Specifically, a behaviorist might say "The rat was exposed to unanalyzed contingencies prior to the introduction of cheese into the environment." That is, the contingencies arranged by a maze without cheese are what may explain the behavior with cheese rather than some cogmap
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I'm still a naive student of behaviorism, but my understanding of the argument is:
The contingencies of the environment cause some change in the rat which is unobservable in its behavioral response—but which nevertheless meaningfully alters subsequent response.
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It has been easier for me to learn QED in order to translate its foundations into the language of Geometric Analysis than it has for me to learn and explain not only behaviorism but also its radical offshoot. Radical Behaviorism is described in "About Behaviorism" by Skinner
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I am tired now, and if I wrote a response it would not be very helpful: by tomorrow I should have something more substantial and comprehensive
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This may be a better starting point than anything I can write. It explicitly mentions Tolman's work. It appears to be about a human organism behaving in the presence of a map, but the rat maze is part of it.
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Generally, I've found Skinner's work is a foundation not a fully crystallized formulation. This is akin to R. L. Goodstein's text Constructive Formalism, which provides an almost unobjectionable foundation upon which much work must be done to build it further.
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Skinner and Forester's "Schedules of Reinforcement" is one of the few texts in psychology which I have yet to "explain away" and it is not an easy text to contemplate.
bfskinner.org/wp-content/upl
bfskinner.org/wp-content/upl
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Did any of that help or have I made things more confusing?
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It is as important to me as I am sure it is important to you that I challenge my understanding of the world and the principles which govern that understanding: has what I've mentioned here helped you at all?
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Thanks for the nudge: I lost your replies in a notifications deluge! I've read your photographed text several times now, and I'm still not able to make sense of the argument as applies to Tolman. I expect I'll have to read much more deeply here before really grasping.
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Thank you for the fulltext PDFs—will add them to my queue!
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It is one of Skinner's weaknesses that he left the details of arguments and experiments in his past writings: if he repeated something it was in a simplified form that hardly hinted at the depth you've detected. There is a lot and you may not have time to figure it out
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Also, the word "nudge" as used by Thaler is almost unforgivable: the thing he is talking about are Skinner's contingencies which lack any push-pull or cause-effect suggested by "nudge". Skinner has more than once written on economic and financial contingencies specifically
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