Science Forum: Queries, Quotes, & Links.


This is a page of Queries, Tidbits, Handy hints, Quotations, and Links. At present, I have no handy hints for this category, but should you have any, please e-mail them to me and I will include them here. Most importantly, if you are interested in swapping links, e-mail your URL to me. I am eager to exchange links with anyone with related research interests.

Queries:

This spot is reserved to look for information I still haven't located yet. If you know the answer, e-mail me at steve_kemp@unc.edu and I will post it here under Tidbits (or Quotes, as the case might be.)


* Lost James reference: Here's an item for you James scholars. Brand Blanshard (1939) cites James (I assume William James and not his brother, Henry) as the source of the clever French sentence, "Pas de lieu Rhone que nous." Help! Does anyone have the original reference for this? I was able to locate a passage in James' "The Principles of Psychology" that mentions it, but that passage seems to indicate the existence of an earlier discussion, which I have, thus far, been unable to locate. Here is what I have found thus far:

On page 80 of Volume II, James has the following:

In many cases it is easy to compare the psychic results of the sensational with those of the perceptive process. We then see a marked difference in the way in which the impressed portions of the object are felt, in consequence of being cognized along with the reproduced portion, in the higher state of mind. Their sensible quality changes under our very eye. Take the already-quoted catch, Pas de lieu Rhône que nous: one may read this over and over again without recognizing the sounds to be identical with those of the words paddle your own canoe.

James, W. (1890/1950). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt. (Reprinted 1950 by Dover Publications, Inc.) Volume II, chapter xix, The perception of 'things', pp.80.

The difficulty with this passage is that James refers to this as an "already-quoted catch," which suggests he has discussed it earlier in the book. Thus far, I have been unable to find an earlier mention by James. Is it possible that James edited out the earlier passage and failed to correct this mention? Or perhaps James meant "oft-quoted" rather than "already-quoted"? Any assistance anyone can give me on this would be greatly appreciated.

I include the beginning of the Blanshard passage for reference.

Thought may vary while speech remains the same. We may repeat an illustration from James. One writes the French words, Pas de lieu Rhône que nous, and asks a student to read them aloud. He says something like 'Paddle your own canoe', and then with a little shock of realization, 'Why, that's "paddle your own canoe!"'

Blanshard, B. (1939). The Nature of Thought. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. volume one, chapter ix, §8, pp.320-321.


* TutorText: I have managed to obtain a copy of a TutorText (a goal in the previous queries section). TutorTexts, also known as automatic tutoring books, also known as Scrambled books, are self-teaching texts invented by Norman Crowder in the late 1950s.

I would like to thank everyone who has helped with this item. I have located the copyright owners. I have communicated with the late Dr. Crowder's partner and his son. I am hoping soon to contact another person who has digitized some TutorTexts. I will try to keep everyone updated from here.

I am interested in converting this text to hypertext and would love to communicate with anyone who has similar interests or who knows precisely how many different TutorTexts are out there, particularly in the areas of basic education.

Crowder, Norman A. & Grace C.Martin. (1962). Adventures in Algebra. London, English Universities Press.


* Works by Weiss: As part of the memorial WebPage for Albert P. Weiss, I have assembled a bibliography of his work. From what records I have, it appears to be nearly complete. If anyone knows of any complete bibliography of Weiss' work, or knows of any work by Weiss not included in the bibliography here, particularly items such as letters, commentaries, and reviews, which don't usually get included in bibliographies. I would also be interested in purchasing a copy of the second edition of Weiss' book, A Theoretical Basis of Human Behavior, copyright 1929.


* Typewriting monkeys: There is an old line about how long it would take a room full of monkeys typing on typewriters to reconstruct all of the works found in the British Museum. (There are variants, such as apes for monkeys and the works of Shakespeare for the works in the museum.) I have been searching for the source of this quote. I tracked it back to the short story from the 1930s that made it popular. (I will include the exact reference for this story when I find where I put it.) It suggests that one of the popular science writers of the day, like Sir Arthur Eddington or Sir James Jeans, had authored the original. I have seen the idea mentioned dozens of times, but only once with a partial citation to yet another popular science author of the period. (I will track down this passage and include it here as well.) Of course, the most likely person would have been T. H. (Thomas) Huxley, and the only hit I got on alta-vista suggests that, but, once again, no reference. In any event, I would really love to hear from anyone who has any information as to the original source of this comment. Also, if anyone has the complete works of any of these folks on disk and could do a quick search, I would really appreciate it. Thanks.


