Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!udel!princeton!pucc!PSYCH@TCSVM From: harnad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad) Newsgroups: sci.psychology.digest Subject: PSYCOLOQUY V1 #14 (discussion : 361 lines) Message-ID: <9010161926.AA00370@reason.Princeton.EDU> Date: 16 Oct 90 19:58:24 GMT Sender: VMNNPOST@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Listserv to Netnews Gateway) Organization: Listserv to Netnews Gateway at pucc.Princeton.EDU Lines: 356 Approved: PSYCH@TCSVM PSYCOLOQUY Tues, 16 Oct 90 Volume 1 : Issue 14 Note on Salzinger obituary for Skinner [1(13)] (line 14) Catania: Reply to Norman on Skinner (line 30) Dane: Electronic Journals: Alternative to Pickering (line 164) Jansen: Thoughts on Electronic Journals (line 248) Query: HP display monitor (line 324) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Kurt Salzinger Subject: Skinner obituary 15 Sep 90 Vol 1: Issue 13 Please note that my obituary on B. F. Skinner will appear in the American Psychological Society Observer and has a copyright 1990, American Psychological Society. It appeared here with the permission of the APS. [Ed. Note: In parallel with the series of critical evaluations of the contributions of BF Skinner in Psycoloquy, triggered by D. Norman's obituary, there has been a series of interchanges in the British Press, triggered by an obituary by NS Sutherland of Sussex. A synopsis of the British discussion would be welcome in Psycoloquy. -- Ed.] ----------------------------- From: AC Catania Subject: Reply to Norman on Skinner The environment matters: A reply to Donald A. Norman A. Charles Catania University of Maryland Baltimore County Donald A. Norman has written a curious personal note in response to the remarks that B. F. Skinner made to the American Psychological Association shortly before his death. His piece is entitled "The mind exists," and it is more a statement of faith than a statement of facts. The little that Norman says about Skinner is at best misleading and at worst incorrect. His claim to authority is that at one time he was a "very junior faculty member" at Harvard, "where Skinner was a very senior faculty member." Though it is to be hoped that colleagues within a department will be students of each other's work, the evidence implies that Norman learned little if anything from or about Skinner. How else are we to interpret Norman's claims about Skinner's blind spot: "he denied that mental activity plays any major role in human behavior" and "thought that the difficulty of studying mental phenomena proved their non-existence"? Such arguments can easily be made about John B. Watson, but Skinner had explicitly rejected them as long ago as in his 1945 Psychological Review paper, "The operational analysis of psychological terms" (which, by the way, was a renunciation of operationism and not a defense of it). Norman is mixed up about Skinner's uses of the words "mental" and "private." Skinner did not like the word "mental," because it suggested that such events were not part of the physical world; in other words, he did not want to speak as a dualist. In referring to phenomena like thinking, remembering, imagining, or even doing mental (sic) arithmetic, Skinner preferred the term "private" and used the distinction between public and private to discuss the problems that a verbal community with access only to public events has in establishing a language of private events. To suggest on the grounds of this vocabulary preference that Skinner denied the existence of such phenomena is simply to demonstrate a totally inadequate familiarity with Skinner's work. If Norman objects to the public-private distinction in spite of his claim that his field "cannot afford to be dogmatic, to have a closed mind," I can only assume that he does so because he really does think of mind as something other than part of the natural world or, in other words, that he is some sort of mind- body dualist. I had not understood the concepts of information, knowledge and computation to imply dualism, but if this is indeed the implication of Norman's position we must now await from him an account of psychophysical interactionism that will tell us how mental events can affect physical events and vice versa. On the other hand, if he really is not a dualist he should try to overcome his antipathy to things Skinnerian long enough to read the relevant literature, so that he will not characterize Skinner's work inaccurately the next time he decides to write about it. Now, Norman does concede that we are "influenced by the environment," and that "some of B. F. Skinner's methods are part of the scientific basis for our understanding of cognition." But the environments that have concerned Skinner do not consist merely of contemporary stimuli. They include the organism's past environments, by way of their effects on a nervous system that has been changed by them; that nervous system in turn is the product of selection by the environments within which the species has evolved. Taken in this context, Norman's acknowledgment of the role of the environment seems to be minimal lip service. The remarks about cognitive psychology by Skinner that Norman addressed were critical ones, and probably we should not be surprised that Norman has responded in kind. But Norman's reply does not address Skinner's central criticism, which is the argument that cognitive psychology has rejected the role of environmental determinants. That rejection began decades ago, when cognitive psychology began to separate itself from psychology; the separation continues to widen, as psychology and cognitive science even come to be represented by different departments at some campuses (Norman's included). The separation is sometimes used as an excuse for excluding some parts of the science of behavior from curricula, but that exclusion cannot serve as an excuse for misrepresenting those parts in scholarly discourse (and, knowingly or not, Norman misrepresents it when he suggests that Skinner's account of behavior is "a simple story"). Cognitive psychology has been making promises for many years, and Skinner has not been alone in raising questions about it. For example, the New York Times Book Review recently carried a review by Fred Hapgood of Norman's