🚀 go-pugleaf

"Brian M. Scott" <b.scott@csuohio.edu> wrote in message 
news:jc22q2ss4mxn.18n3cxnsy4ze4$.dlg@40tude.net...
> On Sat, 8 Sep 2007 08:45:07 -0400, "Glen M. Sizemore"
> <gmsizemore2@yahoo.com> wrote in
> <news:46e29940$0$7594$ed362ca5@nr2.newsreader.com> in
> sci.cognitive,sci.lang,bionet.neuroscience:
>
>> "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@verizon.net> wrote in message
>> news:1189191791.027037.214690@d55g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
>
> [...]
>
>> The Wikipedia entry under Verbal Behavior" is not perfect,
>> but you should at least give it a look.
>
> It certainly offers little incentive to read VB, at least if
> one is interested in language.  Fairly or not, it makes VB
> sound like an exercise in classification

Especially if one reads at a superficial level. Perhaps you missed the 
reference to a functional analysis. The categories are centered around the 
independent variables of which the behavior is alleged to be a function. 
From the stanpoint of "scholarship" like yours, terms like "mass," "force," 
"energy" are "mere" excercises in classification.

>(complete with its
> own elaborate pseudo-technical vocabulary)

And what makes it "pseudo-technical"? The fact that you have not heard of 
it?

>combined with
> some handwaving to suggest how the classificatory structure
> might conceivably have some explanatory power, if only the
> details could be sorted.

The explanatory scheme is well worked out and presented in detail. There is 
no hand-waving - you can argue that it is wrong etc. but the principles are 
derived from a legitimate experimental science and the book constitutes a 
theoretical extention of those principles. So far you have displayed little 
more than an inability to read and think.


>
> Never mind that this looks rather like throwing in the towel
> before the bell rings for the first round:
>
>   For Skinner, the proper object of study is behavior
>   itself, analysed without reference to hypothetical
>   (mental) structures, but rather with reference to the
>   functional relationships of the behavior in the
>   environment in which it occurs.

Because it is eliminitivist with respect to mind in the same sense that 
Darwinian evolution is eliminativist with respect to Divine Creation? You 
are right, though, the "mind" is as much in vogue today as when it was 
synonymous with "soul."




>
> [...]
>
> Brian