Re: Neural netss (was Re: death of the mind.)

From: Wolf Kirchmeir (wwolfkir_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 09/24/04 

Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 19:19:49 -0400

Lester Zick wrote:
[...]
>
> Let me give you an example. I have repeatedly asked the behaviorist
> camp to explain how and why self contradiction can occur in human
> behavior, all without response. Clearly it does occur because we see
> it happen all the time. And yet everyone wants to explain human
> behavior without being able to explain this or even recognizing it.

It's not at all clear what you mean by self-contradiction, but what the
hell, what's life without risks?

If you mean making statements that explicitly or implicitly contradict
themselves, the answer is fairly simple: The contingencies that control
language use include the language itself. That is to say, any utternace
can evoke another, and it doesn't matter much whether the utternace
comes from another or from oneself, since speech is one of the
behaviours one monitors in oneself. We say that S contradicts itself
when we encounter S, IOW, when S is a contingency. The fact that people
may disagree, ie, produce different utterances in response to S means
that the behaviour is learned, and is not learned equally by different
people. Note that to be able to say that S contradicts itself may
require education, specifically education in logical and/or linguistic
analysis. I was going to give you a behaviouristic description of
logical/linguistic analysis, but I'm sure you can do that yourself.

If you mean saying one thing and doing another, well, I think that means
that the contingencies evoke several behaviours (more precisely, that
some combination of contingencies present evoke one behaviour, and some
another.) When that happens there's no guarantee that the behaviours are
consistent with each other. In fact,some kinds of humour depend on such
inconsistencies. :-)

If there's some other meaning of self-contradiction I've ignored, kindly
explain.