Comparison

I keep trying to defend radical behaviorism but I can't say I make waves. It is hard to attract
the attention of scientists for more than a minute and persuade them to enlarge their animal-conditioning laboratory. Nobody's interested enough to ask: Why? What for?

Murray Sidman's Tactics of Scientific Research: Evaluating Experimental Data in
Psychology (1960) introduced issues regarding data reliability and generality, and concludes:
It is never easy to determine whether contemporary enthusiasm (or apathy) represents a sound judgment.
That verdict will develop concurrently with the particular science.

Well, expanding behavior science will reduce apathy and engender trustworthy data with global
consensus and lead to general appreciations of people as fallible, flesh-and-blood human beings.
How do I know?
My answers are posted in this blog, and interested readers may judge and decide for themselves
whether - or not - they lead towards conceptual revision.

Meanwhile, I cite Murray Sidman as the spokesman for experimental behavior analysis.
The first question (in Chapter 1) is Why Perform Experiments? 
   In psychology, the hypothesis-testing school of experimentation is undoubtedly dominant today.
Many of those who organize their research in this manner have made significant contributions.
But I caution the student not to fall into the error of  insisting that all experimentation must derive
from the testing of hypotheses. Psychologists must recognize, as do other scientists, that advances in
knowledge come from many unexpected quarters.
I was uncomfortable with hypothetical cumulative records until Murray Sidman assured me,
he did not mind. Ever since then, I count my designs as coming from "unexpected quarters".

Comparing methodologies Dr. Sidman continues to clarify: The history of science reveals many discoveries that resulted from the inquiry, 'I wonder what will happen if...' (p.8)
There are two broad and diametrically opposed schools of thought concerning the most effective methods for integrating diverse data. The difference between the two schools lies, not in the presence or absence of theory, but in the way theory is brought into the picture. In one case, the theories are formulated first and then tested -- by -- experiment. The other method is to experiment first and let the theories emerge -- from the data. (p.14)
   
"Theory first vs theory later ", sounds a good way to categorize different schools of thought. Yet,
I find Sidman's everyday terms more helpful for comprehending the battle of words - which still
rages. A lot of people can connect guessing with having a theory, know what curiosity is and
are familiar with let's find out what happens if...

Wondering what records might show if a rat had food and shock at one lever, the first thing
that happened to me was I knew "my animal" would probably run away and not come back.
So I left the food where it was and moved the shock to another lever. But there again, I thought
the rat would press once - no more.   And thus, only the food curve would be accumulative.
So the next thing I did was imagine a second food lever and then there could be two curves:
if food stopped at the one, the rat would stop too, and try at the other.
If food stopped at the one, the rat would stop too, and move to another.
I thought this a few times until the penny dropped: I must not use shock.

The next thing that happened was I asked myself what would happen if behaviorists knew
that rats didn't need shock to stop them pressing the lever.  The investigators could open
the food - or the water - in another location. 
So then I recalled Sidman's words:  Great experiments have been performed without the experimenter
having the slightest inkling as to the probable results ..... When an investigator performs an experiment
to test no hypothesis, his life is full of surprises . (p.8)

And - since I had never performed a proper experiment - I felt trapped. I can never convince
Sidman, and Skinner, and Ferster and many more opposers of "theory before data" to accept
my suggestion. Perhaps the best I can do now is, remind behavior analysts of how we define
social interactions and find outside cause for diametrically opposed epithets:
patriot or traitor, idealist or terrorist, liberal or radical, such unilateral epithets can depend
on geography, place of birth, socio-economic status, school and experience.

So long as impartial objective measures of either border-position are neglected, pushed out of
sight, or simply not mentioned, identical behaviors are evalued one-sidedly.

Comparing adjectives, applied by parents and teachers to their oppositional child - before and
after successful modification - can be a beautiful and an enlightening experience for all involved.
In my view, reflex and operant conditioning is nothing less than miraculous.

