Lecture 5: The Rise and Fall of Behaviourism: 1900-2000 Flashcards
hoe stond psychologie in 1900
wel echt als een science nu
wat was de dominant method (vooral in usa)
introspection
waardoor werd psychologie gezien als een soft science in 1900
door dingen als spiritualism, mesmerism, phrenology… dingen die keer op keer fout werden bewezen.
wat was een belangrijke stroming aan het begin van de 20e eeuw (1900)
positivism (Comte)
- Positivism is popular at the beginning of the 20th century.
- The thesis: Science is ultimately the way to truth
- Objectivity of knowledge must be guaranteed
- This relates poorly to the fact that introspection is still the dominant methodology
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wie was Bridgman
- The theory of relativity turns physics upside down
- The basis lies in Einstein’s persistent question: how do we establish through
measurements that two events are simultaneous? - The Newtonian intuition of absolute time appears to be wrong!
- The physicist Bridgman wants to save physics from another revolution like this by clearly
attaching all concepts to measurement procedures
door wie was william james eerder al beinvloedt
darwin
er was een soort disbalans in 1900, mensen wilden psy graag als harde science zien, maar hier was ook kritiek op. ook was er al heel lang geen nieuwe bevinding (zoals bv in de biologie).
oke
we mean by any concept
nothing more than a set of
operations; the concept is
synonymous with the
corresponding set of
[measurement] operations”
bridgman (wilde dus alles operationaliseren!)
3 ingredienten voor behaviourism
- hard vs vague
- a time of revolutions
- humans are animals
dus de operationalisation of Bridgman =
we should define everything in terms of how we measure them.
= concepts should be reduced to measurements
waar kwam bridgman niet zo ver
binnen de filosofie
wat was kritiek op bridgman
– Length can be measured with multiple different procedures, so no unique definition of length
– Operations cannot be “synonymous” to concepts
maar… Bridgman werd wel heel populair binnen de psychologie
yay
Boring:
maakte Bridgmans ideeen populair met: intelligence is what the intelligence test measures
pavlov’s classical conditioning=
Neutral stimulus (NS; tone) is linked to unconditioned stimulus (US; food) provoking an unconditioned response (UR; salivating)
After a while, the NS becomes a conditioned
stimulus (CS) and is followed by a conditioned
response (CR; salivating)
thorndike was een student van…
james
thorndike studying animals
because he cannot find
children to serve as subjects
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wat had thorndike bedacht
law of effect (behaviours followed by a reward are more likely to be repeated)
wat is instrumental conditioning
wat skinner later operant conditioning noemt: a procedure in which a reinforcement, such as food, is delivered contingent upon a response
hoe leidde de evolutie theorie tot behaviourism
- Biology is successfully studying animal behavior
- Nobody ever asks a dog what it thinks of anything
- Apparently behavioral science in biology doesn’t need introspection…
- So why should that be necessary with people?
- Can’t we just let psychology revolve around behavior?
- And even remove any dependence on ‘mental states’?
dus wat waren de 3 oorzaken + gevolgen die ook weer leidden tot behaviourism
1) hard vs. vague: positivism (science brings truth and requires objectivity)
2) time of revolutions: operationalism (concepts should be defined through mechanisms)
3) learning theory (based exclusively on stimuli and behaviour, inspired by animal research)
wie was de eerste behaviourist
watson
No more introspection; only
behavioral analyses in terms
of reinforcement and
punishment, a psychology without consciousness
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wat was de key ding van behaviourism (hoe leg je het in een zin uit)
kijken naar observable behaviour, stimulus response associations.
wie schreef het eerste journal article
watson
wat was john watson
een behaviourist en empiricist (geloofde in tabula rasa)
“Give me a dozen healthy infants,
well-formed, and my own
specified world to bring them up
in and I’ll guarantee to take any
one at random and train him to
become any type of specialist I
might select – doctor, lawyer,
artist, merchant-chief and, yes,
even beggar-man and thief,
regardless of his talents,
penchants, tendencies, abilities,
vocations, and race of his
ancestors.”
watson
Watson essentially repeats many of the ideas of the British Empiricists:
- The Tabula Rasa thesis is in fact a direct copy of John Locke
- The learning theory of the behaviorists is very close to that of David Hume
- Behaviorism is designed as an
absolutist system - Much of the content, however,
has withstood the test of time
well - In psychotherapy behaviorist
concepts (conditioning,
extinction, exposure) for
example, are still widely used - Also a lot of learning theory is
rooted in behaviorism
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wat hoorde bij Skinner
radical behaviourism
radical behaviourism=
total ban on the use of terms that refer to mental states, all human behaviour can be understood as S-R associations, what is not measurable should be left out of science (did not deny these mental states, but just stated that they did not belong in science).
thoughts, etc.
