[From Samuel Saunders (205.12.18.1654 MST)]
Rick Marken (2005.12.18.1510)
>Fred Nickols (2005.12.18.1557 ET) -
>
>>From Rick Marken (2005.12.16.0810)--
>>By the way, the most obvious example of behaviorists capitalizing on
>>the purposive nature of organisms (and the one that virtually defines
>>Skinner's version of behaviorism) is _operant conditioning_, which
>>works by taking advantage of the fact that it is the organism's
>>purpose
>>to _eat_. You can do operant conditioning on a satiated organism --
>>one
>>that does not currently have the purpose of eating .
>
>In any event, allow me to nitpick the wording above. First, however,
>I'll agree with but also elaborate upon the assertion Rick makes: you
>can't do operant conditioning when what you're using as a reinforcer
>isn't reinforcing - as would be the case when using food as a
>reinforcer if the organism has no interest in food. That said, I
>don't think many (if any) behaviorists would agree that they were
>capitializing on or taking advantage of the organism's "purpose to
>eat." If memory serves, most of them would deny the existence of
>purpose or at least claim that it is unknowable.
Yes, of course. When I say that behaviorists capitalize on the
purposive nature of organisms in order to control them I don't mean to
imply that the behaviorists are doing this consciously. They say things
like what you said: operant conditioning only works when what you are
using as a reinforcer is reinforcing. But we know (from PCT as well as
everyday experience) that a reinforcer is reinforcing because it is
_wanted_. Food works as a reinforcer only when an animal is hungry
(which is, as you say, not all the time; that's why behaviorists keep
the organisms to be operantly conditioned in a cage at 80% of their
normal body weight -- to insure that that organisms want the food).
Water works as a reinforcer only when an animal is thirsty. Access to
females works as a reinforcer only when an animal is horny. The
behaviorist idea that a reinforcer works only when it is reinforcing is
just a way for these folks to avoid saying what is obvious: a
reinforcer is reinforcing when it is wanted; when it is the animal's
purpose to get it. But there is no such thing as purpose in
behaviorism so they make believe that external events -- like
reinforcers -- can pull behavior out of an organism.
We had a long discussion on this about 7-8 years ago on CSG-L, even getting to a little modeling. This is not as hidden in the behaviorist literature as Rick and Bill sometimes like to claim (straw men are easier to attack, and this straw man has been being beaten since the early days of the "cognitive revolution", so they are really just joining the crowd). The Hull and Spence models which were popular as "neobehaviorist" models both had terms for incentives, which were specified as resulting from specific operations (like food deprivation). There was of course a famous debate as to the necessity of these for learning, as opposed to performance, but some where in there they were known to be important. Skinner and his close "radical behaviorist" colleagues talked about "establishing operations" as being required for reinforcement to be effective. David Premack suggested that one could describe the conditions for reinforcement by knowning the relative probability of vario!
us behaviors. Premack's approach was to observe in a baseline condition, where no contingency was imposed between various activities, and note the relative frequency with which the behaviors occurred (relative frequency then becomes an estimate of relative p[robability), and Premack argued that if a contingency were then established such that engaging in a lower probability behavior were required to obtain the opportunity to engage in a higher probability behavior, reinforcment of the lower probability behavior would be observed (e.g. for a rat, eating occurs more often than pressing bars protruding from cage walls, so if bar pressing is required to gain an opportunity to eat, bar pressing will increase above the baseline level (and eating will drop below the baseline level, but that is another story)). Allison and others later extended Premack's idea by noting that any contingency which requires engaging in one behavior more often than in a baseling conditon in order to!
have the oppotunity to engage in another behavior at something approa
ching baseline frequency is suffiecient for reinforcement regardless of the relative probabilities of the two behaviors, producing the "relative deprivation". This all starts to get difficult when one tries to identify relevant "baseline" conditions to measure frequency of behavior. This is a good point to consider PCT and something like the test for controlled variables, and it was in fact a reference to B:CP and Power's work that originally lead me to CSG.
While it is a bit out of date now, "Introduction to modern psychology" by Robertson and Powers does a great job of putting PCT into the context of general psychology, and demonstrating how PCT can address issues of concern in the broader psychology community. Anyone who is interested in "how HPCT can address problem X" should take the time to read the book, or at least the first two chapters plus the specific chapters adressing X. (I used this book as a text for a General Psychology course as recently as last year, and have also assigned chapters for other courses, such as Developmental Psychology).
>Even from my limited PCT perspective, I don't see an organism as
>having the purpose to eat.
Really? Don't you ever want to eat (have the purpose of consuming food)
and go seek out food to satisfy this want? I think all organisms are
pretty much the same in this regard. All of them have (at some time(s)
during their life) the purpose of consuming food.
>But, for me, at least, having "the purpose to eat" is a fleeting,
>transitory state - unless, of course, someone keeps me locked in a
>cage and also keeps me in a hungry state. At that point, my "purpose"
>becomes one of killing and eating my captor.
Ah, so you do have the purpose of eating every so often. I thought
so;-) You're lucky that that purpose is fleeting; it's not fleeting for
the children in Darfur or the animals in operant conditioning
experiments, whose main purpose in live, all the time, is to get food.
>Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all...and my apologies to any
>of you on this list who find a controlled variable of theirs disturbed
>by those wishes.
And a Merry Solstice to you and yours.
Best regards
Rick
---
Richard S. Marken Consulting
marken@mindreadings.com
Home 310 474-0313
Cell 310 729-1400
Samuel
···
On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 03:07:41PM -0800, Rick Marken wrote:
--
Samuel Spence Saunders, Ph.D.
saunders@westriverresearch.com
Partner, West River Research Associates
