[FRIAM] Could this possibly be true?

[Frank Wimberly]

I don't think psychologists in general use language that way.  Behaviorists
may.  When I was a graduate student in psychology 55 years ago behaviorism
had a bad reputation, at least at Carnegie Mellon but I suspect at other
places that emphasized theories of cognition.

After a year I switched to the grad program in math because I couldn't cope
with the ambiguities.  I was young

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 3:32 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> This is where there is a style of use of language that may be unique to
> Nick among all humans, or may be a tribal custom among the psychologists,
> but which the common man needs to be aware exists, so that he knows that
> the way Nick/psychologists use words will be directly opposed to the way
> the common man has always used them.
>
> If that question disappears for you under those circumstances, then I can
> simply admit that a pleasure is just the behavioral transition that occurs
> upon the achievement of set of circumstances, and escape the tautology by
> defining  a goal as the organization of behavior that points to a set of
> circumstances.
>
>
> So, in archery, the way the archer points the bow (organization of
> behavior) is the “goal”, and the event of an arrow’s hitting a bullseye is
> somehow not a goal.  Nick didn’t happen to use the word “function” in the
> clip above; I have no idea what he would say a “function” is, but in the
> earlier posts, it was as bizarrely glossed to me as this glossing of goal,
> so I can’t even come up with a guess for how to imitate it.
>
> The plugging in of an address for the supermarket to the GPS while sitting
> in the car in the driveway (organization of behavior) is the goal, not the
> event of my arriving at the supermarket.
>
> For me as a mechanic, the bullseye as a position for arrows is the goal
> (applied to an object), or the event of the arrow’s arriving there is a
> goal (applied to an outcome of a behavior) that serves as a selection
> criterion among directions in which a bow might be pointed.  My pointing
> the bow one way versus another is to me a function for attaining that
> goal.  The event of arriving at a supermarket is the goal that serves as a
> criterion for selection of which GPS location I plug in; the act of
> plugging in that address is then a function for attaining that goal.
>
> I know that, in response to this, Nick will reply with a sequence of
> English-language words that I find even more unparseable than the ones
> above.
>
> The meditators do this too.  If I comment that, as a mechanic, I am
> interested in what would get people to be more restrained in the use of
> excesses of power when they find themselves in possession of such, to try
> to unwind the death spiral that is leading to the dissolution of the
> society, I know that the meditators will say “Poor child, lost in samsara,
> he doesn’t realize that all these things he refers to are just illusion.”
>  If I say to them that this is what I expect them to say, the meditators
> get annoyed at me because they think I am insulting them.  They say “when
> we say, over and over again, in the first pages of every piece of our
> literature, and again every three pages after that, that `all that is
> illusion’ “, we don’t mean that all that is illusion.  You strawman us.
> Seriously?
>
> I guess that’s how either discipline-specific or idiosyncratic speech
> habits work.  What is unexplainably self-evident to one person is
> mystifying to somebody else.
>
> Eric
>
>
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