* Auguste Comte experts: I believe that, somewhere along the line, Comte used the goings on at the center of the sun as an example of something that was obviously going on, but was necessarily beyond the reach of human knowledge. I can't find the source of the citation, much less the original passage. I'm no Comte scholar (not much of a scholar of anything, as this WebSite no doubt attests), so I would appreciate some help from anyone who can help me track this down.


* Signs and seals: I know that, somewhere along the line, the distinction between a "coarse hand" and a "fine hand" disappeared. Prior to typewriters, educated persons had two handwritings, one for ordinary use and one for business. I also know that people used to have seals for sealing letters and documents. I have always assumed that typewriters killed the fine hand and that the expansion of literacy to those without family crests killed seals. But it recently struck me that with the elimination of the fine hand, persons' signatures became more distinctive (and thus harder to forge) and some of the necessity of seals was eliminated. I was wondering if anyone out there knew enough about the dates of either of these changes to suggest whether either hypothesis was false.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Tidbits:

This spot is reserved for information that may be of use to persons interested psychology, artificial intelligence, behavior analysis, philosophy of mind, etc. Your comments are welcome.


* The mirror reversal paradox: It has been noted that a mirror reverses left and right, but not up and down. When you look in a mirror, the face you see is opposite from side-to-side from your own as others see you. If you part your hair on the left, it will appear to be parted on the right in the face of your reflection. However, this reversal does not apply in the vertical direction as it does in the horizontal. The eyes are still above the nose and mouth, etc.

I have seen a number of explanations as to why this is so. Here is my favorite:

A mirror does not reverse East and West, but only left and right. Left and right are unlike up and down, because left and right are measured from the person's own perspective. Imagine looking down on someone who is looking into a mirror. Suppose they are facing North. The person's left side is West and their right side is East, and they both stay that way, just like up and down. The points of the compass, like up and down, are measured relative to the environment, not the body.

So, why does the part of your hair jump to the other side of your head, at least relative to what another person would see looking at you? Why doesn't your reflection have the part in your hair on the same side as a photograph? Think back the overhead view. The mirror just reflects light. It is you, looking into the mirror, who interprets what you see as a face. If it were a face, and not a reflection, imagine where that person would be standing. She or he would be standing directly on the other side of the mirror from you. And that imaginary person would part his or her hair on the right. If you look down from above, you see that both the real person and the imaginary one part their hair on the West. For the real person, this is because that is where the hair is parted. For the imaginary person, this is because West is the side where the light is reflected. The reflected part in the reflected hair is not really on the right side of anything. It is on the left side of the image. It is just that the person looking in the mirror interprets the image as being the image of a person facing South, instead of North. If that person actually existed, the West side, where the parts are, would be that person's right side, because she or he would be facing South.




* Two types of behaviorism: B. F. Skinner distinguished between two forms of behaviorism, methodological behaviorism and radical behaviorism. This very useful distinction does not get a lot of play outside of behavior analysis.

Methodological behaviorism is a doctrine to the effect that all psychological phenomena and, more importantly, all the empirical regularities to be found amongst such phenomena, must be expressed, or at least expressible, in terms of overtly observable external events. Thus, to the degree that traditional mental entities, such as thoughts, feelings, intentions, etc. can be integrated into psychological science, they must be given "operational definitions" in terms of the observable phenomena. If such definitions fail, then the mental construct must be abandoned, both as something to be explained and also as a mechanism for constructing explanations.

From a phenomenological perspective, one of the most obvious distinction amongst psychological phenomena is between the circumstances within which the person finds herself and the accomplishments of that person. The most common feature to varieties of methodological behaviorism is the codification of the evidence into circumstances (called stimuli) and accomplishments (called responses). Hence, older versions of methodological behaviorism are often known under the rubric "stimulus-response (S-R) psychology."

