you a
behaviorist only because of the way you speak.

And how else are you going to make assessments in forums such as this?

rickert+nn@cs.niu.edu> writes
David Longley <David@longley.demon.co.uk> writes:

You can ask what are the criteria by which they make these ascriptions
of truth or falsity. But philosophers always evade such questions.

Hmm, I suppose that a behaviorists might say that how people ascribe
truth is a matter of conditioning. But that would seem to imply that
truth is socially constructed.

The point to grasp (especially in this forum) is
the scope and language of science.

Well sure. That's about what I would expect. Namely, that Longley
thinks of science as some kind of language game. But that
characterizes pseudo-science, not real science.

The theory of truth in this context
is basically Tarski's "disappearance, or disquotational" theory.

Tarski's theory was on a theory of truth for a formal language, and
it presupposes that there is already notion of truth available in
natural language. Tarski gives no guidance at all to the basis for
truth of natural language statements.

All of these points have been addressed and resolved a number of times
before (if others look back through the archives they'll see that).

Neil W Rickert says...

The theory of truth in this context
is basically Tarski's "disappearance, or disquotational" theory.

Tarski's theory was on a theory of truth for a formal language, and
it presupposes that there is already notion of truth available in
natural language.

No, it does not. Tarski's theory presupposes a notion of *meaning*
of statements, not a notion of *truth* for statements. Basically,
whatever

"The sky is blue"

means,

"It is true that the sky is blue"

means the same thing.

The theory of truth in this context
is basically Tarski's "disappearance, or disquotational" theory.

Tarski's theory was on a theory of truth for a formal language, and
it presupposes that there is already notion of truth available in
natural language.

rickert+nn@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
} Doktor DynaSoar <targeting@OMCL.mil> writes:

} >} 1. A computer scientist who explores the philosophical problems
} >} regarding the computational view of the mind.
}
} >A field which is as close to drowning in irrefutable rhetoric as any
} >other fundamentalist religion. Typically they jump into "quantum" or
} >"holographic" or similar improperly understood and applied concepts,
} >and generate untestable "theories".
}
} No, that is not typical. The quantum mind and holographic mind types
} are a tiny minority, and usually viewed with some disdain.

The latter particularly by Karl Pribram, who is creditied with the
idea. You do NOT want to get him started on how people misuse and
misstate his theories. It should be a requirement that if you're going
to use his ideas, you have to be able to handle the math. The math is
Gabor and Schroedinger functions, primarly.

I disagree about the numbers. There's gobs and piles of them out
there.

lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message news:<3fef7e0c.31513518@netnews.att.net>...
On 28 Dec 2003 12:07:48 -0800, erayo@bilkent.edu.tr (Eray Ozkural
exa) in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:

I'm not sure I can give examples in the sense you mean. I think what
I'm suggesting is that if one cannot define some specific key concept
such as behavior, it is often better to complicate the analysis with
variants of the key concept that you can define. In other words if one
cannot define behavior exactly one might be better off embracing
variants of behavior like public, private, emitted and so on because
these latter terms are much more easily defined and will leave the
impression that one has defined behavior when all one is doing is
repeating the undefined term behavior in different contexts.


Had Godel's philosophy become more widely known, it would strike to us
immediately that this is essentially analogous to Godel's criticism of
conventionalism in that their efforts in trying to reduce mathematics
to syntax of language is doomed to fail for they necessarily have to
retain abstract concepts in their arguments.

Here, the conventionalists are again in front of us, trying to make
behavior which is an abstract concept into conventions such as
"public" and "private" and so forth, pretending that behavior has been
fully captured by these definitions.

Do you see the analogy?

In point of fact we have no idea whether such things as public,
private, emitted and so on kinds of behavior represent necessary
distinctions in mechanical terms because we don't have any exact
understanding of what behavior itself means and behaviorism doesn't
shed any light on that subject. Just because behavior is public or
private or emitted or not doesn't mean it's significantly different in
mechanical terms from behavior in general. In other words these are
trivial distinctions unless the idea of behavior in cognitive beings
is defined first. And that is something behaviorism is unable to do.

