Bienvenido a Sprachgefühl Languages

“Behaviorism also called the learning perspective

 (where any physical action is a behavior), is a

philosophy of psychology based on the proposition

that all things which organisms do — including acting,

 thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded

as behaviors. This school of psychology maintains

that behaviors as such can be described scientifically

without resource either to internal physiological

events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind”.

Everyone has heard the term behaviorism, right? If not, let me explain it with my own words: behaviorism is one the most well-known / famous / classical schools of psychology that says that our whole thinking, acting and feeling process can be quantified, proved and divided into many little behaviors (stimuli- response). This school is the responsible of the typical struggle of psychology to be considered a science.

I could spend days and days talking about the theoretical aspects of behaviorism, but my concern is something different… I wonder if ALL of our psychological processes can be divided into little-quantifiable-scientific-technical behaviors. Can we sort of “predict” behavior if we manipulate every possible variable?

First, a little background: behaviorism general premises are that all of our actions are conditioned somehow, classically or operationally. Classical conditioning conditions stimuli to natural reactions; for example, we have Pavlov’s famous experiment with the dogs: whenever they heard a bell they salivated, because every time he would feed the dogs, he rang the bell first. Operational conditioning is the one in which we “operate” on the environment to obtain something. For example, if I cheat in a quiz and I get an A+, probably I’ll do it again and again to get the same positive outcome.  

We also have the “black box” term, making reference to the airplanes black box (this little box in which all the airplane’s operations are registered) and used as an analogy to say that all the psychological processes are compared to a black box; in behaviorism, theorists only take into account the following:

Stimuli      à              Black box (mind)               à             Response

Easy, right? Behaviorists are only interested in the thing that causes behavior, and the following outcome; whatever happens in between (that is, let’s be honest, the difficult part!) they simply don’t care! Maybe that is why, nowadays, being 100% absolutely behaviorist is considered obsolete, and this psychological school is now paired with other kind of schools, such as the Cognitive Psychology. With this, we have the new and moderns kind of therapy “Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy”, in which the therapist and the patient try to identify all the “thinking” factors around the problem and see which thinking process is the one that causes the problem; then, they try to change this so-called “cognitive dissonances”.

So, what do you guys think about this? Do you think our behavior – thoughts – actions can be reduced to a simple black box symbol?

Some interesting courses at casa del lago,  Keep an eye on what’s coming each semester.  Enjoy! DR

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – A novel not for the squeamish or faint of heart.

This is not a happy book. It will not make you feel better or lift your spirits. In fact, you will come as close as you’ve ever been to tasting ashes in the back of your mouth without actually standing in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.
A bleak premise, an even bleaker outlook and no realistic hope for relief. Cormac McCarty’s newest novel plunges you headfirst into a tale so sordid it could push a sufficiently depressed person effortlessly over the edge (or off, in case you happen to be on a building at the time of reading).
A terse leading character on a foundation of McCarty’s hard-to-define, and seemingly sparse vocabulary makes this an ‘easy’ to read book but a very difficult cookie to digest.  No adjective, adverb or noun is wasted nor inappropriate in describing a post-some-apocalypse USA.
Following the 2 destitute main characters -a desperate, dying father (yet driven by a momentous will) and his innocent albeit unwilling son- we are introduced to a landscape that resembles everything which the word loss entails. With painfully scarce resources and no idea what, if anything, awaits them at what will probably be their final destination.
McCarty bestows so little prosperity on his characters that something as small as them finding a new pair of shoes makes you heave a sigh of relief with them. But this lasts as long as the sigh itself, because nothing can truly relieve you in a world torn asunder and continuously afflicted by the consequences of the disaster that has stricken the world where our characters seem to dwell only to find their final resting place.
This book, with its vivid yet soberly painted image, is an instant classic already transformed into a celluloid copy. In today’s plethora of hypocritically acclaimed non-sense and self-help books this book might actually help you much more with almost any kind of problem.

It’s sort of like the last coke on the world. Tastes special, sweet and in some inexplicable way it feeds your soul, but leaves an everlasting bitter flavor on your palates. Because it really was the last.