harnad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad) (09/01/90)
PSYCOLOQUY Fri, 31 Aug 90 Volume 1 : Issue 31
Editorial & DA Norman on BF Skinner (line 13)
Reply to Stodolsky (line 133)
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[The following article on BF Skinner represents one viewpoint on the
contribution of one of the most influential experimental psychologists
of our century, who died on August 18; other viewpoints exist, and
thoughtful presentations of them will be considered by PSYCOLOQUY. Ed.]
From: danorman@UCSD.EDU (Donald A Norman-UCSD Cog Sci Dept)
Subject: Comments on APA Press Release: B.F. Skinner Speech
B. F. Skinner died August 18, 1990. This personal note was solicited by
the Los Angeles Times to appear in their Sunday (August 26, 1990) edition
next to Skinner's "Remarks" to the American Psychological Society's 1990
Annual convention. In these remarks, Skinner once again derided the study
of mind ("cognitive science is the creationism of psychology").
______________________________
Copyright 1990. D. A. Norman. First publication rights are
held by the Los Angeles Times.
The mind exists
Donald A. Norman
University of California, San Diego
Poor Fred Skinner. He lived his life rejecting the mind. He only
believed in things he could observe. He wanted to understand human and
animal behavior, but the conventional wisdom of many people --
including psychologists -- was that human behavior was controlled by
thought and reason, by mental processes, by the mind. The mind? What
could that be? Can it be seen? Can it be measured? To B. F. Skinner,
the mind was like those imaginary demons that frighten children in the
dark, demons that must be scourged from psychology for it to proceed as
a science.
Science proceeds in strange ways. It isn't really the orderly, logical
process that it is advertised to be. In the long run, Science overcomes
its mistakes and advances toward comprehensive understanding. But along
the way, it gets distracted by personalities, by whims, and by feuds that
break out among the human beings who are also scientists. B. F. Skinner
was a great scientist, but he disrupted the systematic development of
psychology. He had a major blind spot: he denied that mental activity plays
any major role in human behavior.
Skinner was a charismatic fellow, and his powerful experimental procedures
attracted a hearty band of followers. He presented a simple story of
behavior in which all animals followed the same laws, be they rat or
pigeon, dog or person. Oh, it was captivating and influential. Grab young
college students, teach them to condition animals to do marvelous tricks,
and they are converted for life. Who needs the mind?
Skinner grew up in a mechanical age when the aspiring scientist could learn
how things worked just by observing them: gears meshed with other gears,
cams and levers pushed upon other objects. All this talk about mental
activity was about invisible stuff, theories, for goodness sake.
Skinner thought that the difficulty of studying mental phenomena proved
their non-existence. He fought hard to resist the study of cognition: if
he would have had his way, cognitive phenomena would have been banished
from science. His persuasive influence caused several generations of
American psychologists to ignore the study of the mind. Fortunately, he
didn't convince all of us, and his dominance was primarily an American
phenomenon, not followed by the rest of the world.
Skinner's failing, in my opinion, was that he matured before the
information age and never grasped such concepts as information, knowledge,
and computation. Today, we have a much more sophisticated understanding of
computation than ever before. We are starting to understand the
differences between the kinds of computations done by biological processes
and those done by today's computers. We are gaining a much deeper
understanding of what knowledge might be, of how decisions are made and of
what thought is. The brain is not a computer, at least not anything like
the computers that currently exist, but the brain does indeed provide the
physical mechanisms for the behavior of the mind, including information
processing, thinking, remembering, creating, and imagining.
The human brain is one of the most complex structures in existence. Mental
operations are performed in the human brain by its trillion neurons, each
connected to as many as 10,000 other neurons, each sending from one to one
hundred signals each second -- a total of some 10~16 to 10~18 events each
second (10~18 means the digit 1 followed by 18 zeros. That's even larger
than the national debt!). Is it any wonder that its scientific study
proceeds so slowly?
Mental events are very difficult to study. Only a limited amount of mental
behavior reaches conscious awareness. We are influenced by the
environment, by past experience, by emotions, and by the powers and
limitations of human thought mechanisms. Nevertheless, we need to break
this barrier if we are ultimately to understand human behavior.
The study of human cognition thrives. It is a dominant force in the
scientific study of psychology, and it is the basis for the new discipline
of Cognitive Science -- the study of mental phenomena, combining the study
of brain sciences, language, society, culture, psychological behavior, and
of intelligent machines into one exciting, productive new field. Research
groups and educational programs in Cognitive Science flourish across the
country and around the world.
The study of human thought and cognition cannot afford to be dogmatic, to
have a closed mind. Science has to accept a wide variety of approaches and
to advance through rigorous evidence and explanations, not through personal
schools and beliefs. Cognitive science follows this approach, accepting
the advances from all fields in an honest attempt to understand the human
mind. No single person dominates. Instead, many contribute to the general
scientific development. Indeed, some of B. F. Skinner's methods are part
of the scientific basis for our understanding of cognition.