As I have stated explicitly elsewhere, there is a general sense in
which behavior should be understood and that is exactly the
communicative aspect of computational processes in nature. Behaviorism
sheds no light on this relation.

Behavior, in this regard, is a shadow of computation.

Just like the language is a shadow of mind.

So I think in response to your question I would have to say that
behaviorists are actually embracing complex behavioral issues to avoid
dealing with the simple issue of what behavior means in mechanical
terms. They simply evade the issue by claiming the definition of
behavior has been done somewhere else and quickly move on to the
analysis of behavioral variants they feel more comfortable with.

OK. I can accept this. They seem to be working on contrived problems
just to be able to avoid the core issues.

This is really the reason behaviorists insist on their own jargon. It
isn't that the terms they use are more precise. It's that their own
terms are all they understand behavior in terms of. They don't know
what behavior in cognitive beings actually means apart from those
variants of behavior so they have no way to relate the significance of
behavior in general to anyone elses ideas on the subject. The only
thing they have are those terms cast in terms of a subject they don't
understand. So they have to convey whatever thoughts they have on the
subject in those terms.

That is conventionalism and that is why it is so detached from
reality.

Conventionalism, taken in its entire glory, is a miserable western
teen's idea. It is a philosophy of nothingness. It's not just
ineffective, it's false.

That lack of substance is also evident in the way behaviorists write
and they argue. Skinner himself is representative of the strange
"verbal behavior" that is so characteristic of behaviorism (It's
amazing to read the works of behaviorists, they give me the feeling of
trying to read a sentence without meaning, like essays produced
randomly by a computer)

As for the attacks of behaviorists, I would suggest that you not
concern yourself so much. I really think that you, Omega, and some
others take behaviorists much too seriously. I've seen some very
esoteric arguments attacking the validity of behaviorism but what the
problem really amounts to is that behaviorists don't understand what
behavior is. So anything they have to say on the subject of behavioral
variants is really beside the point.


I see. My problem was that the person whom attacked you claimed to be
an anti-behaviorist ("neuroscience is antithetical to behaviorism")
and then called anti-behaviorists fundamentalist. Anyway, it doesn't
matter.

Now I don't necessarily think that cognitive science knows what
behavior represents in mechanical terms either. But at least they have
the locus of cognition much more firmly and correctly established.
Behaviorists on the other hand are out there in outer space looking
for environmental circumstances whose relevance they don't even
understand because they don't understand the nature of behavior to
begin with.

I think this is a good point.

Regards,

--
Eray Ozkural

In article <3fef7e0c.31513518@netnews.att.net>, Lester Zick
lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net> writes
On 28 Dec 2003 12:07:48 -0800, erayo@bilkent.edu.tr (Eray Ozkural
exa) in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:

lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message
news:<3feb8787.2647984@netnews.att.net>...
In other words the only way behaviorism has to analyze behavior is to
characterize various behavioral forms in purely nominal terms
amounting to nothing more than simplistic and naive distinctions like
public, private, emitted or whatever. And what makes such distinctions
significant? Because behaviorists can reliably define words like these
without reference to behavior in general.

This is probably a paragraph worth discussing. I wish I had not jumped
on Doktor DynaSaur's attack on you and had answered this instead.

You are essentially saying that behaviorists are rejecting the
existence of complex problems because they can only deal with very
simple cases. Is that right?

That would be valid meta philosophy I guess. :)

If you could give a few examples from behaviorist literature where
they do that, it would be supportive of your argument.

This isn't a very new argument, but it seems to be a nice summary of
your observations.

I'm not sure I can give examples in the sense you mean. I think what
I'm suggesting is that if one cannot define some specific key concept
such as behavior, it is often better to complicate the analysis with
variants of the key concept that you can define. In other words if one
cannot define behavior exactly one might be better off embracing
variants of behavior like public, private, emitted and so on because
these latter terms are much more easily defined and will leave the
impression that one has defined behavior when all one is doing is
repeating the undefined term behavior in different contexts.

