Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!valis From: valis@athena.mit.edu (John O'Neil) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Modelling reinforcement Message-ID: Date: 10 Dec 90 22:30:17 GMT References: <25667@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <16562@cgl.ucsf.EDU> Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 52 In-Reply-To: greenba@gambia.crd.ge.com's message of 10 Dec 90 13:19:26 GMT In article greenba@gambia.crd.ge.com (ben a green) writes: In article valis@athena.mit.edu (John O'Neil) writes: In article <16562@cgl.ucsf.EDU> brianc@labmed.ucsf.edu (Brian Colfer) writes: >I think that a systematic development of Skinner's ideas concerning >verbal behavior will result in an effective general model for semantic >processing. Please then explain the verbal behavior contained in "War and Peace" by Tolstoy. Make reference, if you wish, to Napoleon as the stimulus for a book written several decades later. Can't do it, of course, but that's not the zinger you may think it is. I didn't think it was a "zinger"; I was just trying to make a point in an (admittedly marginally) humorous way. After all, physics is a mature science. Yet with it, we cannot predict next week's weather with any accuracy. Even if psychology were as advanced as physics, we would need a complete record of Tolstoy's life and the details of his environment. Even if physics were as advanced as physics, we couldn't predict next week's weather with any accuracy. With *all the details* of Tolstoy's environment, you seem to believe in principle that a deterministic behaviorism could predict the verbal behaviorism evinced in _War and Peace_. This seems to me akin to showing which butterfly in China caused Hurricane Bruno -- not just difficult, but even in principle quite impossible. That is a basic problem with "verbal behavior": when one allows the stimulus to be an event 50 years in the past, the notion of "stimulus", which is at the heart of behaviorism, becomes completely muddled. Let's wrangle over more reasonable problems, especially problems for which there are competing solutions. In other words, does anybody have anything better than Skinner's ideas -- anything with comparable scope? The question is whether the scope of behaviorism includes these phenomena at all, or whether it is necessary to posit more complex internal structures to the mind than behaviorism allows. John O'Neil Organlegger "From head to toe, you know where to go." Spleens a specialty.