Today, we are moving forward in our understanding by pursuing multiple
approaches, each contributing to our understanding of the most challenging
scientific study of all: the study the mind.
_______________________________________________________________
Donald Norman is chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at The
University of California, San Diego. His first academic job was as a very
junior faculty member of the Department of Psychology at Harvard
University, where Skinner was a very senior faculty member. Norman is the
author of the book The Design of Everyday Things and is now studying the
relationship between mental abilities and the cognitive tools that people
are so good at inventing.
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From: William Gardner, (wpg@virginia.edu), Dept of Psychiatry, School
of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh 15213.
Reply to David Stodolsky (david%harald.ruc.dk), Archives and
organization: The social potential of electronic publishing,
PSYCOLOQUY, V1, #11.
I agree with almost every point David Stodolsky makes about the need for
new and integrated network communications / information retrieval
services designed for scholars. In particular, I strongly endorse his
statement that
> The real question is whether efforts should be limited to the standard
> model for information exchange currently used. The alternative is that
> scientific societies play an active role in shaping the new media. I
> believe it will be beneficial if they did so.
He adds that
> I also agree that we need some central organization. However, the power
> of any such central organization should be limited as much as possible.
I agree. I don't, however, think that the next point is right.
> If we take maximum advantage of the capabilities of network technology,
> central organization could be limited to the registration of user names.
There is another place where central decisions could be made: the
development of international standards for scientific documents and
related services. One can foresee the networks evolving to multi-media
mail in the next decade, based on international standards for
multi-media documents, interchange protocols, and so forth. Scientists
will certainly use these, as they have used TCP/IP and other current
network protocols. But scientific documents have many features that may
not be adequately covered by the central network standards, which are
oriented toward ephemeral documents like mail. If the goal is to allow
scientists at diverse locations to exchange or share access to
documents, graphics, data, and so on, it may be necessary to extend
these standards.
For example, it would be good to have a standardized way of archiving
the results of statistical analyses, so that we can archive detailed
analytical results, rather than simply reporting an almost meaningless
factoid like ``_t_ = 1.56, n.s.'' Or, similarly, it would be useful to
have a common language for the description of statistical graphics. I'm
not advocating that we all use identical software, but rather that we
develop standard interchange formats.
Note that some apparently attractive existing standards won't work: for
example, suppose it were proposed that we exchange statistical graphics
by encoding them in PostScript. PostScript describes how a page will
look, but it doesn't have any facilities for describing what the shapes
mean. When I send a graph to you, however, I want you to be able to work
with it and adapt it to your needs: for example, to log transform the
points and re-render the image. That means that the format in which the
graph is exchanged has to define ``point'' as an object. Because only
scientists really know the semantics of their graphs, they need to be
involved in shaping these standards.
> I want to see questions relating to the social organization of science
> included in any discussion about new media. Failure to do so could
> have dire consequences for the both scientists and the general public.
I agree!
> The organization of information can ... also be discussed in terms of
> who gets published and who benefits from the system for scientific
> communication. Outrageous prices for journals are a well known problem
> ... Currently, the structure of scientific communication is distorted
> by commercial interests.
Because I don't know the answer to this problem, let me play the devil's
advocate. Academic publishers will tell you that part of the cost of
journals and books results from photocopying (see also articles by
Johnson and Liebowitz in the 1985 Journal of Political Economy). There
is a vicious circle here: (a) publishers lose individual sales to
copiers. (b) To make a profit above the fixed costs of publishing,
they boost prices, which continue to be paid by those readers with
inelastic demand for the publications, i.e., libraries and specialists
within given fields. (c) More photocopying results.... Eventually
individual scientists stop purchasing books and the libraries go broke.
It would be nice if the happy ending was: ``And this ushered in the era
of network based electronic publishing...'' But many people fear that
the copying problem will only be worse on the nets.
> Counteracting commercial interests requires a massive, but
> decentralized investment. Democratization of scientific communication
> is a solution to the domination of science by outside interests and
> could lead to the achievement of real scientific freedom.
I agree with the spirit, but what, in practice, do you mean by
democratization? I think we need to give careful thought to the issue
of decentralization & commercialization. They may well go
hand-in-hand. Can you propose a decentralized structure that is not a
market and nevertheless works efficiently to store and distribute
documents?
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PSYCOLOQUY
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(202) 955-7653
Co-Editors:
(scientific discussion) (professional/clinical discussion)
Stevan Harnad Perry London, Dean, Cary Cherniss (Assoc Ed.)
Psychology Department Graduate School of Applied Graduate School of Applied
Princeton University and Professional Psychology and Professional Psychology
Rutgers University Rutgers University
Assistant Editors:
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Psychology Department Psychology Department
Princeton University Rutgers University
End of PSYCOLOQUY Digest
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