In point of fact we have no idea whether such things as public,
private, emitted and so on kinds of behavior represent necessary
distinctions in mechanical terms because we don't have any exact
understanding of what behavior itself means and behaviorism doesn't
shed any light on that subject. Just because behavior is public or
private or emitted or not doesn't mean it's significantly different in
mechanical terms from behavior in general. In other words these are
trivial distinctions unless the idea of behavior in cognitive beings
is defined first. And that is something behaviorism is unable to do.

So I think in response to your question I would have to say that
behaviorists are actually embracing complex behavioral issues to avoid
dealing with the simple issue of what behavior means in mechanical
terms. They simply evade the issue by claiming the definition of
behavior has been done somewhere else and quickly move on to the
analysis of behavioral variants they feel more comfortable with.

This is really the reason behaviorists insist on their own jargon. It
isn't that the terms they use are more precise. It's that their own
terms are all they understand behavior in terms of. They don't know
what behavior in cognitive beings actually means apart from those
variants of behavior so they have no way to relate the significance of
behavior in general to anyone elses ideas on the subject. The only
thing they have are those terms cast in terms of a subject they don't
understand. So they have to convey whatever thoughts they have on the
subject in those terms.

As for the attacks of behaviorists, I would suggest that you not
concern yourself so much. I really think that you, Omega, and some
others take behaviorists much too seriously. I've seen some very
esoteric arguments attacking the validity of behaviorism but what the
problem really amounts to is that behaviorists don't understand what
behavior is. So anything they have to say on the subject of behavioral
variants is really beside the point.

Now I don't necessarily think that cognitive science knows what
behavior represents in mechanical terms either. But at least they have
the locus of cognition much more firmly and correctly established.
Behaviorists on the other hand are out there in outer space looking
for environmental circumstances whose relevance they don't even
understand because they don't understand the nature of behavior to
begin with.



Regards - Lester


I've only scanned the above as it seems to me that Zick has his head so
far up his rectum that he has little chance of seeing anything
worthwhile. Point by point challenges would require me to want to invest
more time on him that I would find worthwhile - he just doesn't listen
and he doesn't read.

I've posted the following before in response to other peoples'
misconceptions, and it seems worth posting again. It is meant for
others, as I'm pretty such Zick won't understand the metaphor of
Neurath's (or Theseus') Boat. Nor will he understand what "Ontological
Relativity" (1969) was all about.

oOo

Posted back in early November:

Ok, Do a Google search on "Five Milestones of Empiricism" and look at
Groups (after a quick look at anything on web that catches your
interest). You'll the former lists 10 past messages from me to this
newsgroup.

Here's one from Oct '97.

oOo

First of all it's important to understand that the focus is on
the use of LANGUAGE. Quine's book from which this is taken is
about the use of language and how it is learned. He takes each
gramatical part of language and analyses how they are used, and
when it comes to those elements which are psychological verbs, or
the "propositional attitudes" he highlights something odd about
them - is the failure of extensionality (substitutivity of
identicals "salva veritate"). Note, what's being discussed here
is verbal behaviour, our use of words and sentences.

To appreciate why he focuses on language it might help to read
some of "The Five Milestones of Empiricism".

'We want to know how men can have achieved the
conjectures and abstractions that go into scientific
theory. How can we pursue such an inquiry whilst talking
of external things to the exclusion of ideas and
concepts? There is a way: we can talk of language. We
can talk of concrete men and their concrete noises.
Ideas are as may be, but the words are out there where
we can see and hear them. And scientific theories,
however speculative and however abstract, are in words.
One and the same theory can be expressed in different
words, so people say, but all can perhaps agree that
there are no theories apart from words. Or, if there
are, there is little to be lost in passing over them.'
-
Quine (1973)
Breaking into Language
The Roots of Reference p 35

