Status Updates From How to Tame a Fox (and Buil...

Magnificent.

Prose is good. À little bit more verbose than it needs to be for what I was looking for, but it paints a nice picture of the people and their lives

No, Skinner would have acknowledged the phylogenic component of tail wagging, because he acknowledged the interaction of conditioning and biology from the get-go.

Well, 'dismissed animal emotions' is an over-generalization. Even the methodological folks admitted to private events, they just wanted to avoid their study out of a fear of mentalism. There's a difference between refusing to acknowledge emotions existing, and seeing emotions as behaviors to explain rather than explanations for behavior.

So his point was based on the anthropomorphization of his dog. :-/

"Animals can do elementary reasoning, behaviors not controlled by genetics or conditioning" - This only makes sense if you think Pavlovian conditioning is the only form. Operant conditioning is the process by which we learn to reason; reasoning IS behavior. The authors seem to feel that Pavlov and Skinner were devout blank slaters, which was *never* the case.