* Note that Skinner didn’t deny
that these things exist; he
just insisted that they didn’t
belong in science
27B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)
* Radical Behaviorism: total
ban on the use of terms that
refer to mental states; all
human behavior can be
understood as S-R
relationships
* What is not directly
measurable has to be left out
* So: a psychology without
dreams, expectations,
thoughts, etc.
* Note that Skinner didn’t deny
that these things exist; he
just insisted that they didn’t
belong in science
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wat dacht skinner over free will
free will is an illusion. man is not an actor but a lens, a point where influences come together. behaviour is the outcome.
waar dacht skinner dat de ‘I’ naar toe verwees
naar the person as a whole (not a mind or a brain) -> an input output mechanism.
wat dacht skinner over homunculus?
dat er geen homunculus is, not even in the brain?
waardoor kwam de kritiek op behaviourism
toen Skinner probeerde te schrijven over language in S-R associaties
hoe schreef skinner over language
1) child starts with imitation
2) then learns complex sentences through reinforcement and punishment
3) end result = very complex S-R associations based on language behaviours.
a child who masters language is therefore a sort of well trained pigeon
wat zijn de 3 hoofdpunten van chomsky
skinners theory is…
- much more vague than skinner presents
- unable to explain the complexity of language
- does not do justice to the learning process we see in children
wat is de input altijd van skinners theorieen
a stimulus in the physical environment
wat is de output altijd van skinners theorieen
observable behaviour in response to the stimulus
Skinner’s theory is supposed to be more objective because the terms he uses (stimulus,
response, reinforcement) refer to observable things and behavior.
wat is chomsky zijn reactie hierop?
nonsense:
- if we take these terms literally, they hardly apply
- if we take these terms metaphorically, they become just as vague
Skinners theory is just as vague as traditional theories:
- skinner wants a lawful relationship: one stimulus always gives one response
- however, people can respond differently to a red chair (chair, wood, red, sit)
- dus: if the chair is the stimulus, there is NO lawfullness
- what is we make the property of the chair the stimulus? -> the redness of the chair
- but… then it is no longer objective, because we only know what the stimulus is after you say red
wat is het voorbeeld van response strenght van chomsky
- in animal experience: strength is measured by pitch, stress and quantity
- but what about verbal behaviour of humans?
- strong response would then be: WOWOWOWOWOWWO
- but if we were to make a response like a soft wow also count, the concept would be vague again.
wat was Chomsky zijn kritiek op reinforcement
- reinforcement should explain the response
- to explain all responses, the concept reinforcement should be so vague that there is always some reinforcement
- ‘X is reinforced by Y’ is the same thing as saying ‘X wants Y’
in short: the 3 examples of why Skinners terms are not correct if they are taken literally, and vague if they are metaphorically
- chair (meerdere responses mogelijk, en niet meer objectief als je het hebt over de roodheid van de stoel)
- response strength (animal experiments meten pitch etc, mensen zouden dan WOWOW moeten schreeuwen voor een sterke response, en als wow geaccepteerd wordt dan is het niet meer objectief/vague)
- reinforcement (another way of saying ‘wanting’, vaag concept)
chomskys argument dat skinner niet de complexiteit van language kan uitleggen=
skinner is limited to behaviour, but language requires intentions. you cannot use the behaviour of the listener to explain the intention of the speaker
wat was het argument van chomsky dat skinner’s theorie het complexe leerproces van kinderen niet goed weergeeft
- parents are not precise enough in punishment en reinforcement
- children dont do mimicry
- children can understand an infinite number of sentences
- children learn language spontaneously
- the type of mistakes children make does not seem to suggest they learn by trial and error
hoe legt hij chomsky het argument van kinderen uit adhv een voorbeeld
“The man who is tall is happy”
“Is the man who is tall happy?”