Radical behaviorism is a doctrine to the effect that the traditional categories of mental events, such as actions, thoughts, feelings, intentions, conscious experience, qualia, perception, sensation are not appropriate to scientfic inquiry, at least as provided in the traditional analyses. Radical behaviorism proposes a new taxonomy of mental events: Actions are considered the preeminent type of psychological event. All of the other traditional types are classed into one of three categories: Some traditional terms are deemed to be to vague or otherwise deficit so as to have no proper referent, much less to refer to a genuine natural kind of event. (Terms such as memories and intention are commonly -- though not always -- placed in this category.) Some terms are deemed to be outside the realm of scientific inquiry due to the forms of inquiry required for their analysis. (Terms such as qualia and consciousness are commonly -- though not always -- placed in this category.) All remaining terms are deemed to refer to subtypes of action. (Terms such as thinking, perception, problem-solving, emotion, attention, etc. are commonly -- though not always -- placed in this category.)

Philosophers will note that this analysis is very much in accord with Ryle. It does, however, pre-date Ryle's (1949), The Concept of Mind. There are varieties of radical behaviorism, mostly distinguished in terms of which types of mentalistic term is assigned, either probationarily or apriori, to which super-ordinate category. Most importantly, it should be noted that the tie to the stimulus-reponse methodology is far weaker. There are few reasons that the terms stimulus and response need even be used, given only the fact that one is a radical behaviorist. If adopted, the stimulus-response methodology must be justified elsewhere than in one's philosophy of psychology.

In this context, we can take a second look at the currently most popular philosophy of psychology, Cognitivism. From the perspective of this distinction, cognitivism is a form of methodological behaviorism with a particular solution to the problem of treating the traditional mentalistic terms. Contrary to radical behaviorism, most, if not all, of the traditional mental terms are presumed to have distinct natural kinds as their referents. (More traditional cognitivists still eschew terms such as consciousness and qualia, though even some of these terms are now admitted to study by more modern cognitive scientists.) This assumption allows cognitivists to use the traditional mental categories, both in describing psychological phenomena and in constructing explanations of them. (An interesting linguistic tradition has arisen in this regard. The standardly-used mental terms are often renamed. In English, if the standard term is Anglo-Saxon, a Latinate version is substituted, as in: "cognition" for thinking and "affect" for emotion. Likewise, if the standard term is Latinate, an Anglo-Saxon cognomen is substituted, as in: "plan" for intention.)

In traditional methodological behaviorist systems, such as that of Hull or Tolman or Woodworth, the mental term had to be re-interpreted directly in terms of the experimental procedures in use. (This practice is still common in social psychology.) For the cognitivist, any prior mentalistic term can be admitted, either as explanandum or as explanans, so long as it can be conceptualized computationally as part of a process that ultimately produces actions and so long as empirical predictions can be made with regard to the nature of those actions. Importantly, it is not required that the computational component taken as the model of the mental construct be necessary to the computational model. (This is a complaint made by the advocates of situated cognition.)

Importantly, these assumptions allow the cognitivist to give the practice of operational definition a far less prominent place in his epistemology. The categories used to classify the phenomena must, of course, be rendered with respect to observable criteria in order that inter-subjective agreement be obtainable. However, when the traditional mentalistic categories are used to classify explanatory constructs, the links to observables can be very remote indeed. Cognitivists refer to this as the "freedom to theorize." The greatest benefit of the cognitivist approach is that it allows decisions about the true identities of the referents of the mental terms to be put off until later inquiry can make things more clear. The greatest danger is that a de facto bar to inquiry into the epistemological questions of whether or not the traditional mental categories do, in fact, pick out natural kinds has arisen in order that inquiry can proceed safely without challenge to the risky but necessary assumptions for cognitivist inquiry. In short, judgements about precisely what is meant by various mental terms can be suspended so long as it is assumed that something useful and scientific and causally efficacious is meant.

The deep difficulty is that, no matter how generally useful cognitivist models become, these central constructs cannot be tested independently of the theories in which they are embedded. Because the mentalistic components are not usually necessary, but only computationally convenient, failure to disconfirm a cognitive theory provides very weak support for the central constructs. Because theories about the true neurological referents of the terms are put off, independent confirmation of their existence via brain studies is not yet possible.




My friend, Mark S. Golden (a pseudonym) is planning on contributing some political essays to this WebSite. Some of his views relate to psychology, or at least to social science. I thought I would give folks a preview of his thinking here:

* Psychology and Public Policy: I think that a properly scientific economics, and eventually properly scientific psychology, sociaology, anthropology, etc. should have something to say on the question of what an ideal society would be like, though I would not go so far as the many Utopians, including Skinner, who have attempted to sketch out what such a society would look like.

