Cumulative Record. Chapter 28: The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms. Quote 5
We are told that a concept is to be defined “in terms of” certain operations, that propositions are to be “based upon” operations, that a term denotes something only when there are “concrete criteria for its applicability,” that operationism consists in “referring any concept for its definition to… concrete operations…,” and so on. We may […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 28: The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms. Quote 4
Definition is a key term but is not rigorously defined. Bridgman’s original contention that the “concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations” cannot be taken literally, and no similarly explicit but satisfactory statement of the relation is available. Instead, a few roundabout expressions recur with rather tiresome regularity whenever this relation is mentioned. […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 28: The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms. Quote 3
No very important positive advances have been made in connection with the first three provisions [talking about (1) one’s observations, (2) the manipulative and calculational procedures involved in making them, and (3) the logical and mathematical steps which intervene between earlier and later statements] because operationism has no good definition of a definition, operational or […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 28: The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms. Quote 2
Operationism may be defined as the practice of talking about (1) one’s observations, (2) the manipulative and calculational procedures involved in making them, (3) the logical and mathematical steps which intervene between earlier and later statements, and (4) nothing else. So far, the major contribution has come from the fourth provision and, like it, is […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 28: The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms. Quote 1
There is no reason to restrict operational analysis to high-order constructs; the principle applies to all definitions. This means that we must explicate an operational definition for every term unless we are willing to adopt the vague usage of the vernacular. (p. 416)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 26: A Lecture on “Having” a Poem. Quote 15
And now my labor is over. I have had my lecture. I have no sense of fatherhood. If my genetic and personal histories had been different, I should have come into possession of a different lecture. If I deserve any credit at all, it is simply for having served as a place in which certain […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 26: A Lecture on “Having” a Poem. Quote 14
By analyzing the genetic and individual histories responsible for our behavior, we may learn how to be more original. The task is not to think of new forms of behavior but to create an environment in which they are likely to occur. (p. 401)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 26: A Lecture on “Having” a Poem. Quote 13
Why not continue to believe in our creative powers if the belief gives us satisfaction? . . . To accept a wrong explanation because it flatters us is to run the risk of missing a right one—one which in the long run may offer more by way of “satisfaction.” (p. 400)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 26: A Lecture on “Having” a Poem. Quote 12
For the second time in a little more than a century a theory of selection by consequences is threatening a traditional belief in a creative mind. And is it not rather strange that although we have abandoned that belief with respect to the creation of the world, we fight so desperately to preserve it with […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 26: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 10
Selection is a special kind of causality, much less conspicuous than the push-pull causality of nineteenth-century physics, and Darwin’s discovery may have appeared so late in the history of human thought for that reason. The selective action of the consequences of behavior was also overlooked for a long time. (p. 399)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 26: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 9
The key term in Darwin’s title is Origin. Novelty could be explained without appeal to prior design if random changes in structure were selected by their consequences. It was the contingencies of survival which created new forms. (p. 399)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 26: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 8
A biologist has no difficulty in describing the role of the mother. She is a place, a locus in which a very important biological process takes place . . . The poet is also a locus, a place in which certain genetic and environmental causes come together to have a common effect. (p. 398)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 26: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 7
Something does seem to be taken away from the poet when his behavior is traced to his genetic and personal histories. Only a person who truly initiates his behavior can claim that he is free to do so and that he deserves credit for any achievement. If the environment is the initiating force, he is […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 26: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 5
. . . I agreed to participate [in a BBC television discussion with Chomsky] only if the moderator could guarantee equal time. I suggested that we use chess clocks. My clock would be running when I was talking, and Chomsky’s when he was talking, and in that way I planned to have the last fifteen […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 26: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 4
Eventually the question was asked, why had I not answered Chomsky? . . . No doubt I was shirking a responsibility in not replying to Chomsky, and I am glad an answer has now been supplied by Kenneth MacCorquodale in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. (p. 392)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 26: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 2
Let me tell you about Chomsky. I published Verbal Behavior in 1957. In 1958 I received a 55-page typewritten review by someone I had never heard of named Noam Chomsky. I read half a dozen pages, saw that it missed the point of my book, and went no further. (p. 391)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 20
A person who, as we say, lives for art, for whom art is the most important thing in the world, is not so much one who finds art reinforcing as one who has enjoyed a favorable history of painting or looking at pictures. The technique with which a dishonest gambler “hooks” his victim shows what […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 19
Mutation must . . . be followed by selection . . . The picture eventually left on the canvas is only one product of the combined processes of mutation and selection. An artist who will henceforth paint in a different way is another. (p. 386)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 18
We may not like to credit any aspect of a successful painting to chance, but, if we are willing to admit that chance does make a contribution, we can take steps to improve the chances. Mutations may be made more probable by making the control of a medium less precise or by encouraging disturbances. (p. […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 17
