Folks, there is always going to be some psychology that people tackle you with. We have seen it so often, that we’ve come to terms. We only mind if the psychology is something we can like, a Dr. Seuss you know, some essence.
Alice has prepared a Wiki on Mr. Skinner, a behaviorist. He was no Seuss: ■BURRHUS FREDERIC SKINNER.
To lay it out in simple words, a behaviorist is like a fella who blows a trumpet and knocks you on the knee with a hammer at the same time, to get you jerk as in this picture here.
The idea is to keep on knocking, till you kick with the trumpet only. This is what a behaviorist would say is learning.
The hammer would be the unconditioned stimulus and the trumpet would be the conditioned thing, but what common sense could you have, to try to show any such thing about a particular healthy kid? Besides, we’d be in for learning some things that we can control, why otherwise.
Mr. Skinner said that free will was an illusion, but to believe that, you’d need to be grateful to king George III for the War of Independence, and thank British troops for the Anthem. By the way, see our ■CHARTERS.
We are staying with the ■PSYCHOLINGUISTIC matter, more of ■SEUSS outlook. Psycholinguists came forward in 1960s, to counter behaviorism. The two remain much opposed, behaviorism and psycholinguistics.
The word comes from psychology and linguistics. Psychology is about the mind. Linguistics is about language. Psycholinguistics is like to say there is not much language without a mind, and the other way round, there is no mind really without language. Here’s some doctor Seuss. Enjoy.
GRAMMAR WEBLOG BY TERESA EVA PELKA 