🚀 go-pugleaf

"DKleinecke" <dkleinecke@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1189133753.250909.293400@r29g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
> On Sep 6, 2:32 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> What do you think of Chomskysreviewofskinnersverbalbehavior? Does the
>> "refutation" by the person with a Q in his name hold any water?
>
> I agree with whoever said Chomsky hadn't read the book. I think he may
> have turned all the pages but his bile blinded him. I have never
> bothered to see how he was refuted  by Q or anybody else.
>
> I see the controversy as religious. The question being free will. The
> idea that man has no free will is an old one but before the
> enlightenment there was no clear idea about what that meant.  In the
> enlightenment good enough machines were being built that a philosopher
> could suggest that man was a machine.
>
> What Skinner did, and I think this is tremendous advance in
> philosophy, is to provide a plausible mechanism for this to be true.
> He may well have been wrong - but he cannot be proven wrong by
> anything uncovered yet.
>
> So Skinner set out to destroy the idea of free will, did an excellent
> job of it and felt happy with the outcome. For his own psychological
> and religious reasons he did not value "free will". To Chomsky this
> was offensive beyond all labels. Blasphemy would have been too weak a
> word.
>
> So Chomsky set out to destroy Skinner. After a life time of listening
> to Chomsky his arguments sound like cliches - back then they were new
> and striking.  So Skinner was pretty much destroyed - except among a
> small band of true believers.
>
> I don't think this particular argument says much about linguistics or
> psychology. It is a religious dispute.

I agree with Joe's implication, but it may not be totally correct. My 
understanding of Chomsky's review is that he was, in part, attacking the 
views of his graduate advisor. Those views were not Skinnerian, and may not 
even have been consistent with the sorts of behaviorisms espoused by other 
psychologists, but he apparently thought it was. Certainly "Markov models" 
bear some resemblence to "S-R" theories and non-Skinnerian behaviorisms were 
frequently "S-R."



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