Were it not for misplaced prestige, behavior scientists would have answered What is behavior?
to everyone's satisfaction 30 years ago.
Behavior is manifestly, not a thing; it is what people do as they go here, there, and everywhere.
Or, when they sit on a chair pushing keys to write on their computer, like individual organisms
in the Skinnerian experimental settings.
For analysing socialisation however, researchers need larger laboratories to make room for all
the animals, as well as all the operanda. I don't know how many, but subjects must be able to
go and choose locations according to their needs and their inclinations. In this way, the data will
exemplify communication, and highlight healthy and reciprocal contingencies of reinforcement.
This is also a question about normalcy.

Three inspiring quotes:

She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950) Irish writer

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) British politician, poet and critic.

The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves but in drawing it out of others. He who
leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is perfectly pleased with you.
Jean de la Bruyere (1645- 1696) French essayist and moralist
In 2012 we speak more of intelligence than cleverness, or maybe, the words wisdom 
or kindness, sound better today.

In any case: conditions may inhibit or energize persons, organs and hormones, and so on,
way down to biochemical levels of analysis:  viruses, bacteria, single-celled organisms.
Here we vindicate the behavioristic philosophy of science as thinking outside the box,
on a grand Darwinian evolutionary scale:
from the seas, to the continents and trees ... light and shadow, sound and silence ... up
into the heavens and back to earth again.

5 June, 2012
What a relief!
Yesterday, after hearing a biophysicist's questions: How does a cell in our body know how to fight
viruses, bacteria and chemical toxins?  What does it see?  What does it remember?  I asked:
How do the processes you described fit Darwin's theory of evolution? Are viruses primitive forms
of life? Are there viruses and bacteria that are necessary for the lives of other organisms?
Without hesitation, the scientist said Yes.
I forgave the personification of the cells!

Looking into the head

After all, if organic disease is suspected, or known to exist. introspection - looking into the head or
the body - is warranted and necessary.  Under normal circumstances, you don't feel what happens
inside; i.e., only if something is wrong do you feel your heart weaken or beating strong.
This may explain why we take the normal state of affairs so much for granted, we don't even ask
why people are normal and friendly.
Mostly, we think like internists: the source of mental retardation, delusion, hyperactivity,
self-damage, etc., has to be genetic.
Yet scientific data, derived from reflex and operant analysis, illustrate external sources: reinforcing contingencies in laboratory settings as well as applied science environments.
I employ the term "science" for a functional analysis and "scientific" to denote the measurement
which Skinner called his basic dependent variable:
probability of response that emerges in cumulative records and reflects the partial movements
made by every single subject. Today, apathy for expansion in the way Skinner predicted will be fruitful (personal letter) is interfering with progress and the welfare of behavior analysis.

More and more people - albeit unknowingly - side with BF Skinner when he declares himself most concerned with the possible relevance of a behavioral analysis to the problems of the world today.
There is no doubt about that relevance but alone, behavior scientists will not save the world.
Humans need to unite: terrorists and freedom fighters, patriots and traitors, behaviors are the
same on all sides of political, or ideological, or geographical borders.
Many people know what human means, physically, biologically and behaviorally.
And just in case anyone thinks I worked all this out by myself: I had the best teachers and mentors.
Their articles still exist and I owe more to them than I can say.

Looking outside

Were it not for the prestige afforded 'introspection', the ideas that feeling is observed as private
and that thinking is necessarily mental, may have been confirmed as folly and gently faded out.
Thoughts and feelings would have been counted and quantified like walking and talking or any
other behavior which people are able to see and to hear.
The outer-inner /public-private / arguments might have been settled and Skinner's behaviorism
would have lost 'radicality' and spread, many years ago.

Controversies over physiological vs environmental causes might not have arisen. As it is, Pavlov's
work can be said to indicate that things we see and hear - or discuss - affect us as individuals plus
the brain cells, hormones and chemistry. Which in Skinner's words is "an appeal to events taking place somewhere else, at some other level of observation, described in different terms, and measured in different dimensions." Pavlov's data justify explanation on a molecular level of observation.

As a process, Pavlovian conditioning is relatively slow, because time must elapse until salivation
is nil, before the next stimulus presentation.  Still, the result is immediate and precisely what you
expect from a reflex.  So perception, visual and auditory, could have been recognized as a reflex reaction.  Like: " 'I see.' said the blind man as he bumped into the lamp post."  Although this is
a case where "seeing" is due to contact between person and object, so the causal relation is clear.

