Download NAFO 2014 Farsethas Apning

Atferdsanalyse, radikal behaviorisme
og resten av verden
Eller :
Hvorfor så sur,
da?
• Jon Arne Farsethås
• Nafo 2014
Kanzi
Hva vi skal snakke om?
• Først Simon Baron-Cohen, og hva han er så sur
for.
• Dernest selvfølgelig at han tar pinlig feil på alle
punkter.
• Og så om hva det er ved atferdsanalysen og
atferdsanalytisk praksis som avføder denne
typen voldsomheter (kritikk er et alt for mildt
ord).
Hva vi skal snakke om?
• Dette skal vi forsøke å belyse ved å se nærmere
på fire områder:
1. Hva i all verden er radikal behaviorisme, og
hvorfor er det så viktig for atferdsanalytikere å
mase om dette ved praktisk talt enhver
anledning?
2. Forholdet mellom radikal behaviorisme,
eksperimentell atferdsanalyse og anvendt
atferdsanalyse.
3. Atferdsanalysens forhold til biologi.
4. Atferdsanalysens språk og (mis)forståelse av
språk.
Og i en fornuftig verden?
• Da burde vi ha snakket om:
Funksjonell atferdsorganisering - et kontinuum
Variasjon og seleksjon
S
S
O
R
Reflekser
FAM
Seleksjon av:
Sensoriske systemer
Motoriske systemer
Motivasjonelle systemer
Seksuell seleksjon
R
Arbitrære
relasjone
r
Edge.org.
What scientific idea is ready for
retirement?
Simon Baron-Cohen:
Radical Behaviorism
Simon Baron-Cohen (2014) :
• Every student of psychology is taught that
radical Behaviorism was displaced by the
cognitive revolution, because it was deeply
flawed scientifically.
• Yet it is still practiced in animal behavior
modification, and even in some areas of
contemporary clinical psychology.
Simon Baron-Cohen (forts.)
• The central idea of radical behaviorism – that
all behavior can be explained as the result of
learned associations between a stimulus and a
response, reinforced or extinguished through
reward and/or punishment – stems from the
early 20th century psychologists B.F Skinner
(at Harvard) and John B. Watson (at John
Hopkins).
Simon Baron-Cohen (forts.)
• Skinner was painted as if he believed that the
newborn human mind was no more than a
blank slate, although this was something of a
straw man, since in at least one interview
Skinner clearly acknowlegdged the role of
genetics.
• Ett intervju?
Simon Baron-Cohen (forts.)
• (It) is scientifically uninformative. Behavior by
definition is the surface level, so it follows that
the same piece of behavior could be the result of
different underlying cognitive strategies, different
underlying neural systems, and even underlying
causal pathways. Two individuals can show the
same behavior but can have arrived at it through
very different underlying causal routes.
• Joda, selvfølgelig. Men problematisk formulert :
kognitive strategier, f.eks.
Simon Baron-Cohen (forts.)
• Given these scientific (sic!) arguments, you’d have
thought Radical Behaviorism would have been
retired long ago, and yet it continues to be the
basis of «behavior modification» programs, in
which a trainer aims to shape another person’s or
animal’s behavior, rewarding them for for
producing surface behavior whilst ignoring their
underlying evolved neurocognitive make-up.
• Men dette er jo helt bakvendt radikal
behaviorisme kalles radikal nettopp fordi den
inkluderer og analyserer private begivenheter.
Simon Baron-Cohen (forts.)
• The orca dutifully produced the behaviors to get
the rewards (food) but, over the years in captivity
he was involved in 3 deaths of people. It has
never been documented that orcas have killed a
human in the wild, so this may have been a
reaction to the Radical Behaviorists who were
training this orca to show new behaviors, whilst
ignoring millions of years of evolved social and
emotional neurocognitive circuitry in the animal’s
brain, circuitry that does not vanish in captivity.
• What?
Simon Baron-Cohen (forts.)
• Kidnapping one individual orca and placing him
or her i captivity not only isolates the animal from
their social community, but it reduces their life
expenctancy, and causes signs of ill-health, such
as the frequent collapse of the dorsal fin. The use
of Radical Behaviorism towards such animals in
captivity is doubly unethical, because of the lack
of respect for the animal’s real nature. The focus
on shaping surface behavior ignores who or what
the anamal really is.
• Igjen : what?
Simon Baron-Cohen (forts.)
