SeriousCat wrote:Mr.Samsa, I think it's abundantly obvious now that all you are interested in is emotional argumentation. You post contradictions to yourself and ignore my comments. I have come into this discussion with an open mind, and you have pursuaded me of changing my opinion on several elements of psychology. This was from the force of the logic and evidence, not because of your rudeness. However, most of my queries have still been left unanswered by you. It is all too obvious that this is too personal an issue for you, and so to save us the trouble let's just say that we agree to disagree. Take it as a victory, stalemate, or whatever you'd like. I'm not here to get into a fight.

seeker wrote:If by "mental phenomena" you're referring to private responses, they can be studied: they're behavior.

Asta666 wrote:

seeker wrote:If by "mental phenomena" you're referring to private responses, they can be studied: they're behavior.

I think behavior is one aspect. For instance, imagining a forest might be called covert behavior, but it involves the manipulation of mental images/representations, what's the nature and scientific accessibility of that kind of "objects"?

Skinner wrote:The Copy Theory
Those who believe that we see copies of the world may contend that we never see the world itself, but it is at least equally plausible to say that we never see anything else. The copy theory of perception is most convincing with respect to visual stimuli. They are frequently copied in works of art as well as in optical systems of mirrors and lenses, and hence it is not difficult to imagine some plausible system of storage. It is much less convincing to say that we do not hear the sounds made by an orchestra but rather some inner reproduction. Music has temporal patterns, and only recently have copies been available which might lend themselves to a mental metaphor. The argument is wholly unconvincing in the field of taste and color. Where it is not easy to imagine copies distinguishable from the real thing, and it is seldom if ever made in the case of feeling. When we feel the texture of a sheet of paper, we feel the paper, not some internal representation. Possibly we do not need copies of tastes, odors, and feelings, since we are already physically intimate with them, and for presumably the same reason we are said to feel internal states like hunger or anger rather than copies. The trouble is that the notion of an inner copy makes no progress whatsoever in explaining either sensory control or the psychology or physiology of perception. The basic difficulty was formulated by Theophrastus more than two thousand years ago: "...with regard to hearing, it is strange of him [Empedocles] to imagine that he has really explained how creatures hear, when he has ascribed the process to internal sounds and assumed that the ear produces a sound within, like a bell. By means of this internal sound we might hear sounds without, but how should we hear this internal sound itself? The old problem would still confront us." Similarly, as a modern authority has pointed out, it is as difficult to explain how we see a picture in the occipital cortex of the brain as to explain how we see the outside world, which it is said to represent. The behavior of seeing is neglected in all such formulations. It can take its proper place only if attention is given to other terms in the contingencies responsible for stimulus control.
Seeing in the Absence of the Thing Seen
When a person recalls something he once saw, or engages in fantasy, or dreams a dream, surely he is not under the control of a current stimulus. Is he not then seeing a copy? Again, we must turn to his environmental history for an answer. After hearing a piece of music several times, a person may hear it when it is not being played, though probably not as richly or as clearly. So far as we know, he is simply doing in the absence of the music some of the things he did in its presence. Similarly, when a person sees a person or place in his imagination, he may simply be doing what he does in the presence of the person or place. Both "reminiscing" and "remembering" once meant "being mindful of again" or "bringing again to mind"--in other words, seeing again as one once saw.

seeker wrote:because your brain allows these kind of long-lasting effect of your initial perceptual interactions (when you perceived those forests)

Asta666 wrote:The point I was trying to make is that those things one experiences or re-experiences are not the same as the behavior of experiencing/feeling/fantasizing,"

Asta666 wrote:whether one thinks of them as mental or physiologically derived.

Asta666 wrote:I wonder if it's a viable object for psychology or if it's neurology's field.

Asta666 wrote:Especially since one can read many reputed sources claiming that cognitive psychology is the study of the "mind" or computational processes that work with mental representations, which would be a viable stance if one accepts the premise of multiple-realizability of cognitive processes, but I don't think it's well supported.

Microfarad wrote:If psychology applies the scientific method, it is a science.-

genie2012 wrote:i believe that any science name that begins with the prefix phy- is not a real science who does agree with me?