| Verbal Behavior |
Article Index for Verbal |
Website Links For Behavior |
Information AboutVerbal Behavior |
|
''Verbal Behavior'' touches on many perennial issues in '' — to acquire new knowledge through deduction and induction, and to reduce the clamour of information that reaches us through our senses to pure mathematical concepts such as "square" and "melody". In its extreme form, as espoused by Descartes , rationalism holds that virtually all knowledge may be arrived at by "pure reason", i.e. by logical reasoning from a set of self-evident first principles. From this perspective, the role of the senses in the formation of knowledge is merely that of a Catalyst , accelerating a process which is internal to the mind/brain. In contrast, Skinner was an extreme empiricist, arguing that notions such as "reason", "idea", "knowledge" and "concept" have no scientific significance. For example, a speaker of English could not, according to Skinner, be said to have a "knowledge of English" in any well-defined sense — he would merely have acquired a set of behaviors which allowed him to respond appropriately during English conversations. The book itself has been no less controversial than these broader philosophical issues, and is probably now more famous for the controversy surrounding it than for its actual contents. Particularly famous is " in Psychology , a shift from the study of behaviour for its own sake to a study of the mental mechanisms which underly it. Empiricist ideas about behavior are still being explored, especially in the field of Cognitive Science known as Connectionism . EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|