• There may be ethical lessons here when we think
about the still widespread use of behavior
modification of humans in contemporary clinical
settings, the need to respect how a person thinks
and feels, respecting their real nature, rather
than simply focusing on whether they can be
trained to change their surface behavior.
• Jaha. Er det ikke det som er atferdsanalyse, da?
Hvorfor alle disse påfallende
aggressive misforståelsene?
• Dette er ikke Simon Baron-Cohens private
vrangforestillinger. Han bare gjengir på en
særdeles plump måte oppfatninger som er
ganske utbredt, kanskje tilmed dominerende,
utenfor det atferdsanalytiske
(radikalbehavioristiske?) miljøet.
• Hvordan i all verden kan det ha blitt sånn?
Mulige delsvar
• Atferdsanalyse rommer mange og til dels
motstridene tradisjoner.
• Atferdsanalyse vingler f.eks. mellom å være
direkte bøllete overfor noen andre
fagtradisjoner, og overinkluderende overfor
andre
Mulige forklaringer (bortsett fra vrangvilje
og uvitenhet) kan være knyttet til:
• Mangelfull forståelse og arrogant avvisning av
andre fagtradisjoner
• Eksklusiv krav på vitenskapelighet
• Alt tas til inntekt for atferdsanalyse.
• Forvirrende og ekskluderende språkbruk.
• Meningsløs formalisme, og forvirrende indre
stridigheter.
• Overdrevne forestillinger om effektivitet og «false
assurances about the state of our knowledge»
Tema 1: Radikal behaviorisme
• Ikke lett å finne noen klar definisjon: Både Mecca Chiesa og
Jay Moore har skrevet en hel bok om det, uten at det har
lykkes meg å finne annet enn indirekte definisjoner av hva
det innebærer.
• Men må åpenbart være viktig, siden det henvises til
overalt, også i forhold til anvendt atferdsanalyse.
• Siden Skinner har funnet opp begrepet, burde han være
første og største autoritet. Men også han er unnvikende og
indirekte. Men også ganske klar:
• Radikal behaviorisme er IKKE metodisk behaviorisme.
• Hvorfor ikke : Fordi radikal behaviorisme INKLUDERER
private begivenheter i analysen. I grunnen er det det hele.
Men det er ikke lite. Og det er radikalt.
Konglekjertelen
Behaviorism, with an accent on the last
syllable, is not the scientific study of
behavior,but a philosophy of science
concerned with the subject matter and
methods of psychology.
Behaviorism will eventually die, not
because it has been a failure but because it
ha been a success.
B.F. Skinner
Huden som grense
• The skin is not that important as a boundary
Radikal behaviorisme
• The heart of the behavioristic
position on conscious experience
may be summed up in this way:
seeing does not imply something
seen.
• Skinner : Behaviorism at Fifty. (1964)
Radikal behaviorisme? Kognitivisme?
• In many cases we can reconstruct a complete causal
chain by identifying the mental state which is the effect
of an environmental variable with the mental state
which is the cause of action. But this is not always
enough.
• ….Mental states alter one another. A painful memory
may never affect behavior or may affect it in a different
way, if another mental state succeeds in repressing it.
Conflicting variables may be reconciled before reaching
behavior if the subject engages in mental actions called
«making a decision»
Radikal behaviorisme? Kognitivisme?
• Dissonant cognitions generated by conflicting
conditions of reinforcement will not be reflected in
behavior if the subject can «persuade himself» that
one condition was actually of a different magnitude or
kind. These disturbances in simple causal linkages
between environment and behavior can be formulated
and studied experimentally as interactions among
variables, but the possibility has not been fully
exploited, and the effects still provide a formidable
stronghold for mentalistic theories designed to bridge
the gap between dependent and independent
variables in the analysis of behavior.
Radikal behaviorisme? Kognitivisme?
• Hva er dette?
• Svar:
• B.F. Skinner : Behaviorism
at Fifty. (1964) s.92-93
Radikal behaviorisme.
• It restores introspection, but not what
philosophers and introspective psychologists
had believed they had been «specting», and it
raises the question of how much of one’s body
one can actually observe.
• B.F. Skinner, 1974 About Behaviorism
Så hva gjenstår?
• Hvordan vet hunder at de
ser?(Nivå en)
• Det cartesianske teater i
uendelig regress.
Så hva har dette med autisme å gjøre?
•Ingenting!
