[nairboon]

> Specifically it tried to downplay introspection, and personal experience and reduce behavior to learned "reflexes". This was debunked quite a while ago, 1970s or so, by Chomsky and others so it sounds absurd to us.

Just because this gets repeated again and again, and is even in some textbooks, doesn't make it true.

Skinner wasn't ever "debunked". The point of Skinner was, in the early half of the last century, that we cannot reliably and objectively "introspect" into the brain. Remember that stuff like MRI was invented 10 years after Chomsky supposedly "debunked" Skinner and fMRI only in the early 90s.

With the advanced methods of today, it is very easy to label the work of scientists a century ago as absurd. But they didn't have all these modern measurement technology back then.

[rusk]

Skinner was never "debunked" - as I said, behavioral methods are still used extensively and effectively. However in a historical context behaviorism was the dominant theory for a good 50 years or so. The adage about "every problem looks like a nail when you've a hammer". The issue is not about Skinner, more to do with mainstream academic thought, which being human is absolutely prone to its indulgences.

I don't want to get into an ideological firefight. I was more responding to GP assertion that GGP's statement was based "on nothing". I was just providing the substance upon which the original statement was probably based.

[FrustratedMonky]

Perhaps that is the point, lets not toss IIT out the window because we have not yet figured out a good way to measure it.

Were early theories of mind 'pseudoscience' because we didn't yet have MRI's to make them testable?