own book, "The psychology of everyday things." In discussing the application of cognitive psychology to design, the reviewer states that "there is nothing here that suggests any contact at all, derisory or not, with the life and work of the professionals Mr. Norman purports to advise: no interviews, no references to their history, nothing that gives a person any feeling for who does this work or how they do it, or the constraints under which they operate. Mr. Norman's approach is to pick up some object and meditate on it from his desk, pointing out how its operations might have been made simpler and more transparent if the designer had paid more attention to this principle or that." The reviewer then deals with how some industries have studied the interactions between customers and products, and goes on to say that "Almost certainly the present versions of the designs that now make the most sense to us . . . represent the steady accumulation of the detailed experiences of specific users." The reviewer's argument has much in common with Skinner's argument that cognitive science too often fails to pay attention to behavior. It is easy to see that the issues involve interactions between organisms and environments, but it is hard to see why cognitive scientists are so uninterested in them. Whatever the nature of cognitive phenomena, they can only be studied at the point at which they become manifested as behavior, whether that manifestation is verbal or nonverbal and whether it is immediate or delayed. It might even be worthwhile to entertain the possibility that some of those phenomena are themselves instances of behavior. There is no need to assume that all behavior must involve muscles. If we are willing to agree that visualizing or imagining are things we do, then we may treat them as examples of behavior worthy of study. Skinner did not claim that he had provided the last word on behavior, but he has given us much on which to build. The experimental analysis of behavior has taught us a good deal about how selection by environmental consequences can create classes of behavior, about the way in which response classes can combine into higher-order behavioral units, and about some of the unique properties of verbal behavior and its interactions with nonverbal behavior, to mention just a few recent developments. Many of these findings have led to successful applications, including the saving of lives. Topics such as these are covered in readily accessible journals, and it is therefore disappointing that so much of the commentary by cognitive psychologists about Skinner and about the field of behavior analysis is based upon superficial and out-dated views about its foundations, its substance, and its contributions. -------------------------------- From: Frank Dane Subject: Electronic Journals: An Alternative to Pickering An Alternative Proposal for an Electronic Journal Francis C. Dane Mercer University The "abstract" journal proposed by Pickering (1990) already exists in a variety of forms. What was proposed is essentially that which is offered in the form of PsycScan, PsycInfo, SocSciSearch, and other electronically available versions of print media abstract services. The difference is that Pickering proposes material be sent to and from reviewers electronically; this, too, is accomplished by some print journals (e.g., _Law and Human Behavior_ encourages reviewers to submit reviews electroni- cally). What is new about Pickering's proposal is that only ab- stracts be reviewed. I believe such restricted review would seriously undermine the purpose of journals, print or electronic. That purpose is to communicate empirical and theoretical develop- ments. Reviewers cannot determine the developmental utility of a submission from only an abstract. As Pickering notes, there is the danger of an abstract without a paper. I see a greater danger in reviewers' inability to consider an entire work before rendering judgment. The status of journals is, in part, due to the quality of the material published in them. The proliferation of journals is, in part, due to printing costs. A high quality print journal can publish only so many pages per year, regardless of the quality of submissions. Additional journals arise due to spe- cialization, but also due to an abundance of publishable-quality papers that cannot be published due to page limitations. Therein lies one potential advantage of electronic journals. Electronic journals undoubtedly have an advantage vis-a-vis speed and what Pickering calls "interconnectivity." The greater advantage of electronic journals may be the potential for greater length. Electronic archives, though not unlimited, can hold a considerably greater amount of material than any single print journal. Thus, an electronic journal could conceivably publish *all* submissions that met reviewers' standards. Consider an electronic journal in which abstracts are sent to subscribers, but the corresponding papers are archived and available electronically via request (much like the one-line grant announcements offered by the APA Science Directorate in its Funding Bulletin). Subscribers could scan the abstracts and read only the most relevant or intriguing articles, just as they now do when reading print journals. Complete articles could be available within 24 hours (or less) via the archive. References for the abstract alone would contain the usual year and vol- ume/issue numbers; references for the complete papers could be similar to the "whole number" citation used for _Psychological Monographs_. This suggestion does not necessarily meet Pickering's call for innovative uses for electronic media, but it may solve at least one of the shortcomings of print journals--page restric- tions. Certainly, the size of the archive will eventually become a problem, but no greater a problem than that which exists for print archives. Electronic archives, however, can be stored and sent in compressed versions. The money saved by avoiding print- ing and postage expenses could be applied to storage media. The networking potential of electronic media would not require a single storage location for all archived monographs. As one storage location achieves saturation, another location on the network could be implemented. Electronic