•Men se her:
Radikal behaviorisme
• Så hvordan har det gått med
behavioraliseringen.
• Jo,takk. De nevrobiologiske vitenskapene har i
det stille gjennomført eller er i ferd med å
gjennomføre den uten at atferdsanalytikere
egentlig har lagt merke til det.
Forholdet til biologi.
Hva det dreier seg om
• In the distant future I see open fields
for far more important researches.
• Psychology will be based on a new
foundation, that of the necessary
acquirement of each mental power
and capacity by gradation. Light will be
thrown on the origin of Man and his
history.
• Charles Darwin : The Origin of Species.
..the natural lines of fracture..
• The preceding system is based upon the
assumption that both behavior and
environment may be broken into parts which
retain their identity throughout an experiment
and undergo orderly changes.
• If this assumption were not in some sense
justified, a science of behavior would be
impossible.
..the natural lines of fracture..
• But the analysis of behavior is not an act of
arbitrary subdividing.
• We cannot define the concepts of stimulus and
response quite as simply as “parts of behavior and
environment” without taking account of the
natural lines of fracture along which behavior
and environment actually breaks.
• B.F. Skinner, B of O, 1938, p. 33
..the natural lines of fracture..
• But the analysis of behavior is not an act of
arbitrary subdividing.
• We cannot define the concepts of stimulus and
response quite as simply as “parts of behavior and
environment” without taking account of the
natural lines of fracture along which behavior
and environment actually breaks.
• B.F. Skinner, B of O, 1938, p. 33
Skinner’s konsistens i synet på forholdet mellom
eksperimentell atferdsanalyse og nevrologi.
1.
What is generally not understood by those interested
in establishing neurological bases is that a rigorous
description at the level of behavior is necessary for the
demonstration of a neurological correlate..... I am not
overlooking the advance that is made in the
unification of knowledge when terms at one level of
analysis are defined (“explained”) at a lower level.
Skinner, B of O, 1938, pp 422, 428.
Skinner’s konsistens i synet på forholdet mellom
eksperimentell atferdsanalyse og nevrologi. Forts.
• 2.
• The physiologist of the future will tell us all that can
be known about what is happening inside the
behaving organism. His account will be an important
advance over a behavioral analysis, because the latter
is necessarily “historical” – that is to say, it is confined
to functional relations showing temporal gaps.
.....What he discovers cannot invalidate the laws of a
science of behavior, but will make the picture of
human action more nearly complete.
•
• About Behaviorism, 1974, pp. 236-237.
Skinner’s konsistens i synet på forholdet mellom
eksperimentell atferdsanalyse og nevrologi. Forts.2
• 3.
• Valid facts about behavior are not invalidated by
discoveries concerning the nervous system, nor
are facts about the nervous system invalidated
by facts about behavior. Both sets of facts are
part of the same enterprise, and I have always
looked forward to the time when neurology
would fill the temporal and spatial gaps which
are inevitable in a behavioral analysis.
•
• The operational analysis of psychological terms
De fleste behavioristiske psykologer mente at om
man ser bort fra at menneskets
læringsmekanismer har felles evolusjonært opphav
med og er felles med læringsmekanismer hos dyr,
kan ikke evolusjonsteori bidra noe for å kaste lys
over menneskets atferd. Antimentalisme og likt
potensial for betinging ble behaviorismens to
pilarer. …….Alt man trengte for en vitenskap om
atferd, var organismens belønnings/forsterkningshistorikk og artens fylogenetiske
historie. Det sistnevnte tilførte den radikale
behaviorismen en oppfatning om organismens
”genetisk utrustning” – hovedsakelig evnen til å bli
klassisk og operant betinget.
It is inevitable that behavior analysis will be
integrated into evolutionary biology; the
question is how this will occur.
The danger here is not of being wrong, but of
becoming irrelevant. Evolutionary biology will
push ahead because it has the weight of
Darwinian revolution behind it. To remain
relevant, behavior analysis must discard
antropocentrism and embrace evolutionary
biology.
(W. M. Baum, 1995, p. 1 -2 )
Behaviorismen vektla at forsterkningsbetingelsene i
miljøet var viktige og basert på tre implisitte
antakelser. Den første var at dyret ble brakt inn i
laboratoriet som en ”tabula rasa” – en blank tavle.