The 'Five Milestones of Empiricism' (Quine 1981) represent a
progressive shift from the 'idea' to 'the word', to 'the
sentence' to 'systems of sentences' to 'methodological monism'
(the abandonment of the analytic-synthetic distinction) and
finally to 'naturalism' (that there is no 'first philosophy').
Along the way, the borders between psychology and linguistic
philosophy, and both of these and the rest of science has
somewhat dissolved. In Quine's words, 'Philosophy of Science is
Philosophy enough'. Empiricism proper therefore has no place for
'psychology' in the guise of Cognitive Science, and is more
likely to naturalise behavioural science into disciplines
which focus on particular domains of human behaviour such as
'law', 'management', 'marketing' 'prison governership', 'landing
officership' etc. These are logical, not capricious conclusions.

With the demise of philosophy and psychology as
'ontic' disciplines, one has to at least consider the
possibility that what is studied under the auspices of
their names are perhaps pseudoproblems. The 'intensional
idioms', or 'idioms of propositional attitude' are not, from
this perspective, 'marks of the mental' or 'cognitive
representations' but GRAMMATICAL or LINGUISTIC anomalies .

There will still be collections of folk who, for one reason or
another continue to call themselves psychologists, astrologers,
etc etc - perhaps more out of ignorance & a penchant for mystery.
But as covered at length elsewhere, saying 'one can't quantify
into propositional attitudes' is not 'legislative' but
explicative of a linguistic anomaly. Attempts to quantify into
propositional attitudes are prone to go awry, and for well
understood reasons - because there are 'bugs' in language. A lot
of work has been invested in trying to understand the nature of
these bugs. Quine in particular has taken a 'genetic' (ie
ontogenetic) approach suggesting that they represent
application of grammatical rules in contexts where they are
nevertheless inappropriate (ie 'quantifying in' is ok with
some sentence elements (see below) but not others). Once one
accepts that work with 'cognitions' is work with verbal
behaviour, one should see why there is no reason to expect
there to be a relationship between work with such verbal
behaviour & the rest of an individual's repertoire of behaviour.
There MAY be, but it's rather akin to expecting training in
squash to generalise to tennis. Such training may well
transfer, but even if it does the transfer may be negative.

To say that there is no stable relationship between 'beliefs' and
other behaviour is not therefore to make some vague metaphysical
conjecture about 'mental stuff and physical stuff' but
rather to explicate a characteristic of a linguistic anomaly
which is definitive of the intensional idioms (propositional
attitudes and modal contexts). This must be so if one
passes the five milestones of empiricism alluded to at the
start of this note. I have recommended elsewhere that the work
of the mathematical logicians who have undertaken these analyses
should be looked at very carefully by psychologists,
particularly applied ones, since these logicians are in effect
telling us what is POSSIBLE within the basic infrastructure which
comprises scientific if not all analysis.

'Contextual definition precipitated a revolution in
semantics: less sudden perhaps than the Copernican
revolution in astronomy, but like it in being a shift of
center. The primary vehicle of meaning is seen no longer
as the word, but as the sentence. Terms, like
grammatical particles, mean by contributing to the
meaning of the sentences that contain them. The
heliocentrism propounded by Copernicus was not obvious,
and neither is this. It is not obvious because, for the
most part, we understand sentences only by construction
from understood words. This is necessarily so, since
sentences are potentially infinite in variety. We learn
some words in isolation, in effect as one-word
sentences; we learn further words in context, by
learning various short sentences that contain them; and
we understand further sentences by construction from the
words thus learned. If the language that we thus learn
is afterward compiled, the manual will necessarily
consist for the most part of a word-by-word dictionary,
thus obscuring the fact that the meanings of words are
abstractions from the truth conditions of sentences that
contain them.'

Quine (1981)
The five Milestones of Empiricism
Theories and Things p.69

'Naturalism does not repudiate epistemology, but
assimilates it to empirical psychology....
...The naturalistic philosopher begins his reasoning
within The inherited world theory as a going concern. He
tentatively believes all of it, but believes also that
some unidentified portions are wrong. He tries to
improve, clarify, and understand the system from within.
He is the busy sailor adrift on Neuraths's boat.'