My favorite example is from the movie "Jezebel," starring Bette Davis and Henry Fonda, Warner Brothers, 1938. Henry Fonda plays a young up-and-coming doctor in 1840s New Orleans, mentored by a prominent and progressive member of the city council, a Dr. Livingstone (played by Donald Crisp). As the film begins, Fonda and his mentor are trying to convince the city council to establish public hygiene measures, in particular, a sewer system, in order to avoid the return of a recently departed Cholera epidemic, which they claim will inevitably return unless such scientific measures are taken. Their science is new. The cost is great. The city council rejects the idea.

Fonda leaves for the NorthEast for further education and research. He returns ten years later, skilled, prominent, and successful, with a new Yankee wife (played by Margaret Lindsay), to a city now facing the return of the dreadful plague they had predicted. The wealthier citizens are retreating up the hills to the suburbs above the "plague line" where cholera has never reached. Fonda and his wife are invited to the country house of Jezebel, played by Bette Davis, where they will be safe.

In the distance, they hear explosions. The wife asks Jezebel what the noise is. She explains that, in an effort to stop the plague, all the cannons of New Orleans have been set up along the docks and are being fired in continuous nighttime volley to push the "bad" night air out to sea. The young wife, coming as she does from a society where the scientific facts of Cholera and its relation to hygiene, etc., are well-accepted, is horrified. On the other hand, considering that the City council had already decided not to build the sewer system, what more could they do but hope that the outdated folk theory had some merit?

I direct your attention to the debate that began the film. In the Boston of that same day, there would have been no debate. The merits of germ theory was no longer a political issue in the North. Soon, it would not be so in the South. Science removed the issue from politics.

Imagine an ancient town council deciding how to build a bridge. A debate as to what sort of animal should be sacrificed to the gods how often in order to insure that the bridge not collapse. Today, a town council chooses an architect or contractor based on reputation and price and then leaves the engineering to the experts they have hired. Victorian England had no council of Economic advisors, since Economics was not yet sufficiently developed to take any problems out of the hands of the politicians. Today's U.S. Congress is in a similar state to the New Orleans town council in that movie, but a bit later. In the Congress, free trade and protectionism is still debated, even though no reputable economist will take the side of protectionism.

(The most amusing bit is that the MacNeil/Lehrer Opinion Hour -- now just the MacNeiless Lehrer Opinion Hour -- on PBS is so foolishly and ignorantly committed to turning every issue into a High School debate championship that they scoured the country to find someone to debate the economists about the merits of NAFTA. Initially, they titled him a "Labor Economist." I guess some real economists must have objected because, the next time he was on, he was billed as a "Labor Advocate.")

Perhaps some day there will be a Council of Psychological Advisors. Perhaps some day there will deserve to be. By that time, if all goes well, the Council of Economic Advisors will be obsolete, just as worthless as having a Council of Engineering Advisors instead of the actual Army Corps of Engineers. The Army Corps of Engineers does not advise, they do.


* A warning about the use of group statistics: Watching cable TV the other day (3/21/98) I saw a show on the psychology of fear. One investigator, specializing in the fear of public speaking noted that, in surveys, the fear of public speaking was ranked number one. He noted that fear of death was ranked number five. He then noted, tongue in cheek, (at least I hope it was tongue in cheek) that people would rather die than speak before a large audience.

Of course, this conclusion does not hold. No doubt a huge majority of those surveyed would choose to speak rather than to die. In part, the confusion is due to the nature of the question. What is the meaning of "greatest fear?" To some degree, ranking public speaking above death means that one is occurrently more fearful more of the time about public speaking than one is about death. And even if we were to neglect the effects of how often one concerned oneself about either matter, one's immediate emotional reaction to the possibility of speaking could be worse than the reaction to the possibility of death simply on the grounds that the former is easier to imagine or is imagined to be more likely. Even neglecting all this, one might shiver more mightily when contemplating public speech than when contemplating death and still choose the former over the latter.

But suppose that the survey asked, "What is your greatest fear?" and that everyone answered with the thing they would least prefer to do, given all the possible alternatives. Even so, the conclusion would not hold. Suppose that some small minority of whackos, say five percent of those surveyed, really would prefer anything else, including death, to speaking publicly. They list that as their greatest fear. The other 95% list death or loss of a loved one or homelessness or crippling disease or damnation or some other fear that could legitimately be considered a "fate worse than death." But no one of those alternatives collects more than four percent of the votes. In that case, fear of public speaking would be number one and fear of death might be number five and yet fully 95% of those surveyed would prefer public speaking to death. Indeed, those 95% might love public speaking. Even if we asked each person to list their top five fears in order, or even to list all the fears they could think of an to order them from greatest to least, it is possible that fear of public speaking could be ranked number one over all and yet only a small percentage would fear it worse than death.