De hadde kun noen få medfødte egenskaper, blant
annet å kunne lære. Den andre var at artsforskjeller
ikke hadde noe å si. Den tredje var antakelsen om at
alle responser var tilnærmet like lette å betinge for
alle typer stimuli – organismene hadde likt
læringspotensial for alle typer stimuli.
Mysterud, 2003,s. 35.
Med sin overdrevne vektlegging av Darwins
læresetning om mental kontinuitet mellom
arter dominerte behaviorismen den
eksperimentelle psykologien i Nord-Amerika
fra 1920-tallet til 1970-tallet. Paradokasalt
nok fostret det behavioristiske synet, med
sine røtter i Darwins argumenter om
fylogenetisk kontinuitet, en dyptgående
antidarwinistisk holdning om at læring og
miljøpåvirkning på en eller annen måte
skjermet atferd fra evolusjonær påvirkning
og analyse.
The evolution of behaviorism
• New data on conditionioning processes
favor an eclecticism between the
traditional nativist and
environmentalist extremes in the
analysis of behavior. .. The theory of
behavior based on conditioning
processes can be reconciled with the
new data, but only by revising certain
tacit assumptions about the
parameters of the conditioning
processes, particularly instrumental or
operant conditioning.
• Herrnstein, 1977
The evolution of behaviorism
• Operant conditioning specifies how stimuli, responses,
reinforcers, and drive states are woven into relationships that
shape and sustain an organism’s behavior. The new data
undermine traditional assumptions about each of those
elements rather than about the form of their relationship.
Because some of the assumptions fall under the heading of
motivation, it is concluded that behaviorism is at last
reflecting motivation’s subtleties, after several decades of
failing to do so. Thus refined, behaviorism appears to merge
with the main lines of ethology as a more complete science of
behavior than either one alone has been.
• R. J. Herrnstein
• American Psychologist, 1977.
Due, rotte, ape, hvilken er hvilken? Det har
ingen betydning.
Skinner,1959.(A Case History).
Så hva er problemet?
• Ganske enkelt:
• Rotta er ikke en rotte, men en
organisme.
• Spaktrykking er bare en
representativ, arbitrær respons
Of course, the
operant rides on the
respondent.
• Alledgedly : B.F Skinner
Forsterkning?
•Det vet vi vel i alle fall
hva er?
Forsterkning?
Så hva er forsterkning?
• Tre effekter:
• Øker akivering og aktivitet
• Øker sannsynlighet for atferd innen samme
klasse (organiserer atferd)
• Øker variasjon (jfr. N+1 – effekten)
Preferanse for variabilitet
• Generelt velger eksperimentdyr variable
framfor faste skjema, selv der hvor disse gir
mindre uttelling.
• Hvorfor?
• Det finnes et flertall forslag til rasjonelle
løsninger på det tekniske plan.
• Men den ulyimate grunnen er at det er slik vi
nevrobiologisk er skrudd sammen
Basisbegreper (2)
Forsterkere defineres operasjonelt ved effekt : En
forsterker er enhver endring i stimulusforhold
som følger av eller etter (kontingent på) en atferd
og medfører en økt sannsynlighet for at atferden
igjen vil forekomme på et senere tidspunkt under
samme eller lignende stimulusbetingelser. Positiv
og negativ refererer til om denne effekten er
basert på kontingent økning eller reduksjon av
stimuli i situasjonen.
Forsterkning?
• The concept of reinforcement is at least
incomplete and almost certainly incorrect.
• William Baum, JEAB,2012, 97, p.101.
Radikal behaviorisme og anvendt
atferdsanalyse
Radikal behaviorisme og anvendt
atferdsanalyse
Så hva er atferdsanalyse?
• Ikke så lett å definere.
• Hvorfor ikke? Er det ikke en lett avgrensbar
disiplin med en svært kort, oversiktlig og
enhetlig utviklingshistorie?
• Nei dessverre, det er nok en sentral del av det
dessverre feilaktige selvbildet hos de fleste
som kaller seg atferdsanalytikere, og det
selvbildet man gjerne presenterer utad.
What is analysis?
The analysis of a behavior, as the
term is used here, requires a
believable demonstration of the
events that can be responsible for
the occurence or non-occurence of
that behavior. An experimenter has
achieved an analysis of behavior
when he can exercise control over it.
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1970
1980
1990
2000
2012
• It seems clear that we
can do what remains to
be done
• Baer; Wolf & Risley, 1987.
Hva er feil?
