Philosophical naturalism
In this blog post I will discuss the fears of humans being controlled by behavioural science. This fear receded as criticisms of behaviourism made the discipline seem less capable of achieving the bombastic claims made by the likes of Skinner and Watson. But behaviourism has advanced well beyond Skinner and Watson and current behavioural science [ ]
Introduction. From about 1950 there was a resurgence of interest in the Rationalist Empiricist debate. With people viewing Chomsky as an updated rationalist carrying on the traditions of Leibniz and Descartes and Quine and Skinner updated versions of empiricism carrying on the traditions of Locke and Hume. And a consensus emerged that Chomsky’s rationalism won [ ]
In the last decade there has been an explosion of literature on Large Language Modules. The availability of Chat GPT-3 and Chat GPT-4 has created an interest in the topic for the general public. The resulting literature has to some degree led to a rehashing of age-old debates in philosophy which began with the onset [ ]
Introduction In this paper the competence-performance distinction first proposed by Chomsky (1965) will be analysed in relation to behavioural science. The paper will consider three primary criticisms of behaviourism from the point of view of the competence performance distinction: (1) behaviourists decision to stick with describing speech patterns and habits prevent them from constructing a [ ]
The Setting The act of referring to objects, so effortlessly performed in everyday discourse, belies the complex web of philosophical inquiry it has spurred since the dawn of analytic philosophy. In the annals of this intellectual tradition, a recurring motif emerges: the relentless quest to mend the perceived fractures in the relationship between words and [ ]
Introduction David Barnes-Holmes (2000) in his ‘Behavioural Pragmatism: No Place for Reality and Truth’ criticized Quine for offering a non-solution to the problem of homology. The problem of homology sprung up when Quine was trying to explain how different subjects could assent or dissent from observation sentences. Quine tried to cash out the stimulus meaning [ ]
Introduction In this blog post I will discuss Noam Chomsky’s 1971 paper ‘Psychology and Ideology’ where Chomsky critiques Skinner’s popular science book ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner claimed that freewill was an illusion and we could explain it away using an effective behavioural science. And once we did this [ ]
Childers et al 2023 argue that the debate between Chomsky and Quine and Skinner is revisited by contemporary debates on Large Language Models and Chomskian linguistics. They go on to argue that proponents of the view that data driven large language models mirror human natural language make the same mistakes that Chomsky critiqued people like [ ]
The Extended Mind is a thesis by Andy Clark and David Chalmers which states that the Mind Extends beyond the brain and encompasses aspects of the physical world. They give an example of a person who has dementia who keeps a diary to remind him of things he needs to do, such as when to [ ]
In this blogpost I will consider Quine’s relation to two of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Operants: the Mand, and the Tact. I will argue that Quine’s Observation Sentence is analogous to Skinner’s Tact, but that Quine makes very little use of the notion of a Mand. A Mand is one of the most studied verbal operants, [ ]