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)

It's true that there are some people on the fringes of psychology who are still working in a behaviourist framework - I've seen them try to use these ideas to treat child language impairment, for example. But in linguistics, mainstream psychology and cognitive science I'm not aware of anyone who really has a Skinnerian view. Many people don't accept Chomsky, but they don't accept the behaviourist claim that studying the workings of the mind to account for behaviour is unscientific, and that we should confine ourselves to using environmental stimuli to account for tasks as sophisticated as language acquisition and even tying our shoelaces.

The criticisms you mention don't really stand up because for one thing, Chomsky does not dismiss the role of the environment - indeed, the presence and nature of the ambient linguistic data the child is exposed to is crucial for language acquisition to proceed. The point is that what they say and how they understand things - that they produce and comprehend instances of language they've never heard before, and more importantly rule out novel unacceptable examples - is underdetermined by the input they receive. Chomsky considered this so obvious that he did no empirical research on it, but no study has unarguably shown otherwise.

Though Chomsky actually said very little about whether language itself is innate - he merely argued you can't just learn it through hearing examples - researchers have used his work to come to the conclusion that either there is an innate language faculty, or at least general cognitive processes that can ensure the child comes to language. It's hard to see how comprehension in particular could be explained through environmental stimuli alone, when the child has most likely never heard anything like the utterance before. Skinner never said we were all 'blank slates', of course, but he did want to try and explain behaviour purely through environmental interaction, which most people today would reject.

To get back on to the purpose of this Talk page, which is to discuss the development of the article rather than argue at length about Chomsky and Skinner, I think we need to steer it away from any kind of acceptance of behaviourism - this theory is generally met with laughter by most mainstream researchers, in a wide variety of fields. I will modify what you've written a little, while keeping the broad strokes. John Stephenson 20:58, 25 September 2007 (CDT)