Term Paper on "Education Psychology"

Term Paper 10 pages (3581 words) Sources: 1 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Adult Learning

Fodor (1987) offers a theory of psychology that avoids the problems of physical reductionism, implied by many psychological theories, and suggests that language can be approach as a far more intuitive and natural process -- he calls this folk psychology. Fodor's form of folk psychology takes into account the realization that people in general cannot have a conscious grasp of exactly the kind of psychology they are engaging in. In other words, people are capable of understanding each other's behavior without being explicitly familiar with the mechanisms they employ to reach that understanding. This anomaly has its analogy in language: most speakers of the English language are able to speak it fluently and grammatically correct without having any formal understanding of its grammatical laws: "Chomsky has famously argued that the best explanation of such capacities is that speakers of natural languages have a form of unconscious knowledge of the grammar of the language that they speak. Such unconscious knowledge is known as tacit knowledge and is held to be encoded in the brain," (Cain 8). Recognizing this idea suggests that humans perform a similar sort of computation when making psychological inferences: we understand the causal laws that bind people's intentional states together, and we apply this knowledge without consciously knowing what we are doing.

Historically, one of the most important theories attempting to overcome this hurdle -- namely, that the psychological phenomenon of language cannot be physically observed -- has been behaviorism. Although, in many ways this is an antiquated way of conceiving of the human mind, it nonetheless provides vital insights into the teaching of ESL. Behaviorism is an increasingly broad area of study, which has its roots in the very beginnings of modern psychology. The driving notion behind the theory is that we, as ordinary human beings, possess no direct way to look into the human mind and observe precisely what it is comprised of or how it operates. Consequently, the only workable approach towards psychology, according to behaviorists, is to conceive of the mind as the relay between external, physical inputs and their resulting outputs. In other words, the mind is simply a mechanism that performs certain functions when specific inputs are given to it, and the result is an output -- this output is human behavior. In other words, although the ideal way to analyze human behavior and thought would be to observe the mechanisms of the mind first hand, psychologists must be content to observe behavior and make inferences about the mind. Doubtlessly, even though significant advances have been made in our understanding of the physical mind, the mental and subjective machinery within will forever remain a black box to our probing. Accordingly, philosophical reasoning will always remain a means towards advancing psychological theory, regardless of how deep our empirical knowledge of the brain might go.

Freud writes, "We possess no criterion which enables us to distinguish exactly between a psychical process and a physiological one, between an act occurring in the cerebral cortex and one occurring in the sub-cortical substance; for 'consciousness,' whatever that may be, is not attached to every activity of the cerebral cortex, nor is it always attached in an equal degree to any particular one of its activities; it is not a thing which is bound up with any locality in the nervous system," (Freud 84). In this way, Freud argued that the task of the psychoanalyst was not to attempt to understand consciousness from a strictly physical standpoint, but to insert workable models into the input-output mechanism that is the human mind. Freud approached the mind as if it were a "black box"; we cannot ever fully know the electric and physical activities that may be responsible for the workings of the human mind; instead, we must treat consciousness without concern for the particular physical phenomena which may play a role. Accordingly, if a model can be developed of human consciousness and unconsciousness that can accurately predict and diagnose, then we must accept that this model is correct in the absence of physical observations of the brain. This is the basic premise that later psychologists, philosophers and researchers adopted to develop the theory of behaviorism.

From this foundational understanding of behaviorism, a central doctrine of behaviorism emerged. It is comprised of three rigid premises:

Psychology can only be understood in terms of behavior -- it should not be expected to make claims about the internal workings of the mind.

The causes of all human behavior originate from the external environment, so all behavior can be understood by characterizing the environment.

Consequently, all psychological theories that rely upon mental states and their interactions with one another should be completely eliminated in favor of the behaviorist model.

B.F. Skinner was perhaps the most famous and most forceful advocate of behaviorism in the twentieth century. He explained that although there is a sort of intuitive appeal towards looking for internal causes to human behavior, this is inconsistent with the observable world: "There is nothing wrong with an inner explanation as such, but events which are located inside a system are likely to be difficult to observe. For this reason we are encouraged to assign properties to them without justification," (Skinner 1). Skinner claimed that all human behavior -- including emotions and language -- could have their occurrence traced back, causally, to physical stimulus. Language, to Skinner, is nothing more than a behavior; granted, it is a more complex behavior than most, but it still must be situated within the overall framework of input and output. The complexity of language results in the fact that we, as observers, are rarely able to accurately predict what any particular individual will say at a given time; nevertheless, if it were possible for us to enumerate all of the numerous forces making themselves felt upon a person by his or her environment, it would be possible, according to Skinner, for us to accurately predict what he or she would say.

To many critics, including Noam Chomsky, this was an absolutely ridiculous claim. However, the lasting appeal of this conception of language is that it is explicitly scientific in its terminology and approach. From Skinner's point-of-view, the words that we typically use to describe the process of thought -- such as "idea" and "concept" -- lack any real meaning; they do not exist, except as ways for us to speciously map the characteristics of thought. Accordingly, we must embrace the premise that the mind acts only as a biological tool that shapes the various inputs we receive from the external world into behavior -- this behavior is very often verbal language. Nevertheless, "This point-of-view is emphatically rejected by scientists calling themselves cognitive ethologists. Cognitive ethologists, stimulated by the writings of distinguished biologist Donald Griffin (1976), claim that behaviorism has unduly inhibited the investigation of the nature of consciousness in animals," (Shettleworth 7). In other words, Skinner's version of behaviorism, according to some, goes too far in asserting that consciousness is merely a mirage; as a result, other behaviorists have modified his understanding of the theory to allow for inferring the existence of something akin to what we believe consciousness to be.

Still, not all behaviorists have gone as far as Skinner in contending that there is no justification within the context of behaviorism for the existence of consciousness. In a more forgiving understanding of the term, the theory does not claim that we can truly know what the manifestations of thought are, only that we can infer, from the observable and from our common sense grasp of how mental systems may operate, and exactly when they are operating. Put differently, behaviorism tells us that if certain systems satisfy the requirements for thought, then we have no justifiable reason to doubt the presence of consciousness; similarly, we should infer that thought itself is a complex ordering of inputs. Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett uses this concept of causality and intention to illustrate that there is a spectrum of ever-increasing mental processes that can go from those used by a thermostat to a human being. The important point being that the thermostat is centrally limited by the information it needs to know to properly carry out its function; this is what makes it such a simple entity. A human being, by contrast, receives millions of inputs and is required to carry out far more complicated processes to carry outs its functions. Importantly, "There is no magic moment in the transition from a simple thermostat to a system that really has internal representation," (Dennett 32). The only answer, therefore, is to assume that internal representation is present where it can be inferred, to a high level of success: this is the behaviorist stance.

Within the context of teaching English as a second language, the behaviorist stance suggests a number of things. First, it suggests that the learning environment is perhaps the single most important feature of teaching. After all, if language is nothing more than the output of a… READ MORE

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