There is no autonomous self. You, like every other organism, are a product of the complex dialectical interplay between genetic endowment and environment. Moreover, you cannot seperate one from the other and say 40% of me is determined by my genes, 60% by environment, because genes and the environment are both the subject and object of each other i.e. both influence and act upon each other. Isolating an organism from its environment leads to an alienated and impoverished explanation.
Wilfred Sellars ( a Marxish analytical philosopher) distinguished between what he called the 'manifest' image of man(sic) and the 'scientific' image. The manifest image is the way humanity is studied in literature departments and the scientific image is the manner in which biologists, chemists and other scientists study humanity. The goal of philosophy, in Sellars view, is to reconcile these two images. One of the strengths of Marxism, imo, is that it combines both images in its theory. Sellars is most famous for his tortured writing style. Here is a typical Sellarsian sentence: "Rather, we would have the alternative of saying that although for many purposes, the central nervous system can be construed without loss as a complex system of physical particles, when it comes to an adequate understanding of the relation of sensory consciousness to neurophysiological process, we must penetrate to the non-particular foundation of the particulate image, and recognize that in this non-particulate image the qualities of sense are a dimension of natural process which occurs only in connection with those complex physical processes, which, when 'cut up' into particles in terms of those features which are the least common denominators of physical processes--present in inorgnic processes alike--become the complex system of particles, which in the current scientific image, is the central nervous system." Science, Perception and Reality p37.
Brutal, huh?
> There is also the ominous potential of relating a behavioristic
> view to totalitarian modes of social control, though it would be an unfair
> stretch to find that in anything you have said.
>
> mbs
I got that impression, too, from reading Chomsky's critiques of Skinner. I'll have to read Skinner for myself.
Sam Pawlett