Word: behaviorists
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...part would rip the whole fabric. Every discovery or invention of man has this dual aspect"-a potential for both benefit and harm. He warns that it does no good to try to retreat to an earlier century, and he quotes Konrad Lorenz, the famed naturalist and animal behaviorist, who has been warning hostile student audiences that if they tear down knowledge to start afresh, they will backslide 200,000 years. "Watch out!" Lorenz cautions the students. "If you make a clean sweep of things, you won't go back to the Stone Age, because you're already...
...work by Francois Truffaut. At first the mud-caked curiosity (Jean-Pierre Cargol) is treated as a zoo animal, visited by Parisians who applaud his pathetic growls and tantrums. Mercifully -or so it seems-the child is taken in tow by Dr. Itard (played by Truffaut himself). The primitive behaviorist names his charge Victor and slowly teaches him the habits and manners of civilization. But there is a ceiling of comprehension above Victor's head. Once he bumps it, all is lost. The embodiment of Rousseau's noble savage cannot progress to "normality"; yet he has lost...
Toward the end of World War II, Behaviorist B.F. Skinner was working on a similar project for the U.S. Navy -using pigeons. Skinner was evolving a kind of majority-vote bombardiering, using three pigeons on the theory that two at least would peck correctly on the left or right of a target screen. Then, as Skinner recalls, "the Manhattan Project came along and there was no need for pinpoint bombing...
...income in money or in greater leisure time. The goal of most Americans will be self-fulfillment rather than self-sacrifice. In everything, the emphasis will be on experimentation. "The idea of redesigning a way of life is going to be the dominant theme of the '70s," says Behaviorist B. F. Skinner. Young people will continue to fear large institutions, he believes, and will be ever more willing to "let this culture alone" and start their own institutions and communities. Education for enrichment or amusement rather than for professional skills will become a lifetime process as universities expand...
...make much noise themselves could respond to the arranged sounds that humans know as music. Cross, who happens to prefer Mozart himself, has an explanation of why the rats agreed with his musical tastes. Schoenberg, the father of serial music, wrote works of extraordinarily complex harmonies and rhythms; in behaviorist jargon, his music is dense with "information bits." Mozart used the traditional chromatic scale and a regular, readily identifiable beat. To a novice listener, and perhaps to a rat as well, Schoenberg may sound too cacophonic. Mozart might appeal to rats by the power of repetition, says Cross, as they...