THOUGHT-READING

"Helpful words are holier than praying hands." 
That sentiment was my response to reading:
"The hands that help are holier than the lips that pray." 

And then I searched for the speaker in Wikipedia:
Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899) a lawyer, an orator, a Civil War veteran, an American political
leader.  In an era known as The Golden Age of Freethought (!) he explained why he doubted
the Word of God.  He gave other reasons, but these impressed me the most:

"I oppose the church because she regards repentance as more important than restitution, and because
she sacrifices the world we have to one we know not of."

I recall B.F. Skinner's report of a conversation with his school-teacher: 
"I had gone to Miss Graves to tell her that I no longer believed in God.
' I know,' she said, 'I have been through that myself.'  But her strategy misfired: I never went through it."

And I remember the explanations he opposed as a radical behaviorist:

"any explanation of an observed fact which appeals to events taking place somewhere else, at some other level of observation, described in different terms, and measured, if at all, in different dimensions' .  

He argued such explanations perpetuate 'introspection' in psychology that could be abandoned, since behavior and its causes are accessible to our senses.
Skinner insisted such theories had not inspired good research on learning, do not present facts
to be accounted for, and confuse ignorance with knowledge.

Today, Skinner's position might make us pose some pivotal questions: 
What does a 'salivary reflex' imply about the brain and the nerve cells?
What is the difference between a 'mental', and a 'physical' explanation?
How may we go beyond Pavlov's findings to the events seen and heard in day-to-day living?
How do we distinguish a medical diagnosis from a psychological diagnosis?  And prognosis? 

To be continued!