[FRIAM] Could this possibly be true?

[Frank Wimberly]

I should have said "out of favor" instead of "bad reputation".

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 3:50 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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