🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 8 Sep 2007 14:43:20 -0400, "Glen M. Sizemore"
<gmsizemore2@yahoo.com> wrote in
<news:46e2ed1e$0$7607$ed362ca5@nr2.newsreader.com> in
sci.cognitive,sci.lang,bionet.neuroscience:

> "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. 

I did not.

[...]

>> 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. 

This is not apparent from the Wikipedia article, and in fact
I doubt very much that it can be in any sense that would
interest me.  I suspect that you and I have very different
understandings of 'well worked out', and probably also very
different notions of what is to be explained where language
is concerned.

[...]

> So far you have displayed little more than an inability
> to read and think.

I suggest that you re-read my previous post before casting
aspersions on my ability to read.  You appear not to have
noticed that I was explicitly describing the impression made
on me by the Wikipedia article, not by VB itself, and that I
explicitly allowed that the impression might be misleading.

By the way, in case you hadn't noticed in the heat of your
exchanges with Peter, my previous post was my first
substantive comment on the subject, so your bile and insults
seem a bit out of place for someone who calls himself 'a
polite fellow'.

>> 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? 

Not really, no.  Divine Creation, even if (incredibly) it
were the case, would seem neither to be subject to
scientific inquiry nor to have explanatory power in any
scientific sense.  Of mind, on the other hand, the worst you
can legitimately say is that it's not clear whether
scientific inquiry is possible.  It seems rather foolish,
therefore, to take its non-existence as axiomatic.

> You are right, though, the "mind" is as much in vogue
> today as when it was synonymous with "soul."

Actually, I neither made nor implied any such statement.