W.V. Quine (1975)
Five Milestones of Empiricism
Theories and Things (1981)
oOo



--
David Longley

On 29 Dec 2003 05:40:54 -0800, erayo@bilkent.edu.tr (Eray Ozkural
exa) in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:

So I think in response to your question I would have to say that
behaviorists are actually embracing complex behavioral issues to avoid
dealing with the simple issue of what behavior means in mechanical
terms. They simply evade the issue by claiming the definition of
behavior has been done somewhere else and quickly move on to the
analysis of behavioral variants they feel more comfortable with.

OK. I can accept this. They seem to be working on contrived problems
just to be able to avoid the core issues.

This is what I'm getting at. However in contriving problems in
linguistic terms their analyses get bogged down in the specific
language constructs used to define their take on behavior in general.
So they find themselves unable to consider problems in other terms.

This is really the reason behaviorists insist on their own jargon. It
isn't that the terms they use are more precise. It's that their own
terms are all they understand behavior in terms of. They don't know
what behavior in cognitive beings actually means apart from those
variants of behavior so they have no way to relate the significance of
behavior in general to anyone elses ideas on the subject. The only
thing they have are those terms cast in terms of a subject they don't
understand. So they have to convey whatever thoughts they have on the
subject in those terms.

That is conventionalism and that is why it is so detached from
reality.

Conventionalism, taken in its entire glory, is a miserable western
teen's idea. It is a philosophy of nothingness. It's not just
ineffective, it's false.

When are you going to get some ideas of your own with which to
critique the ideas of others? But I digress.

On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 11:28:35 +0000, David Longley
David@longley.demon.co.uk> in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:

In article <3fef7e0c.31513518@netnews.att.net>, Lester Zick
lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net> writes
On 28 Dec 2003 12:07:48 -0800, erayo@bilkent.edu.tr (Eray Ozkural
exa) in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:

lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message
news:<3feb8787.2647984@netnews.att.net>...
In other words the only way behaviorism has to analyze behavior is to
characterize various behavioral forms in purely nominal terms
amounting to nothing more than simplistic and naive distinctions like
public, private, emitted or whatever. And what makes such distinctions
significant? Because behaviorists can reliably define words like these
without reference to behavior in general.

This is probably a paragraph worth discussing. I wish I had not jumped
on Doktor DynaSaur's attack on you and had answered this instead.

You are essentially saying that behaviorists are rejecting the
existence of complex problems because they can only deal with very
simple cases. Is that right?

That would be valid meta philosophy I guess. :)

If you could give a few examples from behaviorist literature where
they do that, it would be supportive of your argument.

This isn't a very new argument, but it seems to be a nice summary of
your observations.

I'm not sure I can give examples in the sense you mean. I think what
I'm suggesting is that if one cannot define some specific key concept
such as behavior, it is often better to complicate the analysis with
variants of the key concept that you can define. In other words if one
cannot define behavior exactly one might be better off embracing
variants of behavior like public, private, emitted and so on because
these latter terms are much more easily defined and will leave the
impression that one has defined behavior when all one is doing is
repeating the undefined term behavior in different contexts.

In point of fact we have no idea whether such things as public,
private, emitted and so on kinds of behavior represent necessary
distinctions in mechanical terms because we don't have any exact
understanding of what behavior itself means and behaviorism doesn't
shed any light on that subject. Just because behavior is public or
private or emitted or not doesn't mean it's significantly different in
mechanical terms from behavior in general. In other words these are
trivial distinctions unless the idea of behavior in cognitive beings
is defined first. And that is something behaviorism is unable to do.

So I think in response to your question I would have to say that
behaviorists are actually embracing complex behavioral issues to avoid
dealing with the simple issue of what behavior means in mechanical
terms. They simply evade the issue by claiming the definition of
behavior has been done somewhere else and quickly move on to the
analysis of behavioral variants they feel more comfortable with.