While there are many examples of how group statistics can lead us astray in making inferences about individuals, I thought that this one was particularly compelling, so I thought I would share it.


Quotations:

A few of my favorite quotes relating to science, psychology, and/or behaviorism. We have some on science, on psychology, and a few just for fun.

on science:

* The following, my all-time favorite Einstein quote, is taken from page 257 of Hoffman (1972):

For a while near the end of 1954 Einstein was ill and weak. He knew that he had not many years left to live. [...] Yet before he died he was to experience yet one more sorrow. In March of 1955 his friend Michele Besso died -- Besso whom he had thanked in 1905 at the end of the paper on relativity. To Besso's surviving son and sister he wrote on 21 March 1955:

"The foundation of our friendship was laid in our student years in Zurich, where we met regularly at musical evenings.... Later the Patent Office brought us together. The conversations during our mutual way home were of unforgettable charm.... And now he has preceded me briefly in bidding farewell to this strange world.

"This signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one."

Hoffman, B. (1972). Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel (with the collaboration of Helen Dukas). New York: New American Library.


* The following is one of my all-time favorite science quotes. It is attributed to Sir Issac Newton:

You sometimes speak of gravity as essential and inherent to matter. Pray do not ascribe that notion to me; for the cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know.... It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and effect other matter without mutual contact.

Wightman (1951, p.101-102)

Wightman, W. P. D. (1951). The Growth of Scientific Ideas. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.


* On a lighter note, here's H. L Mencken's view:

"The Scientist: The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes."

H. L. Mencken (1949) in "Types of Men," reprinted in A Mencken Chrestomathy, chapter 2, page 12. Originally published in the Smart Set, Aug., 1919, pp.60-61, and reprinted in Prejudices: Third Series (1922, pp.269-270).



on psychology:

*

The laws of mind [are] of so fluid a character as to simulate divergences from law.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1931-1958, 6.101).

Peirce, C. S. (1931-1958). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, & A. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


* Edwin R. Guthrie (1940) on the distinction between movement and action:

Common speech defines acts in terms of their results, not in terms of the movements by which those results are accomplished. We eat a dinner, sail a boat, ride a horse, play a selection on the piano. For each of these acts there may be a thousand different patterns of muscular contraction in the details of the achievement, and the act may still be known by the same name. Skillful and awkward performances of the same act may use very different motions.

The notion of conditioning, or a behavioristic use of the principle of association by contiguity, applies directly to the prediction of movements and not to the prediction of acts as defined by their results. There are no direct neural connections between any sense organs and our dinner, our boat, or our piano. It is not the changes in these environmental objects that are associated with new cues. Associative learning implies sense organs, afferent pathways, a central nervous system, a motor system, and the final term, the effector. In the strict sense it is the activity of the effectors that is predicted, not the results of this activity in the outer world.

The fact remains that in order to apply a strict associationism to the explanation of human and animal behavior we must deal eventually with acts as well as with movements. There is little use for the prediction of movements alone, and there exists almost no vocabulary for their description. To try to describe behavior by naming the muscles in use and the degrees and order of their contraction would be absurd. It is the changes brought about by movements, changes usually in the environment and not in the organism, that are of practical importance, and theories of behavior must somehow bring acts as well as movements into their predictive laws and principles.

All this has been said many times before and by many men, perhaps by no one so explicitly as by the late A. P. Weiss. It is this difficulty in extending association from movement to significant action that is behind much of the current dissatisfaction with the principle of association or conditioning. The Pavlovian experiments and their successors stand apart from the bulk of the studies of learning. Pavlov dealt with the secretion of a gland without reference to the possible effects of that secretion on the life adjustment of the dog. Similarly those experiments that have used reflex winking to a blast of air, reflex flexion of the leg to a shock, reflex changes in breathing induced by shock, and all the rest have paid little attention to the effects of these responses on the animal itself or on the outer world.

Guthrie (1940, pp.127-128).

