[FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[uǝlƃ ☣]

FWIW, I've found this concept very helpful for such considerations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey_sentence

On 5/14/20 9:57 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> Whenever a given range of phenomenon start to get scienced, we rapidly find out that we need to nail down the vocabulary beyond the flexibility usually allowed in lay conversations about a topic. We can, for example, allow "He's got momentum" to mean all sorts of things in a lay conversation. We might talk about broad social phenomenon such as how "Bernie has momentum in the polls" or "M. Night Shyamalan's career lost momentum after a string of flops, but he seems to be getting some of that momentum back now",  or about general laziness such as "I'm not going to do the gardening my wife keeps asking about, because momentum", /and /we also could mean that there is a movement that will not alter without the application of force such as "He's not going to stop before he hits that wall, too much momentum." But in a physics conversation we would take out the casual usages and limit ourselves to the latter; momentum would be a property of mass at velocity, which stays constant
> unless acted upon by a force. Hell, Merrium-Webster even offers "momentum" a definition of "force or speed of movement", where in that physics conversation "force" and "speed" are clearly distinguished concepts, that are definitely /not /momentum. 
> 
> Similarly, if we want to talk seriously about psychology, we need to nail down some vocabulary that will allow us to talk/think rigorously about the phenomenon in question. We need some terminology by which to refer to the distinction between the movements of the dead duck (or rock) thrown out the window and the movements of the live duck thrown out a window. And, as we already covered, that distinction isn't /just /a matter of falling, because we want to put Nick's post-defenestration flailing in the same broad category as the more elegant movements of the live duck. 
> 
> Note that, if you aren't interested in /that /distinction that is a different issue. Lot's of people aren't interested in any particular specialized science, and that is entirely unrelated to whether the science needs a specialized vocabulary to operate effectively. And while science frequently go through phases of emphasizing vocabulary that refers to processes that are not easy to observe, those can't be the terms that define the domain of the science. What are the observable phenomenon that lead us to ask questions about psychology? What are the methods by which those observations are made? Until we answer those types of questions, it is dramatically premature to start speculating about what hidden-unobservables might be at play. And, there is every reason to believe that our interest starts with behavior. "Why did he do that?" "Why am I acting this way?" When we wonder "Why is he angry at me?", the start of that question is a witnessed (or reported) action. 
> 
> Could other phenomenon end up in our bucket at some point? Sure, just like in any other science. But you can't even figure out where those other things start, until you know the limits of where the base concepts take you. Though I think some followers of James J. Gibson's Ecological Psychology, for example, take his contributions to the field farther than is warranted, he absolutely showed that basic principles of perceptual systems can get us much, much farther than previously thought, including providing solutions to how people act successfully in situations where most believe that advanced computational thinking is required. We need to nail down the basic concepts, and then do the same type of push Gibson did to determine their limits. 
> 
> In that context, it seems fair to begin using "behavior" in a more technical sense. Once that is done, we could actually answer your question about the tree and the falling seeds, but before that, it would just seem like spinning our wheels. 
> 
> 
> On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 1:07 PM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com <mailto:jonzingale at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Eric,
>     I have some concern that once we /decide/ the dead duck was not behaving,
>     that we would avoid the dropped coin. I get that we wouldn't want to
>     apply the verb /flailing/ to the coin except perhaps in a moment of poetry.
>     This is the season to witness cottonwood drifts, though. Better might
>     be the helicopter like motions of maple seedpods. These adaptations,
>     which carry the future of the species, are shaped so that they behave
>     meaningfully when coupled with their environment. Would you hesitate
>     to call the motions of the cottonwood seedpod, in its environment, behavior?
>     Is it too early in this conversation, or even inappropriate to ask whose
>     behavior it would be?


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