headed

Discussion and questions specific to The Origin of Consciousness; Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind; Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind; The Julian Jaynes Collection; Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness, and The Minds of the Bible books.
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conradhakan
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headed

Post by conradhakan »

"And what a truly vigorous and exciting program of research it was! with its gleaming stainless-steel promise of reducing all conduct to a handful of reflexes and conditional responses developed from them, of generalizing the spinal reflex terminology of stimulus and response and reinforcement to the puzzles of headed behavior and so seeming to solve them, of running rats through miles and miles of mazes into more fascinating mazes of objective theorems, and its pledge, its solemn pledge to reduce thought to muscle twitches and personality to the woes of Little Albert."

Can anyone tell me what the word "headed" in this paragraph from the introduction in The Origin means?
conradhakan
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Re: headed

Post by conradhakan »

Could it be "the behavior of living beings that have a head?"
conradhakan
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Re: headed

Post by conradhakan »

The link provided below gave me the following response. I think it is correct.

Since the topic is Consciousness in humans, I would say that "headed behavior" refers to the behavior of humans as a result of the things we think, our conscious decisions, the impulses within our head.

https://forum.thefreedictionary.com/pos ... px#1268991
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Re: headed

Post by Moderator »

I would agree with that interpretation.

One thing you might try during your translation process is looking how the German, French, and Spanish translators translated similar words and sentences.

Moving these posts to the Book Discussion section.
conradhakan
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Re: headed

Post by conradhakan »

That is exactly what I tried doing but their PDF versions do not exist. Incidentally, you are spot on. I am editing my translation of The Origin.
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Re: headed

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For what language?
benjamindavidsteele
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Re: headed

Post by benjamindavidsteele »

conradhakan wrote: Wed Jan 25, 2023 11:45 pmSince the topic is Consciousness in humans, I would say that "headed behavior" refers to the behavior of humans as a result of the things we think, our conscious decisions, the impulses within our head.
Since Jaynes was originally a behaviorist researcher, 'headed' likely refers to the common behaviorist bias of focusing on the physical body, with 'head' maybe a way of referring to the brain, while many behaviorists famously ignored consciousness; as it simply was not directly or typically part of their field of study. Though interestingly, B. F. Skinner referred to his own behaviorism as radical, in his interest in more than mere superficial behavior, in fact with a concern for private events (e.g., verbal behavior). Interestingly, without any mention of Skinner, Jaynes does use the exact phrasing of Skinner in speaking about the unconscious learning of ‘verbal behavior’ (Book One, Chapter 1):

“Another simple experiment can demonstrate this. Ask someone to sit opposite you and to say words, as many words as he can think of, pausing two or three seconds after each of them for you to write them down. If after every plural noun (or adjective, or abstract word, or whatever you choose) you say “good” or “right” as you write it down, or simply “mmm-hmm” or smile, or repeat the plural word pleasantly, the frequency of plural nouns (or whatever) will increase significantly as he goes on saying words. The important thing here is that the subject is not aware that he is learning anything at all. [13] He is not conscious that he is trying to find a way to make you increase your encouraging remarks, or even of his solution to that problem. Every day, in all our conversations, we are constantly training and being trained by each other in this manner, and yet we are never conscious of it.”

This is just a passing comment in using one example among many, and he states that “Such unconscious learning is not confined to verbal behavior.” He doesn’t further explore language in this immediate section or repeat again the phrase ‘verbal behavior’ in any other section, although the notion of verbal behavior is central to the entire book. But a decade after the original publication date of his book, Jaynes wrote a paper where he does talk about Skinner’s ideas about language:

“One needs language for consciousness. We think consciousness is learned by children between two and a half and five or six years in what we can call the verbal surround, or the verbal community as B.F Skinner calls it. It is an aspect of learning to speak. Mental words are out there as part of the culture and part of the family. A child fits himself into these words and uses them even before he knows the meaning of them. A mother is constantly instilling the seeds of consciousness in a two- and three-year-old, telling the child to stop and think, asking him “What shall we do today?” or “Do you remember when we did such and such or were somewhere?” And all this while metaphor and analogy are hard at work. There are many different ways that different children come to this, but indeed I would say that children without some kind of language are not conscious.”
(Jaynes, J. 1986. “Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind.” Canadian Psychology, 27, 128– 148.)

I don’t have access to that paper. That quote comes from an article by John E. Limber: “Language and consciousness: Jaynes’s “Preposterous idea” reconsidered.” It is found in Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness edited by Marcel Kuijsten (pp. 169-202).

https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.c ... -behavior/
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