Talk:Psychology

Article Checklist for "Psychology"

Workgroup category or categories	Psychology Workgroup [Categories OK]
Article status	Stub: no more than a few sentences
Underlinked article?	No
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	Bruce M.Tindall

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"study of the human mind, brain, and behavior." Comment: A substantial part of psychology consists of research on nonhumans: rats, mice, monkeys, dolphins, etc. A branch of psychology, comparative psychology, ethology, animal behavior, is largely concerned with this. E.g., research on ape language learning. So I would recommend removing human. Please let me know if this criticism/suggestion belongs in "edit" rather than "discussion." Thanks.

Reply: just edit the article!  :-) --Larry Sanger 12:42, 6 November 2006 (CST)

Expansion

I attempted to expand the article, as a new author here I am curious about some initial feedback before plowing ahead. Thanks! Trent Toulouse 22:19, 28 April 2007 (CDT)

Chomsky-Skinner

I, too, am new here, and not all too sure of protocol for changing text, so I thought I'd note a few things about the changes I just made. Anyway, I modified the section about Chomsky's and Skinner's linguistic theories, since I believe the conclusion that Chomsky disproved Skinner is not universally accepted. For one thing, their theories are of two different types. The structures Chomsky postulates as antecedents of language are not necessarily antithetical to an explanation of language by its consequences (and when we learn another language, a functional approach works quite well, at least in the beginning). Another criticism of Chomsky's theory I recall from long ago is that it does not explain comprehension; when you look at his disambiguation of ambiguous phrases by deep structure, that criticism seems to the point – the speaker may disambiguate the statements structurally, but his or her audience have no way of apprehending that deep structure. Perhaps a fairer conclusion of this section would be that Chomsky opened up a whole new dimension for psychological study of linguistics.

Or maybe I'm just full of it, and for that reason I would appreciate hearing others' opinions. John FitzGerald 17:31, 25 September 2007 (CDT)