Guthrie, E. R. (1940). Association and the law of effect. Psychological Review, 47, 127-148.


* Austin (1962) makes a clear statement of this problem. In discussing the rich-thin continuum of action, he concludes that at some level, we must decide that such an intermediary is, in fact, not a proper action in some sense:

With physical actions we nearly always naturally name the action not in terms of what we are here calling the minimum physical act, but in terms which embrace a greater or less but indefinitely extensive range of what might be called its natural consequences (or, looking at it another way, the intention with which it was done).

We not merely do not use the notion of a minimum physical act (which is in any case doubtful) but we do not seem to have any class of names which distinguish physical acts from consequences ....

(p.112)

Note that if we suppose the minimum physical act to be movement of the body when we say 'I moved my finger', the fact that the object moved is part of my body does in fact introduce a new sense of 'moved'. Thus I may be able to waggle my ears as a schoolboy does, or by grasping them between my finger and thumb, or move my foot either in the ordinary way or by manipulating with my hand when I have pins and needles. The ordinary use of 'move' in such examples as 'I moved my finger' is ultimate. We must not seek to go back behind it to 'pulling on my muscles' and the like.

(p.112, footnote)

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words (2nd ed.; J. O. Urmson and M. Sbisà, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


* In his book, Cybernetics, Wiener (1947) gives the classic picture of the microstructure of action:

When we desire a motion to follow a given pattern, the difference between this pattern and the actually performed motion is used as a new input to cause the part regulated to move in such a way as to bring its motion closer to that given by the pattern. For example, one form of steering engine of a ship carries the reading of the wheel to an offset from the tiller which so regulates the valves of the steering engine as to move the tiller in such a way as to turn these valves off. ...

Now, suppose that I pick up a lead-pencil. To do this I have to move certain muscles. However, for all of us but a few expert anatomists, we do not know what these muscles are; and even among the anatomists, there are few if any who can perform the act by a conscious willing in succession of the contraction of each muscle concerned. On the contrary, what we will is to pick the pencil up. Once we have determined on this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. This part of the action is not in full consiousness.

To perform an action in such a manner, there must be a report to the nervous system, conscious or unconscious, of the amount by which we have failed to pick the pencil up at each instant. If we have our eye on the pencil, this report may be visual, at least in part, but it is more generally kinaesthetic, or to use a term now in vogue, proprioceptive.

(pp.13-14)

Wiener, N. (1947). Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine. New York: John Wiley & Sons.


* And this problem applies just as much to perception as to action. Consider the following from Hebb (1949):

My point is not that eyemovements are essential to perception by a sophisticated observer ...; but that the perception is definitely clearer, more effective, with them than without. ... [This] is to be interpreted in the light of all the evidence ... showing that the perception of square or circle is slowly learned and depends originally on multiple fixations. ...

I find it very difficult to have a clear image of a triangle, square, or circle without imagining or actually making a series of eyemovements. .... It is hard or impossible, that is, to have a clear image of a triangle as fixated at one point. Eyemovements definitely improve the 'image.' They do not take the form, necessarily, of following the figures contours, but are apt to jump from point to point.... Thus the distinctiveness of the image is not merely in the eyemovement pattern.... Activation of the motor system, overt or implicit ... contributes essentially to the development of visual integration without being sufficient to it.

(p. 34)

There would be a tendency to fixate, successively, various parts of the contour of an object. Also, with the intersection of lines, there may be a further summation of the border effects, so that the foci of the greatest activity aroused by a pattern in the visual field would correspond to its corners. ...

It appears from these considerations that the eye would tend to seek out the contours of a figure and follow them -- irregularly, and with reversals, it is true, and subject to disturbances by other events, but it seems that such a tendency must exist.

(p. 82)

Hebb, D.O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior. New York: John Wiley and Sons.


* In closing, I should like to quote a passage from Gibson (1972) that summarizes the point far more eloquently than I ever could:

It has long been assumed by empiricists that the only information for perception was 'sensory' information. But this assumption can mean different things. If it means that the information for perception must come through the senses and not through extrasensory intuition, this is the doctrine of John Locke, and I agree with it, as most of us would agree with it. But the assumption might mean (and it has been taken to mean) that the information for perception must come over the sensory nerves. This is a different doctrine, that of Johannes Müller, and with this we need not agree. To assume that visual information comes through the visual sense is not to assume that it comes over the optic nerve, for a sense may be considered as an active system with a capacity to extract information from obtained stimulation. The visual system in fact does this. Retinal inputs lead to ocular adjustments, and then to altered retinal inputs, and so on. It is an exploratory circular process, not a one way delivery of messages to the brain.

