Thank you for bringing up Rescorla-Wagner. You brought me back:
My interesting in behaviorism stopped at Skinner and usual
extensions of interest are more Skinner-ish - but I remember
Rescorla-Wagner now. Even with his flaws, nobody could question
that Skinner was doing some excellent science. Awkward and
uncomfortable and yes, I believe he went too far in a number of
areas (opinion), nevertheless, the dude has my respect. == I
love QM - a number of my friends are working in the field (hint:
not many jobs), working on their doctorates (hint: won't be many
QM jobs but businesses LOVE ppl with Theoretical Physics degrees
over MBAs.. and happily pay for it) - and the thing is: it cant
handle many bodied systems. Even few bodied systems it struggles
with. The "building blocks" model is a model of wish and hope at
present. I see a lot of attempts to reinvent the wheel by
finding quantum mechanical explanations for things that ALREADY
have fantastic working theories that are function.... and here
comes SOMEBODY always publishing a paper saying, "yeah yeah,
your old theories ain't quantum so let's just get rid of them" -
which is fine to try... but it does the public a disservice
because here come the press reports "Quantum holds the key to
understanding [something-something] in biology]" and you read it
and it's like, "ok, dubious and existing theories IN BIOLOGY
work fine and great. Go away QM and stick to your own field".
But it gets the press. Makes everybody want to be theoretical
physicists and nobody want to be biologists. SOMEBODY's gotta go
out there and catalog undiscovered species. Sometimes I want to
shoot the science channel for pushing the LEAST scientific of
scientific disciplines and saying THIS IS REAL SCIENCE unlike
the others that are only playing... except they're not playing.
== Indeed. I look at it this way: It's good for what it's good
for, and it's not good at what it's not good at. Crossing fields
_can_ be useful at times - but behaviorism isn't equipped to
study cognition in depth in the way that psychology (now
Cognitive Psychology - we have such great tools now, although
even the fMRI needs improvement) can. Hence, different foci,
different fields. ==