This is really the reason behaviorists insist on their own jargon. It
isn't that the terms they use are more precise. It's that their own
terms are all they understand behavior in terms of. They don't know
what behavior in cognitive beings actually means apart from those
variants of behavior so they have no way to relate the significance of
behavior in general to anyone elses ideas on the subject. The only
thing they have are those terms cast in terms of a subject they don't
understand. So they have to convey whatever thoughts they have on the
subject in those terms.

As for the attacks of behaviorists, I would suggest that you not
concern yourself so much. I really think that you, Omega, and some
others take behaviorists much too seriously. I've seen some very
esoteric arguments attacking the validity of behaviorism but what the
problem really amounts to is that behaviorists don't understand what
behavior is. So anything they have to say on the subject of behavioral
variants is really beside the point.

Now I don't necessarily think that cognitive science knows what
behavior represents in mechanical terms either. But at least they have
the locus of cognition much more firmly and correctly established.
Behaviorists on the other hand are out there in outer space looking
for environmental circumstances whose relevance they don't even
understand because they don't understand the nature of behavior to
begin with.



Regards - Lester


I've only scanned the above as it seems to me that Zick has his head so
far up his rectum that he has little chance of seeing anything
worthwhile. Point by point challenges would require me to want to invest
more time on him that I would find worthwhile - he just doesn't listen
and he doesn't read.

Yada yada whatever. Is this the lesson for today? A scriptural
exegesis delivered ex cathedra no less?

See, David, the problem here is that you aren't qualified to think in
terms of ideas because you only deal in the ideas of other people.
When are you going to get some ideas of your own with which to
critique the ideas of others? But I digress. By all means get on with
the service. The father, son, and holy ghost no doubt. Let's worship
the behaviorist world without end. Amen.

I've posted the following before in response to other peoples'
misconceptions, and it seems worth posting again. It is meant for
others, as I'm pretty such Zick won't understand the metaphor of
Neurath's (or Theseus') Boat. Nor will he understand what "Ontological
Relativity" (1969) was all about.

oOo

Posted back in early November:

Ok, Do a Google search on "Five Milestones of Empiricism" and look at
Groups (after a quick look at anything on web that catches your
interest). You'll the former lists 10 past messages from me to this
newsgroup.

Here's one from Oct '97.

oOo

First of all it's important to understand that the focus is on
the use of LANGUAGE. Quine's book from which this is taken is
about the use of language and how it is learned. He takes each
gramatical part of language and analyses how they are used, and
when it comes to those elements which are psychological verbs, or
the "propositional attitudes" he highlights something odd about
them - is the failure of extensionality (substitutivity of
identicals "salva veritate"). Note, what's being discussed here
is verbal behaviour, our use of words and sentences.

To appreciate why he focuses on language it might help to read
some of "The Five Milestones of Empiricism".

'We want to know how men can have achieved the
conjectures and abstractions that go into scientific
theory. How can we pursue such an inquiry whilst talking
of external things to the exclusion of ideas and
concepts? There is a way: we can talk of language. We
can talk of concrete men and their concrete noises.
Ideas are as may be, but the words are out there where
we can see and hear them. And scientific theories,
however speculative and however abstract, are in words.
One and the same theory can be expressed in different
words, so people say, but all can perhaps agree that
there are no theories apart from words. Or, if there
are, there is little to be lost in passing over them.'
-
Quine (1973)
Breaking into Language
The Roots of Reference p 35

The 'Five Milestones of Empiricism' (Quine 1981) represent a
progressive shift from the 'idea' to 'the word', to 'the
sentence' to 'systems of sentences' to 'methodological monism'
(the abandonment of the analytic-synthetic distinction) and
finally to 'naturalism' (that there is no 'first philosophy').
Along the way, the borders between psychology and linguistic
philosophy, and both of these and the rest of science has
somewhat dissolved. In Quine's words, 'Philosophy of Science is
Philosophy enough'. Empiricism proper therefore has no place for
'psychology' in the guise of Cognitive Science, and is more
likely to naturalise behavioural science into disciplines
which focus on particular domains of human behaviour such as
'law', 'management', 'marketing' 'prison governership', 'landing
officership' etc. These are logical, not capricious conclusions.