(p. 218)
Gibson, J. J. (1972). A theory of direct visual perception. In J. R. Royce and Wm. W. Rozeboom (Eds.), The Psychology of Knowing (pp. 215-232). New York: Gordon and Breach.


* Skinner (1957) offers a different view of the consequences of action:

A man gets a drink of water in many ways -- by reaching for a glass of water, by opening a faucet, by pouring water from a pitcher, and so on. The verbal operant Water! becomes a member of this group when it is reinforced with water. ...

Suppose, however, that in addition to drinking water our speaker has also used water to extinguish fires. Until we have tested the point, we cannot be sure that a response acquired when he has been reinforced with water while thirsty will be emitted when the wastebasket catches fire. If there is any functional connection, it must be found in certain events common to drinking water and extinguishing a fire. If the response Water! has been reinforced with visual stimulation supplied by water prior to water in the mouth, and if that stimulation plays a role in controlling the behavior of extinguishing a fire, then the response acquired only under water deprivation may occur in the case of conflagration. The group of operations which affect the strength of Water! suggests, in common parlance, some general "need for water" rather than "thirst." But we should have to examine all behavior in which water plays an essential role in order to define this need. We may say that we increase the strength of any response that has been reinforced with water, including the verbal response Water!, by strengthening any behavior which 'requires water for its execution'. (In more technical terms, the latter would be described as any behavior under the control of water as a discriminative stimulus.)

(pp. 32-33)

Skinner, B.F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.


* Skinner (1988) said this about about mathematical models:

No matter how many of the formulations derived from a study of a model eventually prove useful in describing reality..., the questions to which answers are most urgently needed concern the correspondence between the two realms. How can we be sure that a model is a model of behavior? What is behavior, and how is it to be analyzed and measured? What are the relevant features of the environment, and how are they to be measured and controlled? How are these two sets of variables related? The answers to these questions cannot be found by constructing models.

(p.83)

Skinner, B. F. (1988). Methods and theories in the experimental analysis of behavior. In A. C. Catania & S. Harnad (Eds.), The Selection of Behavior: The Operant Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner: Comments and Consequences, (pp. 77-105) . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


* B. F. Skinner on the relationship between biology and psychology (in Catania & Harnad, 1988):

I have always looked forward to the time when neurology would fill in the temporal and spatial gaps which are inevitable in a behavioral analysis.

(p.128)

We now know much more about the chemistry and the architecture of the nervous system, but I believe it is still true, as I said in 1938 in The Behavior of Organisms, that no fact about the nervous system has yet told us anything new about behavior. It has, of course, told us much that is new about the relation between the nervous system and behavior and has indicated things to be done to the nervous system to change behavior. We have not yet learned anything about the behavior of an organism in an experimental space from its physiology except when measures are employed which directly alter the physiology. The neurological measures are, of course, very much worth studying.

A science of behavior is not yet indebted to neuroscience, but there is an enormous debt in the other direction. Behavioral science gives neuroscience its assignment, just as the early science of genetics, exploring the numerical relationships among the traits of successive generations, gave the study of genes its assignment.

A behavioral analysis has two necessary but unfortunate gaps -- the spatial gap between behavior and the variables of which it is a function and the temporal gap between the actions performed upon an organism and the often deferred changes in its behavior. These gaps can be filled only by neuroscience, and the sooner they are filled, the better.

(pp.469-470)

A. C. Catania & S. Harnad (Eds.), (1988). The Selection of Behavior: The Operant Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner: Comments and Consequences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


* We must, of course, conclude our assay of psychology with a quotation from Ryle's (1949) classic, The Concept of Mind, now recently adopted by the situativitists, which lays out so many of the basic issues of the relation between behavior and cognition. There are so many important points, but here is a personal favorite of mine:

Even where efficient practice is the deliberate application of considered prescriptions, the intelligence involved in putting the prescriptions into practice is not identical with that involved in intellectually grasping the predictions. There is no contradiction, or even paradox, in describing someone as bad at practising what he is good at preaching. There have been thoughtful and original literary critics who have formulated admirable canons of prose style in execrable prose. There have been others who have employed brilliant English in the expression of the silliest theories of what constitutes good writing.

