Comment by travjones
10 years ago
My bad for coming off as condescending. That wasn't my intention. Philosophy is useful when talking about or discussing things. The problem with philosophy though is it doesn't allow one to predict and control behavior. Thus, if practical behavior change is your goal then behavior analysis is appropriate.
Prediction and control is not the only paradigm for causing behavior change, indeed it may frequently be the least appropriate one.
Prediction and control is what science rests on whether we're talking about behavior or physics. You can't prove that an independent variable (IV) caused a change in a dependent variable (e.g., behavior) unless you can predict and control it by systematically manipulating the IV while observing changes in the DV.
However, this is way beyond the scope of the original blog post or my original comment. In my first comment, I offered an alternative description of a phenomenon that the author described. You suggested that I was advocating for "strict behaviorism." That wasn't the case, so I clarified. At this point, I'm not sure what the purpose of this discussion is.
The purpose is to point out that people sharing information about how they think about things is a valid a way of influencing behavior. You are simply wrong to dismiss that.
I agree that humans influencing each other through talking about how they think about things is a hard phenomenon to reduce to the kind of science that you are advocating, but that is a limitation of your preferred methods, and it's inappropriate to dismiss phenomena just because you don't have a good way to understand them.
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