• De prosedyrene vi i dag anvender er ofte komplekse….Når
de virker er det åpenbart et behov for å analysere dem ned
til de enkelte komponentene. En lærer som gir et barn nonstop kan godt med dette lykkes i å endre barnets atferd i en
planlagt retning. Men hun har ganske sikkert blandet
oppmerksomhet og ros med hver lille bit. En videre analyse
kan bestå i at hun bare gir oppmerksomhet, og
sammenligner effekten av dette med effekten av
oppmerksomhet sammen med godterier. Om hun helt vil
slutte med godterier, som i et reverseringsdesign, eller
anvende godterier sammen med oppmerksomhet overfor
enkelte atferder og oppmerksomhet overfor andre, som i et
multipelt basislinje-design, er igjen et spørsmål om
grunnleggende troverdighet slik vi har diskutert det
ovenfor.
Så dette er grunnlaget for anvendt
atferdsanalyse?
•Er det noe rart at folk
(av og til) hater oss?
•Eller i det minste synes
at vi er veldig snodige
Case : språk
•Words have wings, but
fly not where we would.
• George Elliot
Hva er problemet?
E=
2
mc
Men act upon the world,
and change it, and are
changed in turn by the
consequences of their
action.
Verbal Behavior, p. 1
Case : språk
• Påstand : «Verbal behavior» er unik og overlegen
alle andre tilnærminger til forståelse av språk.
• Dette påpekes ved enhver anledning, og
anledningen avgrenses gjerne til denne
påpekningen.
• Andres tilkortkommenhet påpekes inntil det
obsessivt rituelle, og refereres til som
«tradisjonelle synspunkter» eller «tradisjonell
lingvistikk.»
Case : språk
• Verbal atferd er definert som:
• «behavior reinforced through the mediation
of other persons» (p.2)
• Senere raffinert til:
• «behavior reinforced through the the
mediation of other persons (who) must be
responding in ways which have been
conditioned precisely in order to reinforce the
behavior of the speaker» (p.225)
Case : språk
• Our definition of verbal behavior, incidentally,
includes the behavior of experimental animals
where reinforcements are supplied by an
experimenter or by an apparatus designed to
establish contingencies which resemble those
maintained by the normal listener. The animal
and the experimenter comprise a small but
genuine verbal commuity.
• Skinner :Verbal Behavior, note s. 108.
Case: Språk
• Tilfeldig valgt eksempel: Jay Moore (2000):
Words are not things, The Analysis of Verbal
Behavior, 17, 143-160.
• Første setning:
• On a traditional view, words are the fundamental units
of verbal behavior. They are independent, autonomous
things that symbolically represent or refer to other
independent autonomous things, often in some other
dimension. Ascertaining what those other things are
constitutes determining the meaning of the word. A
pervasive implication of this traditional view is that a
word is some kind of mental posession that can
therefore be «used» in the same way that other
possessed things are used.
Case: Språk
• Jay Moore (forts.):
• A traditional view adopts a structural perspective
and often talks of words as independent,
autonomous entities called «parts of speech». In
contrast a behavior –analytic view adopts a
functional approach. The functionally defined
behavioral unit does not necessarily correspond
to the structural entity called a word that exists
within a sentence….
Case : språk
• To speak of language as a thing by itself, as living
a life of its pwn, as growing to maturity,
producing offspring, and dying away, is sheer
mythology and though we cannot help using
metaphorical expressions, we should always be
on our guard…..against being carried away by the
very words which we are using. (p.51) Language
has no independent substantial existence.
Language exists in man, it lives in being spoken, it
dies with each word that is pronounced, and is no
longer heard.
• Max Müller , Lectures on the Science of Language, 1861.
Case : språk
• This conception of language as an abstraction
was commonplace in 19th-century linguistics
• Maria de Lourdes R. da F. Passos, The Behavior
analyst ,2012 s. 116.
• ”children unerringly use computationally
complex structure-dependent rules rather
than computationally simple rules”…
• ”the language faculty appears to be, at its
core, a computational system that is rich
and narrowly constrained in structure and
rigid in its essential operations, nothing at
all like a complex of dispositions or a
system of habits and analogies”.
• Chomsky: Knowledge of language, 1987, pp 7, 43.
Transformasjonell generativ grammatikk
• But the fundamental reason for [the] in adequacy
of traditional grammars is a more technical one.