wat is chomsky zijn stand dus over language
language is innate, he is a nativist, proposes language acquisition device (LAD)
met wie komt chomsky daarmee overeen
plato en descartes
- Chomsky explains the innate
system by an evolutionary
change in humans - Although the system seems
very complex, it’s probably
something simple - But we can’t omit this system
from the explanation of
language just because it seems
so complex
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waarom is chomsky een rationalist
hij dacht:
* Linguistics should let go
of the assumption that
the meaning of language
can be found in the
observable outside world
* Instead, the meaning of a
word is a mental concept:
it’s in our head
=Rationalism
- 8 years later (1967), Chomsky writes
that his review is more of a critique
on behaviorism than on Skinner’s
work specifically - And even more generally, it can be
seen as a critique on empiricism:
“an account of the development and
causation of behavior that fails to
consider the structure of the organism
will provide no understanding of the
real processes involved”
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“the remarkable capacity
of the child to generalize,
hypothesize and “process
information” in a variety
of very special and
apparently complex ways
which we cannot yet
describe or begin to
understand, and which
may be largely innate”
“It is clear that what is
necessary in such a
case is research, not
dogmatic and perfectly
arbitrary claims”
chomsky
wat is recentelijk bewijs tegen chomsky
- The LAD is quite controversial; there is no “language organ” in the brain so how does that
work? - And how “poor” are the stimuli that children get? They hear thousands of language expressions a day
- Recent research with neural networks suggests that certain aspects of grammar can be learned inductively
- Chomsky shows that behaviorism fails in
obtaining objectivity: we cannot get
around intentions, beliefs & feelings to
explain behavior. - This tension, of those who try to achieve a
“hard science” to understand the mind,
versus those who argue that such
“objective” approaches miss out on
fundamental characteristics of the mind,
will pop up again and again in history
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Turing:
- English mathematician
who cracks the Enigma
code of the Nazis - Turing shows how to
make a machine do
calculations - Proves that such a
machine can handle all
calculable functions - This also includes all
standard logic: the Turing
machine thus can “think”
a bit
Boolean algebra
- Mathematical implementation of logic
- True sentences are given the value “1”, false sentences the value “0”
- In logic, the truth of compositions (“p and q”) is a function of the truth of the elementary statements (“p”, “q”)
- In Boolean algebra the truth value of compositions is calculated by mathematical operations on the elementary parts
- E.g.: the value of “p and q” equals the value of p multiplied by the value of q
- “p and q” is thus only true (“1”) if p and q are both true (both “1”), because only then you get 1x1=1 (in all other cases you get 0)
who discovered modus ponens
aristotle!!!!!!1 my baby
- Aristotle discovered that certain forms of reasoning always give true conclusions from true premises: logic
- Example modus ponens:
If p then q
p
q - Is always valid, regardless of the
meaning of p and q! Because the meaning of p and q doesn’t matter, a machine can do it
as well. Turing applies this insight from Aristotle
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the computer analogy =
Mind:Brain
- The Turing machine shows how a psychological process (reasoning) can be performed by a machine. This results in the
computer analogy:
Software:Hardware
The mind as the software program that performs reasoning.
- The question of how the mind relates to the brain goes all the way back to Plato
- Descartes’ dualism dominates until the 20th century: the mind interacts with the brain.
- Turing gives a new possibility: the mind is implemented in the brain, like a program is
implemented in a computer
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- If thinking is indeed nothing more than implementing logic, then a computer can also think
- Could a computer also develop consciousness?
- This question continues to occupy philosophical minds to this day
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- Chomsky shows stimulus-response theory
is insufficient to understand complex
behaviour such as language - Therefore, to understand complex
behaviour, we need to construct theories
about what goes on inside the black box - The development of digital computers
provides a framework for doing this, in
which the mind can be seen as a program
that performs information processing - This leads to a new organizing principle:
the computer metaphor, in which
mind:brain=software:hardware - The study of this information processing in
humans becomes known as cognitive
psychology
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dus de turin gmachine showed….
how a psychological process (reasoning) can be performed by a machine. could the mind work like that too??? is the mind implemented in the brain, like a software programme in hardware?
- Behaviorism briefly satisfies the need for an
objective, hard science - However, falls short in the analysis of
complex behavior; specifically language - The downfall of behaviorism is primarily
scientific in nature: there are good arguments
against it - Also important: Behaviorism in many ways is
also a winner - Can the analogy of the mind as computer
program keep the brain at distance?
oke
