In my article, “Why Psychology Hasn’t Kept Its Promises” , I argued that psychology hasn’t become the science its practitioners had hoped because psychologists continue to focus on mentalistic constructs and they adhere to a methodology that emphasizes statistical inference over experimental analysis. I concluded that in order to better keep their promise of a psychological science, psychologists should return to studying the relationship between observed behavior and its context with the type of experimental analysis that characterizes the other experimental (...) sciences. In his reply, Lana suggests that there may be aspects of human social and verbal behavior that are so complex that we may not be able to carry out a solid experimental analysis, thus limiting what we can discover about our own nature. Lana concludes that the methodologies needed to understand these more complex social relationships are hermeneutic and historical rather than experimental in nature. I concur with Lana both that an experimental analysis of much of human behavior may not be possible and that psychologists must, therefore, rely on complementary descriptive, interpretive, and historical analyses. I argue, however, that the interpretive language and the historical hindsight must be based on a foundation of basic principles derived from the systematic experimental analysis of behavior. (shrink)

This essay posits that psychology’s general lack of respect as a science stems from two related problems: the continued focus on conceptually vague mentalistic constructs and the adherence to a methodology that emphasizes statistical inference over experimental analysis. The lack of a thoroughgoing experimental analysis has so far prevented psychologists from discovering a set of foundational principles thus inhibiting them from being able to predict and control individual behavior. Psychologists can remake their conceptual and methodological foundations by focusing on the (...) relationship between observed behavior and its context and by adopting methods of experimentation that would aid in the discovery of orderly functional relationships. This knowledge could be used to more parsimoniously explain complex behavior, including cognitive phenomena, and to more effectively solve practical problems. (shrink)

Jaswal & Akhtar provide several quotes ostensibly from people with autism but obtained via the discredited techniques of Facilitated Communication and the Rapid Prompting Method, and they do not acknowledge the use of these techniques. As a result, their argument is substantially less convincing than they assert, and the article lacks transparency.

For this reason also the question is asked, whether happiness is to be acquired by learning or by habituation or some other sort of training, or comes in virtue of some divine providence or again by chance. Now if there is any gift of the gods to men, it is reasonable that happiness should be god-given, and most surely god-given of all human things inasmuch as it is the best. But this question would perhaps be more appropriate to another inquiry; (...) happiness seems, however, even if it is not god-sent but comes as a result of virtue and some process of learning or training, to be among the most god-like things; for that which is the prize and end of virtue seems to be the best thing in the world, and something godlike... (shrink)

"The professional memoir of Henry Burroughs--former president of the White House Press Photographers Association, chairman of the Senate Standing Committee for Photographers, and "shooter" for the Associated Press for thirty-three years--whose career docu.

La nouvelle révolution copernicienne marquant la publication de la troisième Critique, un an après le choc de la Révolution française, offre trois pistes pour lire la philosophie du Droit de Kant : 1) la relation de l'universel et du particulier est liée à la conception de la liberté comme « clef de voûte » de tout l'édifice ébranlé par l'hétérogénéité du réel; 2) l'intersubjectivité de la communication humaine ressort de l'esthétique du beau en se rappelant, dans ce contexte, la mise (...) en abîme du sublime; 3) le corps organisé en relation avec la réflexion de Kant sur la République. Dans l'histoire, se pose le problème de la « destination » de l'humanité, puisque l'énigme du mal radical remet en question un développement pensé, par les Lumières, en terme de progrès. A year after the French Revolution, the third Critique creates a new Copernican Revolution by opening three ways of understanding Kant's Ph. of Right: 1) the relationship of the universal and the particular is linked to a conception of freedom as the keystone for the edifice, shaken by the recognition of the heterogeneity of the real; 2) the intersubjectivity results from the aesthetic of the beautiful, called into question by the experience of the sublime; 3) the human body in relation to Kant's thought on the Republic. Within history we are confronted with the question of human destiny, for the enigma of evil renders questionable the Enlightenment idea of human development as progress. (shrink)