[From Chris Cherpas (951109.0947 PT)]
[re: > Bill Powers (951108.middle of the night)]
cc:
I finally got this post. Our network people keep going off
to get the Novell training and then leave for a higher paying job!
BP:
If you read Skinner while eliminating all his positive
statements about good science and how behavior DOES work, what is left
is a continuing attack on the way other psychologists have tried to
explain behavior.
cc:
I agree. Now I'd rather watch reruns of Green Acres than have
to wade through all the off-hand polemics provided by "Skins,"
although I kinda liked those attacks when I first got into the field.
Actually, Skinner's best book _by far_ is "Verbal Behavior," where
his "strength" model of behavior is clearest, even though it's
purely qualitative.
BP:
I even have a letter from him in which he rejected an
invitation to discuss control theory, indicating that he saw nothing it
could add to our understanding of behavior.
cc:
I know. I talked with Fred on a few occasions where I just got
back quotes from what he'd already written, relevant or not.
BP:
Skinner, his adherents, and
his predecessors have behaved toward other schools of psychology far
worse than any PCTer has behaved toward EABers.
cc:
Maybe. Although I'm certainly seeing the same kind of in-group bravado
in PCT statements of the form "controlling perceptions is a FACT..."
(I haven't found it in the PCT literature I've been reading yet, so
maybe someone can tell me where "perception" is clearly defined,
or that "purpose" adds anything to understanding control mechanisms.)
Also, I'm sure we're all tired of the "cognitive revolution" with
its obligatory statement that Chomsky's review of "Verbal Behavior"
marked a Kuhnian paradigm shift; as far as I'm concerned, psychology
is pre-par adigmatic. Let's face it, almost everybody's kicked
Skinner around, usually while attacking a totally different kind of
behaviorism (check out BFS's 1945 paper, "The Operational Analysis
of Psychological Terms" for the first occurrence of the terms
"methodological behaviorism" versus "radical behaviorism.")
BP:
Not only do the
dozens of schools of thought ignore or disparage each other; they defend
themselves against each other and reject any attempts to remove the
walls. Each school considers itself the center of the intellectual
universe; all progress in psychology is progress in one's own field. I
won't say that such attitudes are unscientific, since they are obviously
demonstrated by numerous scientists, but I will say that I think this
attitude is stupid. It's the best possible way to prevent psychology
from ever becoming a unified scientific discipline.
cc:
Seems fairly inevitable to me, blind variation and all, but it is
embarrassing.
BP:
We in PCT have always tried to be open to criticisms from any other
school of psychology. But with only a few outstanding exceptions, this
openness has gone only one way. Many people who have expressed an
interest in PCT have done so primarily to evaluate it as a threat to
positions they already hold. They are generous in offering difficult
problems for us to try to solve, but stingy when it comes to considering
problems we pose for them -- they are satisfied with their solutions,
and instead of discussing the matter they want only to show that they
have already solved the problems. To my mind, this sort of attitude
counts in evaluating whether the other person's approach is scientific.
cc:
Well, I hope I'm not doing this. But you have to admit, it just
doesn't pay off to overthrow the huge investment one may have in
a perspective every time one encounters a view that's different.
If we didn't have some "confirmation bias" we'd be chasing UFOs
around. I'll probably g et in trouble for this, but I say the biggest
impediment to a scientific psychology at this point in history
is theism. Babies are born atheists, given a supernatural rap
to account for their behavior, and then have to become "born again
atheists" to finally get clear on reasonable options... what a waste.
I regard theism as a mild form of mental retardation (but there I
go, trashing another point of view!)
BP:
As far as I know, nobody has
ever compared cumulative records obtained when (a) an organism
is operating the bar or key, and (b) an artificial device
programmed to behave arbitrarily is operating the bar or key.
cc:
Not true. In the lab I worked in, we routinely ran programs to
operate the devices used in operant conditioning experiments to
test the equipment. Your statement sounds as if someone from the
EAB camp would really be caught with their pants down on this one
-- that you think it's amazing that nobody would ever think of
doing this. Think again.
