评G.顾尔维奇主编的《社会学概论》(第二卷)

象这样规模的汇编不是一件可以轻易做到尽善尽美的工作;对于在概念方面的配备还在犹豫不决和专家们尚未达到确定其专阴术藉的一阴学科靛来,它儿乎是一项赌注。事实上,在社会学方面,用法文出版的这种类型的著     

哲学的历史性事业

本期发表了一组有关俄国哲学史的译文。19世纪末和本世纪初,俄国涌现出一大批在国内外深有影响的唯心主义哲学家和宗教哲学家。1985年以后,特别是近两年来,苏联哲学界一改以往的回避传统做法,着手出版百卷左右的《祖国哲学思想史丛书》,《哲学问题》等杂志特辟专栏,大量发表介绍这些哲学家生平的文章和他们的著作节选。这些现象不能不引起各国哲学工作者的注意和深思。这里介绍的三位哲学家是三个不同时期最具代表性的人物,但这里选登的三篇文章并不完全是他们的代表作。读者若能从这些文字中粗略地了解到俄国宗教唯心主义哲学之一斑,或进而看到苏联哲学已经并正在发生的变化,就不负编者的初衷了。     

Establishing operations

The first two books on behavior analysis (Skinner, 1938; Keller & Schoenfeld, 1950) had chapter-length coverage of motivation. The next generation of texts also had chapters on the topic, but by the late 1960s it was no longer being given much treatment in the behavior-analytic literature. The present failure to deal with the topic leaves a gap in our understanding of operant functional relations. A partial solution is to reintroduce the concept of the establishing operation, defined as an environmental event, operation, or stimulus condition that affects an organism by momentarily altering (a) the reinforcing effectiveness of other events and (b) the frequency of occurrence of that part of the organism's repertoire relevant to those events as consequences. Discriminative and motivative variables can be distinguished as follows: The former are related to the differential availability of an effective form of reinforcement given a particular type of behavior; the latter are related to the differential reinforcing effectiveness of environmental events. An important distinction can also be made between unconditioned establishing operations (UEOs), such as food deprivation and painful stimulation, and conditioned establishing operations (CEOs) that depend on the learning history of the organism. One type of CEO is a stimulus that has simply been paired with a UEO and as a result may take on some of the motivative properties of that UEO. The warning stimulus in avoidance procedures is another important type of CEO referred to as reflexive because it establishes its own termination as a form of reinforcement and evokes the behavior that has accomplished such termination. Another CEO is closely related to the concept of conditional conditioned reinforcement and is referred to as a transitive CEO, because it establishes some other stimulus as a form of effective reinforcement and evokes the behavior that has produced that other stimulus. The multiple control of human behavior is very common, and is often quite complex. An understanding of unlearned and learned establishing operations can contribute to our ability to identify and control the various components of such multiple determination.     

Language-specific listening

Languages differ in their phonological structure and physcholinguists have begun to explore the conseqence, of this fact for speech perception. We review research documenting that listeners attune their perceptual processes finaly to exploit the phonological regularities of their nativ language. As a consequence, these perceptual process are fill-adapted to listening to languages that do not display such, regularities. Thus, not only do late language-learners have trouble speaking a second language, also they do not hear it as native speakers do; worse, they apply their native language listening prosedures which may actually interfere with successful processing of the non-native input. We also present data from studies on infants showing that the initial attuning occurs early in life; very yong infants are sensitive to the relevant phonological regularities which distinguish different languages, and quickly distinguish the native language of their environment from languages with different regularities.     

Response acquisition by Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens) with delayed visual reinforcement

Male Siamese fighting fish, Betta splendens, swam through a ring in an aquarium, breaking a photocell beam and initiating an unsignaled, resetting delay interval. Following delays of 0 s, 10 s, or 25 s, a 15-s mirror presentation released an aggressive display by the fish. Swimming through the ring increased in the absence of either a period of acclimatization to the reinforcer (analogous to magazine training when appetitive reinforcers are used) or explicit training of the response by the experimenters. Response rates were a decreasing function of delay duration. Other fish exposed to a schedule of response-independent mirror presentations failed to acquire and maintain the response. The results demonstrate the robustness and generality of the phenomenon of response acquisition with delayed reinforcement. They further qualify earlier observations about behavioral mechanisms involved in the phenomenon.