With the demise of philosophy and psychology as
'ontic' disciplines, one has to at least consider the
possibility that what is studied under the auspices of
their names are perhaps pseudoproblems. The 'intensional
idioms', or 'idioms of propositional attitude' are not, from
this perspective, 'marks of the mental' or 'cognitive
representations' but GRAMMATICAL or LINGUISTIC anomalies .

There will still be collections of folk who, for one reason or
another continue to call themselves psychologists, astrologers,
etc etc - perhaps more out of ignorance & a penchant for mystery.
But as covered at length elsewhere, saying 'one can't quantify
into propositional attitudes' is not 'legislative' but
explicative of a linguistic anomaly. Attempts to quantify into
propositional attitudes are prone to go awry, and for well
understood reasons - because there are 'bugs' in language. A lot
of work has been invested in trying to understand the nature of
these bugs. Quine in particular has taken a 'genetic' (ie
ontogenetic) approach suggesting that they represent
application of grammatical rules in contexts where they are
nevertheless inappropriate (ie 'quantifying in' is ok with
some sentence elements (see below) but not others). Once one
accepts that work with 'cognitions' is work with verbal
behaviour, one should see why there is no reason to expect
there to be a relationship between work with such verbal
behaviour & the rest of an individual's repertoire of behaviour.
There MAY be, but it's rather akin to expecting training in
squash to generalise to tennis. Such training may well
transfer, but even if it does the transfer may be negative.

To say that there is no stable relationship between 'beliefs' and
other behaviour is not therefore to make some vague metaphysical
conjecture about 'mental stuff and physical stuff' but
rather to explicate a characteristic of a linguistic anomaly
which is definitive of the intensional idioms (propositional
attitudes and modal contexts). This must be so if one
passes the five milestones of empiricism alluded to at the
start of this note. I have recommended elsewhere that the work
of the mathematical logicians who have undertaken these analyses
should be looked at very carefully by psychologists,
particularly applied ones, since these logicians are in effect
telling us what is POSSIBLE within the basic infrastructure which
comprises scientific if not all analysis.

'Contextual definition precipitated a revolution in
semantics: less sudden perhaps than the Copernican
revolution in astronomy, but like it in being a shift of
center. The primary vehicle of meaning is seen no longer
as the word, but as the sentence. Terms, like
grammatical particles, mean by contributing to the
meaning of the sentences that contain them. The
heliocentrism propounded by Copernicus was not obvious,
and neither is this. It is not obvious because, for the
most part, we understand sentences only by construction
from understood words. This is necessarily so, since
sentences are potentially infinite in variety. We learn
some words in isolation, in effect as one-word
sentences; we learn further words in context, by
learning various short sentences that contain them; and
we understand further sentences by construction from the
words thus learned. If the language that we thus learn
is afterward compiled, the manual will necessarily
consist for the most part of a word-by-word dictionary,
thus obscuring the fact that the meanings of words are
abstractions from the truth conditions of sentences that
contain them.'

Quine (1981)
The five Milestones of Empiricism
Theories and Things p.69

'Naturalism does not repudiate epistemology, but
assimilates it to empirical psychology....
...The naturalistic philosopher begins his reasoning
within The inherited world theory as a going concern. He
tentatively believes all of it, but believes also that
some unidentified portions are wrong. He tries to
improve, clarify, and understand the system from within.
He is the busy sailor adrift on Neuraths's boat.'

W.V. Quine (1975)
Five Milestones of Empiricism
Theories and Things (1981)
oOo



--
David Longley

Amen.

Regards - Lester

More passive aggressive idiocy.