BP:
I wasn't lying. As far as I knew, what I said was true. Now I know more,
and evidently it wasn't true. I would really like to see the results you
got; can you cite some papers? I really haven't seen anything published
where behavioral results have been compared against a baseline produced
by a random behavior generator.
cc:
Sorry. Poor choice of words on my part (I forgot about the "as far as
I know" part). Like I said, we never thought the results of randomly
generating responses (via the computer) were interesting, so we didn't
save the data, let alone publish the results. If I get some time (with
two kids under 3, it ain't easy), I'll see if I can put tog ether a
simulation for concurrent VIs.
cc:
I see a lot of "nobody understands me" coming from CSG, but it's
hard to take this kind of comment seriously. Would you expect to
see scallops on FIs or post-reinforcement pauses on FRs with random
responding?
BP:
No. I would expect to see them in a control-system model of behavior,
and did, but not with random responding. I was talking, however, about
matching. Incidentally, any luck getting my operant behavior model
running?
cc:
You can see them in lots of models too. Since your published
statement was "many 'findings'" with matching given as "for example,"
so I didn't thinking that you were restricting it to matching. No
matter -- I think the random responding question is a good one, just
that EABers aren't going to be thrown any loops by this.
cc:
Duh. Random responding on Concurrent VIs would not produce
matching, my friend. It would produce the worse case of
undermatching that anybody had ever seen.
BP:
Are you saying that it did, or that it would if anyone tried it? If it
has been tried, I'd like to see the results, and if not, shouldn't it be
done to get a baseline against which to evaluate the degree of matching
actually obtained? I can't tell whether you're speaking hypothetically
or reporting on actual results.
cc:
Hypothetically. I guess I should have run it, since I did an experiment
(referred to in an earlier CSG post) in which I considered the economic
maximization perspective to imply that random responding would have
produced the same overall rate of reinforcement as my pigeons who
matched pretty well (although one bird did a little "superstitious
dance" that resulted in some relatively more undermatching), and therefore
did not provide the more reasonable explanation that melioration
theory did.
BP:
How about an essay on the subject? I'd be very interested in knowing how
environmental events can set reference levels. I have some ideas, but
I'd like to hear yours first.
cc:
Unconditioned establishing operations, like food deprivation, are often
confusing enough (if you send me your snail mail address, I'll send you
a little paper on this), since Skinner said they don't affect learning,
just performance, but Jack Michael (Mr. Establishing Operation, and my main
mentor in grad school) says they affect both. Some of the more interesting
questions are how to explain what happens with unlearned motivations.
Here's an example Jack Michael uses a lot:
A repair person is fixing something and encounters plate that is held
by slotted (not phillips) screws and says to the assistant, "hand me
the flat screw driver." Is the sight of the slotted screw a discriminative
stimulus? Not really, because it's not as if there's a history of more
successfully getting the flat screw driver in its presence relative to
its absence -- the assistant would give Mr. Fixit the same tool when
asked regardless. So, it's closer to the effect of food deprivation:
the "value" of this kind of screwdriver goes up momentarily. Now, I
haven't learned a lot about PCT yet, but it sounds like there's a
reference level "established" related to having this screwdriver. A
variety of behaviors could reduce the error: asking for the screwdriver,
going to the toolbox, trying a thumbnail in lieu of the screwdriver,
etc. I won't go on at this point, since this may not coincide with
"dynamically setting a reference level," as I, in my relative ignorance,
might claim at this point.
By the way, I read your (BP's) article in the American Behavioral
Scientist where you show same-reference-level individuals versus
the whole population correlations. Superb. There may be a "trick"
in there that I didn't catch, but as far as I can see, this is
very convincing.
Best regards,
cc
in saying and demonstrating that the only thing a