Although it was well understood that linguistic
processes are in some sense ”creative”, the
tecnical devices for expressing a system of
recursive processes were simply not available until
much more recently. In fact, a real understanding
of how a language can (in Humboldt’s words)
”make infinite use of finite means” has developed
only within the last thirty years, in the course of
studies in the foundations of mathematics.
• Chomsky, (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
ABA, DTT, NET, NTA, AVB,
VBA, NTA, IT, MITS, MMP,
NLP, PRT(1), PRT(2),
PRT(3), m.m
Case : språk
• Igjen Jay Moore:
• A forth and final issue is that some kind of
verbal behavior modify or provide additional
information about other verbal behavior.
Skinner (1957, chap. 12 and 13) identifies
these kinds of verbal behavior as «autoclitic».
• Heretter pekes det på fire typer autoklitter:
Beskrivende, kvalifiserende, kvantifiserende
og relasjonelle.
Case : språk
• ….autoclitics are verbal behaviors that affect
other other verbal behavior functions. They
quantify, qualify, affirm, negate or specify
either mand or tact functions.
• R. Douglas Greer, 2008, p 120.
Skinner : Eksemplet Todd Risley
• Incidental Teaching 1967
• Meaningful differences in the everyday
experiences of young American Children.
• The social world of children learning to talk.
• Dette er alment svært respektert forskning.
• Skinner er ikke engang på referanselista.
Case History : Skinner
• For Skinner var Verbal Behavior hans viktigste arbeid.
• Chomsky eller ikke: ettertiden har ikke akkurat tatt bølgen.
Analysen har ikke avfødt forskning, eller videre elaborering
som har vunnet anerkjennelse. Heller ikke internt i det
atferdsanalytiske har det forekommet noen viktig forskning
som kunne gi en empirisk underbygging av analysen.
(Ironisk :Savage-Rambaugh og Bates).
• Eksempel : Todd Risley og Incidental teaching.
• Men paradoksalt nok: RFT (som på et vis er direkte antiskinneriansk, viderefører arbeidet, og underbygger
analysen med eksperimentell empiri. Strålende, men enda
mer uleselig!
RFT
• Dette er RFT :
Cfunc [CrelArx B and Bry C{Af1///Bf2rp and Cf3rq}]
• Gitt arbitrært anvendbare stimulusrelasjoner
mellom A, B og C, og gitt en kontekst som
aktualiserer transformasjon av en gitt funksjon
av A, vil funksjonene til B og C modifiseres i
henhold til de underliggende relasjonene
mellom A, B og C.
Forholdet til Skinner
Unfortunately, Skinner’s analysis
missed the fundamental core of
human language and cognition - its
derived ralational nature. Skinner
knew that derived relations occur, but
he thought that they came at the end
of the process, not at the beginning.
p. 253
This book is meant to declare, to behavioral
and non-behavioral psychologists alike, that
this inductive, slow and fastidious tradition
now has the emprirical and conceptual tools to
conduct an experimental analysis of virtually
every substantive topic in human language and
cognition.
A new day has dawned
Hayes, Barnes-Holmes & Roche (eds), 2001, p. xii
Fem farer for atferdsanalysens framtid
(Hayes 2001):
•
•
•
•
•
Redskapspussing
Gleden over ekstremt presis irrelevans
Heltedyrkelse
Selvrettferdighets- og selvgratulasjonskulturen
Manglende rekruttering og akademisk
fotfeste.
Gleden over ekstremt presis irrelevans
• A wave of exiting research on rule-governance
moved through behavior analysis in the 80’s
Some odd findings drove the exitement,
including the so-called insensitivity effect.
From the very beginning, thoughtful behavior
analysts pointed out that the insensitivity
effect was a misnomer for the way competing
sources of control work in various contexts
Gleden over ekstremt presis irrelevans (forts.)
• We are about to make the same error with
stimulus equivalence. In some researchers’ hands
it has gone fram an outcome that orients the field
to key process issues in the analysis of language,
to an end in itself. Considered an end in itself
equivalence will ultimately not exite anyone. It
has already been studied for 25 years, and we
could spend another 25 in extremely precise
irrelevancy. Behavior analysis does not have that
time to waste.
Any monkey can reach for a
peanut, but only humans can
reach for the stars, or even
understand what that means.
Vilayanur Ramachandran
University of California, San Diego
There is a crack in everything….
That’s how the light gets in...