Ellis,
Yes, in limited situations concerning prediction and control, such as those where simple "rewards" and "punishments" can be manipulated. What behaviorism cannot explain is "pattern perception" i.e. the dynamic assignment of classification of "stimuli" to functional categories. This is why it doesn't work with language acquisition, because physically stimuli are never actually "repeated". Or to take the corollary of that, physically repeated stimuli can be assigned to different mental categories as in the graphemic..
T/-\E C/-\T (where /-\ represents a symbol between H and A)
... such physical "ambiguity" being resolved by "context".
But it is "context" itself which resists "scientific definition" for would be reductionists. The fact that massive computer power can perform fast autocorrelation manipulations of acoustic signals in order to have limited success at speech recognition in no way reflects on how the brain does it.
Despite claims to the contrary, nobody knows what neurons "do" because nobody can define "the doing". For some, "context" may even be indicatative of social functionality as in the organic holism of insect colonies. This is reflected by the fact that the differentiation of cells in biology cannot be adequately "physically described". Adequate (i.e. manipulative) descriptions require reference to the whole organism and beyond. "Categorization" (friend-foe, food-non-food) implies set-theoretic assignment in terms of "functionality", but for normal science that functionality is often as axiomatic as the "faith" of believers.
Last edited by eccles; 08/15/09 08:49 AM.
