08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
John Locke VS Babies
Another great English philosopher, John Locke, posed another classical epistemological problem. What would happen if you miraculously restored the sight of someone who had been blind from birth? Would that person recognize all the objects he had known so intimately through touch, or would he have to painstakingly learn that the smooth, hard, curved surface looked like a porcelain teacup, or that the familiar, soft, yielding swells and silky hairs translated into a visual wife? Locke thought t...Locke wondered if a blind person given sight would need to learn how to associate this new sense with the others, but babies make these associations instinctively.
06 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Skinner and Freud's View of Child Learning
The theories that did dominate psychology, especially in America, were Freudianism and the behaviorism of psychologists like B. F. Skinner. Both theories had lots of things to say about young children. But like Aristotle with the teeth, neither Freud nor Skinner took the step of doing systematic experiments with children or babies. Freud largely relied on inferences from the behavior of neurotic adults, and Skinner on inferences from the behavior of only slightly less neurotic rats. And like ...Folksonomies: psychology inference
Folksonomies: psychology inference
They got it mostly wrong because they relied on a philosophical inference method of science.