Mystery arises with distance between cause and effect.
Of course the dogs - not the gland - understand tones - but how?
Well, answers involve photons and decibels, measurable light and sound in the air.
The human organism doesn't sense physical impact with either material but all the same, it exists.

And there is the bridge between external causes and internal effects, which permit the behaviorist
to unite Sciences with Humanities. People differ less than one might think.
Human beings share good commonalities with scientists and other citizens.

Deciding whether or not to approach water, seeing and hearing things from afar, is doing what
comes as naturally to man as to other animals; you cannot help seeing and hearing things from
a distance.
It is also human nature to close the eyes, move out of earshot, turn the head away, and look in
another direction.
And those are 'operants', often called 'voluntary' and still commonly explained as due to free will.
Admittedly, I have been very slow in writing all this, but today I insist:
radical behaviorists lack basic data about good reasons for locomotion.
Were they to replicate what I tried to do, they would realize moving away from potential harm, is
a perfectly normal reflex response conducive to the survival of an individual organism.
And that one must be gentle with mentally healthy experimental subjects - otherwise, they will be
be tense and fearful - beyond the scientist's control - rather than relaxed and confident.

UNIVERSAL

No wonder physics and chemistry are - literally - universally relevant!  The stars in the sky,
the moon and the sun, changes in winds, climate and temperature, apply to just about
everything on our planet.
Through telescope and microscope, invisible atoms and molecules or huge heavenly bodies, all
things move according to the gravitational laws in our physical world.
Then again: we are able to scrutinise the movements of whole individuals with our naked eyes.

And indeed, everyone sees inanimate objects don't move like persons and animals.
Live people climb up hills and stop, motionless, at the top; perambulate freely in many directions;
repelled by shock, they run away; they go here and there, attracted by what they need for their
routine welfare. And, you and I know, the way we respond depends on our social relationships.

Animal experiments show intelligence, not as a precursor but, as the outcome of exposure to
stimulation and schedules of reinforcement, specified for every subject's behavior. Hence,
traditional practitioners need not interpret response frequencies as controlled by fictitious internal causes. Which brings us all the way back to BF Skinner and introspection:

    The important objection to the vernacular in the description of behavior is that many of its terms imply
conceptual schemes. I do not mean that a science of behavior is to dispense with a conceptual scheme but
that it must not take over without careful consideration the schemes which underlie popular speech .....
    This does not mean that we must entirely abandon ordinary speech in a science of behavior.  The sole
criterion for the rejection of a popular term is the implication of a system or of a formulation extending
beyond immediate observations .....
    With this criterion it is possible to save a considerable part of the vernacular for use in describing the
movements of organisms. (1938)

Today, I see the most pervasive conceptual scheme in any vernacular is the implicit notion
that to explain or understand causal links for human behavior, one has to begin with looking into
the head or the body; anything else is flatly rejected as unprofessional: silly, simple or superficial.
I confess, only now do I realise the extent of Skinner's radical behaviorism.

They say: Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction.  In relation to 'heredity' versus 'environment', the term 'superficial' denotes looking outside ourselves and listening to the sounds, the tones and the voices
all around.  Oddly enough, behaviorism is the one profound philosophy on the market!

To illustrate, let us sample evaluations in connection with cause-and-effects.
For instance, I find this extremely confusing:
In common usage, causality is also the relationship between a set of factors (causes) and a phenomenon
(the effect). ---- A direct factor is a factor that effects an effect directly, that is, without any intervening
factors. Intervening factors are sometimes called "intermediate  factors".) The connection between a
cause(s) and an effect in this way can also be referred to as a causal nexus. .......
Causality is a basic assumption of science.  Within the scientific method, scientists set up experiments to
determine causality in the physical world. .......
Physicists conclude that certain elemental forces ---- cause all other events in the universe. The notion of
causality that appears in many different physical theories is hard to interpret in ordinary language.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality

