Matching to Reinforcer Value: Human Concurrent Variable-Interval Performance

1980 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Cliffe ◽  
Stephen J. Parry
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Variable Interval ◽  
Sexual Stimulus ◽  
Interval Variable ◽  
Sexual Stimuli ◽  
Stimulus Classes ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Reinforcer Value

A male paedophile offender chose between pairs of sexual stimulus classes in a two-operandum procedure with reinforcement arranged according to concurrent variable-interval variable-interval schedules. Condition 1 involved choice between slides of women and slides of men; condition 2, slides of men vs. slides of children; and condition 3, slides of women vs. slides of children. On the assumption that the subject matched his ratios of responses and times on the two operanda to reinforcer value, estimates were obtained from the data in conditions 1 and 2 of the values of slides of women and of children relative to slides of men. These yielded predictions of the relative allocations of responses and of time in condition 3. The predicted and obtained outcomes were similar. The results support the use of matching-based scaling of reinforcer values in the prediction of choice between qualitatively different reinforcers and extend the application to a human subject, the two-operandum procedure, and sexual stimuli.

Madness, virtue, and ecology: A classical Indian approach to psychiatric disturbance

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512098224
Author(s):  
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Psychiatric Disturbance ◽  
Indian Medical ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Moral Relationship

The Caraka Saṃhitā (ca. first century BCE–third century CE), the first classical Indian medical compendium, covers a wide variety of pharmacological and therapeutic treatment, while also sketching out a philosophical anthropology of the human subject who is the patient of the physicians for whom this text was composed. In this article, I outline some of the relevant aspects of this anthropology – in particular, its understanding of ‘mind’ and other elements that constitute the subject – before exploring two ways in which it approaches ‘psychiatric’ disorder: one as ‘mental illness’ ( mānasa-roga), the other as ‘madness’ ( unmāda). I focus on two aspects of this approach. One concerns the moral relationship between the virtuous and the well life, or the moral and the medical dimensions of a patient’s subjectivity. The other is about the phenomenological relationship between the patient and the ecology within which the patient’s disturbance occurs. The aetiology of and responses to such disturbances helps us think more carefully about the very contours of subjectivity, about who we are and how we should understand ourselves. I locate this interpretation within a larger programme on the interpretation of the whole human being, which I have elsewhere called ‘ecological phenomenology’.

The Imaginary Questionnaire

1950 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Whitfield
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Choice Response ◽  
Questionnaire Data ◽  
Statistical Concept ◽  
Appropriate Treatment ◽  
Alternative Meaning ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Statistical Problems

The experiment was designed to throw some light on the statistical problems in the analysis of questionnaire data. Previous work (unpublished) suggested that a simple choice response was partially determined by previous responses; and also that the nature of the determination was changed with changing length of series. A “null” experiment was devised in the form of a questionnaire without any questions, and the distribution of responses was studied with respect to the problems formulated. The observations are discussed in three sections. In the statistical discussion an alternative meaning to overall association or dissociation is advanced. This: relates association or dissociation to human behaviour in the serial response situation, rather than to qualities of the questionnaire. It is further suggested that association between specific, questions should be tested against the association in the whole questionnaire, and an appropriate treatment is indicated. The observations depart from statistical randomness in certain ways. Answers made up almost entirely of one form of response are given less often than would be expected. Long sequences of the same type of response are relatively infrequent, and sequences of alternation of response are also rare. As the material is “null” it implies that the human concept of randomness differs from the statistical concept. An attempt is made to define the human concept of randomness. It appears that a series of responses which has a pattern, or for which the subject can postulate a simple “cause” will not be accepted as random by the human subject. This raises problems of a perceptual and cognitive nature. It also has a bearing on the design of questionnaires. or experiments involving serial responses.

