PHILOS 2F03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: The Adapted Mind, Tabula Rasa, Leda Cosmides
14 Sep 2016
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One idea and one polemic: the idea: the omni-competence of conditioned learning, the polemic: abolish unobservables in psychology. Anything that is learned is learned by stimulus-response conditioning. Behaviourists quarrel is with any reference to unobservable notions. Psychology is the science of the mind . minds are unobservable. Minds, thoughts, image, representation, beliefs are all unobservable. Everything that psychology needs to explain can be done so by learning: there is no innate ideas or instincts. The human being is a psychological blank slate: the way to write on the slate is through learned stimulus response conditioning. Molecular biology, new knowledge of dna and cell physiology. The new synthesis, also known as neo-darwinism, the synthesis of darwinism and. Chomsky, computers, information theory, cognitive science: its genes that are affected by natural selection, it is genes that mutate and adapt, darwin had no theory of heredity. Men killing their children do not respond with the same selectivity.