storage would enable one to avoid the duplication of archive locations required for print media. Who among us is willing to choose voluntarily to obtain our journals only through interlibrary loans sent via postal service? Who among us would decline the opportunity to access electronically an archived paper if it meant our library could use the money it currently spends on archiving print journals to expand other services? The development of electronic journals should be such that increases in the availability of quality material are achieved, not decreases in the quality of the material itself. Rather than limit the *number* of abstracts published, or archived papers available, we should be focussing on ways to increase the number of quality abstracts and papers available. Reference Pickering, J. A. (1990). Some thoughts on electronic journals. _PSYCOLOQUY_, _1_(13). ------------------------------ From: "Bob.Jansen" Subject: Thoughts on Electronic Journals Some further thoughts on electronic journals. J A Pickering states in Psycoloquy Digest #13 that the use of electronic journals would facilitate the dissemination of information by providing faster infra-structure support for refereeing and by such techniques as limiting initial submissions to abstracts of a fixed size. In addition, he states that the use of electronic journals could make the information more easily read by a greater majority of people. Although I agree that electronic journals provide an interesting medium for the dissemination of information, work carried out in our laboratory, CSIRO Division of Information Technology in Sydney Australia, indicates that the translation of information from traditional paper to electronic form will radically alter the amount of information submitted and the way it is manipulated. We have found, as also reported in the many HYpermedia conferences, that by merely replacing the paper medium with an electronic medium offers nothing extra to the reader. In fact, conventional technology hinders the complex access supported by the paper form, due to screen size, lack of portability, etc. It could be argued that our current method of publishing and accessing information is a by-product of the available technology, ie. paper, and if so, an interesting question arises as to how these aspects will change with the new technology. Thus in our opinion, the journal must provide functions above and beyond those supported by the traditional paper form. Hypermedia forms an interesting technology to researching the types of functions required. We are building tools to extract the knowledge embedded in the paper by the author, and enabling the use of this knowledge as filters to retrieve relevant papers, or sections of papers, depending on the retrieval request. Another tool enables the use of the papers in justification facilities supporting knowledge-based systems, where the paper supplies relevant information justifying particular nodes in the decision tree, or specific paths through the tree, justification that are impossible in conventional expert systems. Our methodology hinges on the conceptual map associated with a section of text or graphic. This conceptual map may be compared with the conceptual map of the query, and if a threshold comparison function is passed, then the section of text is deemed relevant to the query. The threshold function may be used to rank the relevance of the matching sections. The conceptual map also acts as a mapping function between nodes and paths in the decision tree and text sections or graphics. Another interesting function of the electronic journal is the animation of the paper. By animation, I mean not some cartoonized figure turning the page, but making the paper non static. We accomplish this at the moment by storing the actual data underlying any table or graph, instead of or as well as, the graphicThis allows the user to access the unprocessed data underlying the results presented in the paper, and opens up for scrutiny the processing function(s) applied to the data. It is hypothsized that granting access to the raw data will make authors much more carefull about what they publish, thus reducing the amount of papers, and hence the refereeing load, and in some way reducing the falsification of results. We are getting an increasing amount of interest in this approach to knowledge representation and manipulation from the publishing community as well as the knowledge-based systems community. [Editorial Comment: These observations about the relative advantages of electronic media over print pertain only to static texts, presumably available in print first. Psycoloquy is an extremely rapid and global INTERACTIVE medium. The dynamic potential of this "Skywriting" is a medium unto itself and has possibilities that one cannot even dream of in the print media. I agree, however, about the desirability of hypermedia, and as announced earlier, we are planning to implement this in a collaborative project with Bellcore (Tom Landauer). -- Stevan Harnad] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bill Wang Subject: HP scope and PC Query We are interested in any idea or current using system which will enable us to connect a HP x-y display monitor model 1340a (ocilliscope) to an IBM compatible computer. We are trying to use the scope for some psychological experiments. Any comments or current settings would be appreciated. Bill Wang US Mail = Psychology Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 UUCP = {rutgers, att, ames}!iuvax!wcwang Internet = wcwang@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu ------------------------------ PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the Science Directorate of the American Psychological Association (202) 955-7653 Co-Editors: (scientific discussion) (professional/clinical discussion) Stevan Harnad Perry London, Dean, Cary Cherniss (Assoc Ed.) Psychology Department Graduate School of Applied Graduate School of Applied Princeton University and Professional Psychology and Professional Psychology Rutgers University Rutgers University Assistant Editors: Malcolm Bauer John Pizutelli Psychology Department Psychology Department Princeton University Rutgers University End of PSYCOLOQUY Digest ******************************