(urth) 5HC : Skinner, Turing
Iorwerth Thomas
iorweththomas at hotmail.com
Fri Feb 4 06:01:30 PST 2005
>From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
>For what it's worth, there's a lot of interesting work going on
>right now that is putting some of the "human sciences" on what
>I would call a genuinely and appropriately scientific basis. In
>psychology, for example, you have the whole "evolutionary
>psychology" movement, which is producing some pretty
>stunning results in terms of explaining "why we are the way we
>are," and a lot of it looks to be apply-able, for purposes of
>creating more human(e) "behavioral technologies" than the
>Skinnerians ever could have done.
>
Yeah. Of course, with most stuff like this, you have to be careful with how
you proceed; evolutionary psychology got a very bad name when it started up
due to the flagrant crassness of some of its backers (a good history of this
is Andrew Brown's 'The Darwin Wars'). Things have apparently improved,
though on the origins of ideas that some evolutionary psychologists don't
approve of (say, religion) things don't appear to have moved much beyond
Freud (this is less an attack on the scientific study of religions, how they
form, develop and what this has to say about us as a spiecies - which is
wholly worthwhile - and more a statement that a lot of these commentators
don't actually know what they're talking about).
Iorwerth
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