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How is Bayesianism not a form of behaviorism? The essay devotes a paragraph to explain this point allthough Deutsch assumes the reader is familiar with behavior

• jorleif 13y ago
  Had he said that Bayesian decision theory with optimization of utility functions etc. was behaviorism, then I would agree, but Bayesian formulations can be used for many other things as well. At least one can propose very complex internal models, which behaviorists were criticized for not considering.
  • murbard2 13y ago
    Agreed. Besides, behaviorism was abandoned in psychology because it was crazy, not because there's something wrong with reinforcement learning. It was treating the human mind as a black box trying to pretend we have no insight in human thoughts. It was trying to avoid antropomorphizing people as Morgenbesser put it. In fact, quite the opposite, I'd attribute this blatant idiocy to Popperism. After all, introspection isn't testable or falsifiable in a popperian sense. There's no room for the concept of models in Popperianism. There are just big black box ideas that you test and are falsified or not.