"Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2 at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:6e2f1d09.0406200407.9b380 at posting.google.com...
> GS: What you have just said IS the naïve philosophical view, and it is
> > precisely what doesn't work. Progress is not the result of mindless
> > application of some simplistic rules about testing hypotheses
>> B: It has been for 4000 years.
>> GS: Huh? If you are talking about some 4000 year old evolution of
> science I'd be willing to hear it, but I'm fairly certain that any
> exposition of it will not reveal the success of "mindless application
> of some simplistic rules about testing hypotheses."
>> Human behavior is one of the most complex subject matters treated by
> any science, and the behavior of scientists an extra subtle and
> complex portion. The notion that a science could have haphazard,
> uncritical conceptual structure and by some almost rote application
> of: derive hypotheses from theory-> test-> reject/accept/alter theory,
> arrive at "truth" is utterly ridiculous. This view, I think, has
> infiltrated sciences that should know better from psychology.
> Psychology began with a split from philosophy and that schism has
> produced a promiscuous proliferation of metaphors for which there is
> no hope of being anything else. The concepts of psychology are a
> shambles but, of course, what does this matter? Experiment will solve
> everything. No. Some questions simply are not empirical issues.
>> > B:[.]so in my mind, even if someone is experimenting on the brain
> > with completely a whack hypothesis, the results shouldn't care what he
> > thinks.
> >
> > GS: Obviously, I disagree.
>> B: I can't see how it is possible to disagree with that statment.
>> GS: I don't disagree that facts themselves may stand alone. What I
> disagree with is the larger implication that theory and data are all
> there is to science. Mainstream psychology and the sciences that it
> has infected construct their theories out of useless concepts, and
> this is the primary reason that much of psychology and behavioral
> neuroscience is so useless.
>> B: If I am
> experimenting about the nature of gravity, and I hypothesis that
> things
> always fall towards my feet, and I drop a rock, and it falls by my
> feet,
> then of course, these results support my hypothesis, even though we
> now
> know that hypothesis is wrong. It still doesn't detract from the
> result
> that the rock feel towards the mass.
>> GS: Again, facts may stand on their own, but science is more than
> theory and fact; it is also careful, critical conceptual analysis and
> most of psychology has none of this. In contrast, behaviorism and
> behavior analysis has been preoccupied with conceptual analysis since
> the publication of "On the Generic Nature of Stimulus and Response" in
> the '30s.
>> > B: Meanwhile, whether or not "goal cells" make any sense, or whether
> > we
> > should be talking about "goal arrays" or "goal recursive neuronal
> > circuitry", if you find a correlation between two things (cell spiking
> > and behavior) whether its causative or not, it is going to tell you
> > something.
> >
> > GS: Only once it is placed in some particular context. And it is
> > likely that when it is done, the meaning of the fact will not be the
> > same as the original mentalistic meaning.
>> B: Exactly.
>> GS: Yes, exactly, it will reveal the notion to have been misguided,
> and represented a cul-de-sac rather than thoroughfare to "truth."
Do you, Glen, have a single even slightly fresh constructive idea in your
head - or are all your "analyses" mainly about throwing 'skinny poo' on
people you call "behaviorists"?!
P