The word “origin” in The Origin of Species is important, for the book is essentially a study of originality. The multiplicity of living forms is accounted for in terms of mutation and selection, without appealing to any prior design. There are comparable elements in the behavior of the artist who produces original works. (p. 385)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 16
Novelty or originality can occur in a wholly deterministic system. A convenient archetypal pattern is the theory of evolution. The living forms on the earth show a variety far beyond that of works of art. The diversity was once attributed to the whims and vagaries of a creative Mind, but Darwin proposed an alternative explanation. […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 15
For Koestler a behavioral analysis of creativity is not only impossible but ludicrous, since novelty cannot arise in a “mechanistic” system. A creative mind must be at work. But a creative mind explains nothing. It is an appeal to the miraculous: mind is brought in to do what the body cannot do. But we must […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 14
The very assignment of producing a creative artist may seem contradictory. How can behavior be original or creative if it has been “produced”? Production presupposes some form of external control, but creativity, taken literally, denies such control. (p. 385)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 13
Learning the techniques of others does not interfere with the discovery of techniques of one’s own. On the contrary, the artist who has acquired a variety of techniques from his predecessors is in the best possible position to make truly original discoveries. (p. 384)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 11
When teachers abandoned older forms of discipline, they lost control, and to the extent that they have not found suitable substitutes, it is quite correct to say that they can no longer teach. And they have, therefore, been tempted to let students discover knowledge for themselves. (p. 384)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 10
The history of art is to a large extent the history of what artists and viewers have found reinforcing. Universality is the universality of reinforcing effects. Changes in fashion come about as some reinforcers lose power and others gain. The emphasis is important in its bearing upon the practical problem of improving the place of […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 7
The word “reinforcing,” though technical, is useful as a rough synonym for “interesting,” “attractive,” “pleasing,” and “satisfying,” and all these terms are commonly applied to pictures. For our present purposes it is particularly useful as a synonym for “beautiful.” (p. 381)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 6
. . . if we can discover the reinforcers which are contingent upon the artist’s behavior when he paints a picture, and upon the behavior of others when they look at a picture, we can not only explain their behavior but also use our knowledge to give art a more important role in our culture. […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 4
If art springs from an inner life which is truly original, in the sense that it begins with the artist, then there is nothing to be done beyond giving the artist an opportunity. It is much more promising, however, to argue that the achievements of the artist can be traced to the world in which […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 3
When [artists] talk about their emotions, thoughts, ideas, and impulses, they necessarily use a vocabulary that they have learned from people who have had no contact with these things and who, therefore, cannot teach them to describe what they observe accurately. (p. 380)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 2
Why, indeed, do artists paint pictures? The traditional answers are not very helpful. They refer to events supposedly taking place inside the artist himself . . . They represent the artist as a complex person living a dramatic life, and they give him exclusive credit for the beautiful things he creates. But we have not […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 25: Creating the Creative Artist. Quote 1
We usually know why people behave as they do when they “have” to do so, but less compelling reasons are usually less obvious. They exist, however, and if we are going to encourage people to be artists (or, for that matter, consumers of art), we ought to know what they are. (pp. 379-380)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 19
We are living in an age in which science fiction is coming true. The thrilling spectacle of man-made satellites has turned our eyes toward outer space. What we shall find there only time will tell. Meanwhile, we are confronted by far more important problems on the surface of the earth. A possible solution is in […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 18
If we are to make a study of behavior sufficiently reinforcing to hold the interest of young men in competition with inner mechanisms, we must make clear that behavior is an acceptable subject matter in its own right, and that it can be studied with acceptable methods and without an eye to reductive explanation. (p. […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 17
Under the influence of a contrary philosophy of explanation, which insists upon the reductive priority of the inner event, many brilliant men who began with an interest in behavior, and might have advanced our knowledge of that field in many ways, have turned instead to the study of physiology. We cannot dispute the importance of […]
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Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 15
Experimental psychology has suffered perhaps its greatest loss of manpower because competent investigators, beginning with a descriptive interest in behavior, have passed almost immediately to an explanatory preoccupation with what is going on inside the organism. In discussing this flight to the inner man I should like to believe that I am whipping a dead […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 13
The psychologist who adopts the commoner statistical methods . . . is inclined to rest content with rough measures of behavior because statistics shows him how to “do something about them.” He is likely to continue with fundamentally unproductive methods, because squeezing something of significance out of questionable data discourages the possibly more profitable step […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 12
For more than a generation, however, our graduate schools have been building psychologists on a different pattern of Man Thinking. They have taught statistics in lieu of scientific method. Unfortunately, the statistical pattern is incompatible with some major features of laboratory research. As now taught, statistics plays down the direct manipulation of variables and emphasizes […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 24: The Flight from the Laboratory. Quote 11
The very success of a science may force it to become preoccupied with smaller and smaller details, which cannot compete with broad new issues. The philosophical motivation of the pioneers of a “mental science” has been lost. (p. 365)