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From: adam@mtund.UUCP (Adam V. Reed)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,net.legal,soc.singles
Subject: Re: Re: Evidence and Pornography Legislation
Message-ID: <787@mtund.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 19-Sep-86 17:53:38 EDT
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Posted: Fri Sep 19 17:53:38 1986
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The following has drifted away from the topics of these newsgroups, and
they are answered here because they were raised here, and there is no
net.psych.theory to move the discussion to.

Mark Terribile:
> 	The great strength, and great weakness, of the behavioural approach
> 	to human psychology is the basic assumption that the human being is
> 	viewed as a black box with certain inputs and certain outputs and
> 	certain measurable effects.  The strengths are obvious.
> 	The weaknesses lie in the fact that a very great part of psychological
> 	and psychiatric understanding has come from what amounts to
> 	introspection, and the individual study of people engaged in
> 	introspection, or in conversation, etc., about intimate feelings,
> 	reactions, and perceptions that effectively allow one (trained)
> 	individual to conduct inquiries that would ordinarily be introspective
> 	within the experience of another individual.

I agree, which is why I am not now, nor have I ever been, a behaviorist.
Neverthless, I insist on distinguishing between hypotheses and evidence;
and hold that in psychology, as in any science, the latter can only be
obtained through the application of logic and measurement.

> 	This entire area of study is almost completely closed to statistical
> 	research of the sort that you are familiar with.

Not true - look in any textbook on cognitive scaling, or psychophysics,
to learn how measurements can be performed on data derived from
introspection. Most of my own methods are equally applicable to
introspective and behavioral data.

> What you have called the Psychiatric Fallacy (the tendency to generalize from
> people who are in some sense mentally ill to all people) is invariably an
> error in behavioral research that depends upon statistical measures.  It
> is not always an error in the study of the human mind from the inside out.
> There one can consider the effect of a mechanism that is ``gone wrong''
> without discounting the possibility or probability that that mechanism is
> at work in normal individuals, but in normal ways.

Yes. This is a rich source of hypotheses in psychology, and I have used
it in my own work. But hypotheses are not evidence.

> To look for the impact of pornographic materials from the ``black box''
> view requires that you succeed in finding the effects by looking in likely
> places.  It allows relatively little consideration of what internal
> effects may occur without producing immediate results that can be detected
> by relatively simple tests.  It does allow relatively simple interactions
> such as inhibition, excitation, habituation, etc., to be postulated and
> measured.

While there is a lot more than behavior to the science of psychology,
only behavioral data can be relevant to law and legislation. This is
because an internal mental state cannot conceivably do objective harm to
another parson; only overt behavior can do that.

					Adam Reed (mtund!adam)