Compared with the clarity in this recommendation:
The conception of experimental methodology that I advance here is neither revolutionary nor new.
But I must caution the student not to expect a set of rules of experimental procedure, to be memorized
in classic textbook fashion. --- Experimenters cannot always tell us how or why they do what they do,
and the fact that that their conclusions are sound so much of the time remains a puzzle ....... 
At some time or other, everybody asks --- "Why? What? How?" --- The scientist might be defined as
a person whose indulgence of his curiosity is also the means by which he makes his living. .......
Curiosity may, of course, be guided by hypothesis and by theory, but the history of science reveals many
discoveries that resulted from the inquiry, " I wonder what will happen if. . .?" ......
Murray Sidman: Tactics of Scientific Research (1960) 

And regarding statistical causal inference:
Statistics textbooks provide interesting examples of causal questions: Did halothane do more to cause
surgical deaths than ether? Was the lower admission rate of women to graduate programs at the
University of California caused by discrimination against women? Does smoking cause cancer? .......
"Causal inference is one of the most important, most subtle, and most neglected of all the problems
of Statistics." P. Dawid, 1978 Cited by the following authors:
P. Spirtes, C. Glymour, R. Scheines: Causation, Prediction, and Search (1993)

Sidman's questions stress individual data:
Another type of problem often encountered is that of reversibility of a behavioral process. --- After observing
a behavioral change as a function of some experimental manipulation, is it possible to recover the original
baseline behavior? .......
A behavioral analysis is not some idealized state of behavior inferred from the performance of a group of
individuals by means of a statistical averaging process. It is the continuous, and continuing  performance
of a single individual. .......

And herewith, two book reviews:
This one alludes to risky practice: 
1. Causation, Prediction, and Search, 2nd. Edition (2001)
What assumptions and methods allow us to turn observational into causal knowledge, and how can even
incomplete causal knowledge be used in planning and prediction to influence and control our environment?

This one appears more attractive:
2. Tactics of Scientific Research: Evaluating Experimental Data in Psychology (1960)
.... Every student should be aware of the attitude toward research that Sidman's work exemplifies. He may
well find it clean, refreshing, and powerful.

Last but not least, with respect to motivation:
1. In the statistical control analysis, p.3; "Introduction and Advertisement"
 Pedagogy reflects accepted statistical theory, and with some important exceptions, statistical theory tiptoes
 around issues of causal inference. Even so, many research issues in statistics are fundamentally motivated
 by problems about reliable causal inference, although the motivation is sometimes hidden by the details.

2. Compared with experimental analysis, p. 408; "Appendix: A Terminological Note" 
Because a conditioned reinforcement derives its function from association with a stimulus that is already
reinforcing, it is possible for a conditioned reinforcer to become much more powerful than any primary
reinforcer. For  a  conditioned  reinforcer  can  be associated  with  a  wide  variety of primary as well as 
secondary reinforcements. We can extend our example of chaining so that the subject, when hungry, will
receive food in the red light; when thirsty, it will receive water;  ----- when a tone is sounding along with
the red light, a threatened shock can be avoided. The list can be stretched indefinitely. The red light will
then be associated with -- reinforcements, and it will function in a wide variety of situations. It will have
become a generalized reinforcer. Money is a conspicuous example of generalized reinforcement. 

Due to scientists' lack of interest in designing laboratories, such that rats would go wherever they choose, I find audiences elsewhere and can report eye-opening experience, for myself and my
listeners. Telling evidence of mutual contributions is: "I never thought about that!"

If - as the book review suggests - statisticians believe mankind can control global environments with insufficient knowledge as to abating coercion, or uniting humanity for peace and for sanity -
I'm afraid to finish the sentence; a documentary on supervolcanic eruptions made me panic today.
(Thursday, May 17, 2012)

That was yesterday.
This morning, I say mankind cannot control Nature's gigantic disasters, the environment is primary. In fact, at times people pose more of a threat than a chemical element. Yet, I am sure humans have the ability for positive talk - and thinking out loud - as well as for matching tactful vocabularies.
To make a plausible case for 'free will', more details are needed as to how humans drive and spur, force and inspire, learn from and teach one another, with words - phrases and sentences -
anywhere. Let us be certain we know why we agree and unite behavior science with psychology.

July 1, 2012