> >>Miles wrote: This is a pretty generous summary of the rise and fall of
> behaviorism
> > in psychology as a scientific discipline. In fact, Skinner's ideas
> > fell out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s among psychological researchers
> > because a growing corpus of cognitive research clearly disconfirmed
> > basic behaviorist tenets.
> ===============
>
> Some scholars cite Noam Chomsky's 1957 Syntactic Structures and his 1959
> review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, to which Skinner never replied, as the
> death knell of behaviorism. An anarchist slam dunk on authoritarianism in
> yet another neglected dimension of human affairs :-)
>
At the recent ISMB conference in San Diego, the keynote was given by Gerald Edelmann of the Neurosciences Institute (www.nsi.edu). Edelmann argued for the model of consciousness as arising from an active process of self-organisation, based on a kind of Darwinism of neural functions (groups of neurons and connections between groups of neurons evolving through a process of differentiation and selection, as in Darwinian natural selection). He strongly attacked the idea of an 'anatomical locus of consciousness', and the idea that there are a definite set of pathways which 'process' input much like a modern computer does.
In a sense Edelmann and co. are providing the scientific justification for critiques such as Marx's critique of pre-Marxian materialism:
"The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism - that of Feuerbach included - is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively." (1st thesis on Feuerbach)
This also takes a stab at the lack of place for agency in behaviouralism.
A useful intro to some of Edelmann's work is the abstract at:
http://scienceweek.com/search/auxygop.htm
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844