(p.49)

Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. New York: Harper and Row.




just for fun:

*

When the simplicity, amounting almost to naivete, with which this doctrine [behaviorism] is discussed and accepted is compared with the acumen brought to its consideration by a long train of metaphysicians, from Descartes to Broad, who have weighed and rejected it, one is at a loss at first to account for its recent vogue among students of psychology, .... But then one recalls that in America students of psychology are often permitted to become specialists in their science, to take doctorates in it, even to hold chairs in it, with an almost total ignorance of the history of reflection on the problems of body and mind.

Blanshard, B. (1939). The Nature of Thought. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. volume one, chapter ix, §21, pp.339-340.


* In his contemporary classic opus, Human Cognitive Abilities, the legendary John B. Carroll has found a very early theory of intelligence with an interesting factor as component. The presence of this component suggests to me that Huarte, the author of the theory, may be the most honest theorist to have ever entered the field. Carroll (1993, p.25) says this:

In the sixteenth century, the Spanish scholar Juan Huarte de San Juan (Huarte, 1575) examined the concept of intelligence. According to Linden and Linden (1968, p.2), Huarte ... distinguished three characteristics of intelligence: "(1) docility in learning from a master, (2) understanding and independence of judgement; and (3) inspiration without without extravagance."

(p.25)

It has always struck me that what we call intelligence might best be defined as being like a professor. There seem to be many components of coping that are arbitrarily excluded from the concept of intelligence, such as social skills, emotional control, and person perception. Intriguingly enough, these same coping skills are ones that professors don't possess to any particularly especial degree. The underlying problem seems to be one of human vanity. After all, only intelligent people author theories of intelligence.

It is very true that whatever other components of intelligence one might possess, if one is not capable of sitting in one's seat calmly and listening to that self-same professor, not to mention sitting in one's seat calmly for long enough to complete the intelligence test, one will never be rated as intelligent in modern society. In short, one must not only be like a professor in general, but one must be as submissive to the professor as he was to his teacher. Delightfully, Huarte apparently did not love his own personality so much that he neglected to mention this important component of intelligence, namely, docility. (Of course, in early Renaissance Spain, "docility" might not have had the contemporary perjorative connotations it has now.)

Carroll, J. (1993). Human Cognitive Abilities: A survey of factor-analytic studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huarte de San Juan, J. B. (1575). Examen de ingenios para las ciencias. [Examination of talents for the sciences.] Madrid: Baeza.

Linden, K. W. & Linden, J. D. (1968). Modern mental measurement: A historical perspective. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.


*

Any science is based on hypotheses or "laws" that can be investigated, and falsified or modified, by experiments.

Marriott (1984).

Thank goodness there's a statistician around to tell us what science is. Now we know that astronomy, archeology, geology, oceanography, geophysics, astrophysics, and meteorology aren't sciences, because their hypotheses have to be tested by observation and not experiment. And what about all those naturalists and geographers, from Livingstone to Wegener to Dian Fossey, who died for what they thought was science? Prof. Marriott is here to tell us how they wasted their time from the cozy comfort of his computer.

Marriott, F. H. C. (1984). The role of the statistician in psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7(4). pp.527-529.

reprinted as:

Marriott, F. H. C. (1988). The role of the statistician in psychology. In A. C. Catania & S. Harnad (Eds.), The Selection of Behavior: The Operant Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner: Comments and Consequences, (pp. 114-115). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


* On Tuesday, March 10th, 1998, an interview with Pat De Forgione, Jr. Phd., introduced as the Commisioner of Education Statistics for the U.S. Department of Education, was broadcast as part of a feature story by the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) News on the television series, The 700 Club, about worsening math and science test scores by U.S. students. His comment:

The question is, can we be a strong economy with just five percent doing well and the other ninety percent not able to do a problem?


* H. L. Mencken on "the so-called science of public hygiene":

Nature obviously intends the botched to die, and... every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

H. L. Mencken, "Chiropractic," from the Baltimore Evening Sun, December, 1924. (repinted in The Vintage Mencken, 1955, Random House).

Links:

Interesting and useful sites:

Famous folk:

Links to people:

Links to organizations:

Links to more links:

Journals:




Return to top.

Return to the main science page, to my HomePage or to the UNC/CH HomePage.