Responsibility before the World: Cinema, Perspectivism and a Nonhuman Ethics of Individuation

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-410
Author(s):  
Andrew Lapworth
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
World Cinema ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film –  Leviathan (2012)  – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being.

scholarly journals Critical agency in education: a Foucauldian perspective

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Postma
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
The Self ◽  
Alternative Mode ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Educational Implications ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Mode Of Being

While the neoliberal order is associated with the economy, government and globalisation, as a form of governmentality it effects a particular subjectivity. The subject is the terrain where the contest of control plays out. The subject is drawn into the seductive power of performativity which dictates its agency, desires and satisfactions and from which escape is difficult to imagine. Neoliberalism is particularly interested in an education which provides it with the much needed powers of production and consumption. This dependency of the neoliberal order on a particular kind of agential subjectivity is also its weakness because of the indeterminacy of the self. Within this openness of the human subject lies the possibility to be different and to escape any form of subjectification. Foucault’s account of the critical agent portrays a form of difference that opposes and transcends neoliberal ordering. Foucault finds the principle of practices of freedom in the Greco-Roman ethics of the care for the self. It is an ethics where the subject gains control of itself through the ascetic and reflective attention in relation to available ethical codes and with the guidance of a ‘master’. Such as strong sense of the self is the basis for personal and social transformation against neoliberal colonisation. The development of critical agency in education is subsequently investigated in the light of Foucault’s notions of agency and freedom. The contest of the subject is of particular importance to education interested in the development of critical agency. The critical agent is not only one who could identify and analyse regimes of power, but also one who could imagine different modes of being, and who could practice freedom in the enactment of an alternative mode of being. The educational implications are explored in relation to the role of the teacher and pedagogical processes.

scholarly journals V. On the chemical analysis of the contents of the thoracic duct the human sub­ject

1842 ◽  
Vol 132 ◽  
pp. 81-85 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Analysis ◽  
Thoracic Duct ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
The Body ◽  
Old Bailey ◽  
The Subject

The contents of the thoracic duct in the human subject having never been obtained in sufficient quantity for the purposes of chemical analysis, I resolved to avail myself of an opportunity which lately presented itself in the execution of a criminal at the Old Bailey. Through the kindness of Messrs. Macmurdo and Holding, the medical officers of Newgate, and with the assistance of my friends Mr. Hilton and Mr. Samuel Lane, I was enabled to commence operating upon the body one hour and a quarter after death, and before it had become cold, although the thermometer stood considerably below 32° Fahr., and the body had been exposed on the scaffold during one hour. The subject was muscular and of the middle height, and the prisoner had not become emaciated during his confinement in jail. On the evening preceding his execution, he had partaken of some supper, consisting of about 2 oz. of bread and 4 oz. of meat; and the next morning, he drank two cups of tea, and ate a piece of toast made from the quarter of a round of a quartern loaf, and about a quarter of an inch in thick­ness. This breakfast was taken at seven o’clock A. M., one hour before death. He swallowed a glass of wine just before mounting the scaffold.

Political ecology III: Who are ‘the people’?

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 981-990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Loftus
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Authoritarian Populism ◽  
The People ◽  
The Subject

Since its inception, political ecology has marshalled a variety of different understandings of the human subject. Confronted with the challenges of authoritarian populism, as well as the provocations of the Anthropocene, being explicit about such conceptualisations is increasingly necessary. In this third report, I review recent conceptualisations of the subject, beginning with how ‘the people’ have been invoked in authoritarian populist discourses. I then contrast such a perspective with the situated social subjects of everyday political ecology before considering the challenges posed to notions of a sovereign human subject. I conclude with a discussion of political ecological persons in praxis.

Mill's Two Views on Belief

Philosophy ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 59 (227) ◽  
pp. 79-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.J. Mandt
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Newtonian Mechanics ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Philosophical Doctrine

Philosophical traditions often bear the seeds of their own destruction.Their seminal insights are achieved in part by ignoring or distorting certain aspects of human experience. Insights and mistakes grow from the same roots. In transitional periods, this dialectic leads to strange reversals in allegiance and to unexpected and even unnoticed shifts in philosophical doctrine. Classical empiricism presents an example of this when one shifts attention from its treatment of epistemological questions to problems of humanaction, or to the relation of knowledge and action. The empiricist analysisof knowledge in terms of the succession and conjoining of ideas and impressions in the mind leaves the mind itself a passive spectator that undergoes its contents. On this view, the human subject lacks any distinctive spontaneity or power of initiative. The mind's internal processes are conceived ofon analogy with Newtonian mechanics and are distinguished by their law-likeregularity. The subject is not, and cannot conceive itself as being, a kindof agency. Historically, the consequences of this are evident in Berkeley's difficulties regarding ‘active spirit’, of which we have ‘notions’ but not perceptions, and in the often remarked upon disparities between Parts I and III of Hume's Treatise.

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