Wolfgang:
Your first message was full of misstatements about science
in general and about the field that I and others laboriously till
in particular, namely, behavioral geography/
psychogeography/ environmental psychology, and was somewhat
insulting to the workers who till this field. So I tried to
correct your misstatements and misevaluations, and I did
not and do not wish to debate your ideas.
I'll offer the following comments and then shut up.
"Indeed Behaviorism a a school was related to ethology and
is not any longer alive in its crude form."
Ethology if I'm not mistaken didn't exist in the days when
behaviorism reigned. Do you mean research using animal
subjects to make inferences about cognition? That is still very much in
fashion.
"If what some observed people do is explained exclusively by variables of
their environment but not by the purposes that they follow, such
kinds of explanations are still "behavioristic",
independent of the authors calling themselves behaviorists,
or behaviouralists ar whatever else."
Who today explains human actions "exclusively by variables
of their environment but not by the purposes that they
follow?" Nobody that I know is that much of a fool,
although I'm sure you can find such people if you look hard
enough.
"This is really not my field."
No comment.
"Jim Blaut wrote: 'I think you'll find that most scholars,
including geographers, opt for causal analysis. I suspect
that relatively few support philosophical determinism,
which is a different and unrelated issue.' You better keep
your thoughts about what I find for yourself. I am able to
speak for myself. Besides you are wrong about my thoughts.
(No comment on your suspection.)"
What is this supposed to mean?
"[The] problem of representation is not longer solved by
ontological but by epistemological (or terminological,
methodological) differentiations.
Representation has no ontology? If you believe that is the
case, it seems unlikely that you hold, as you say, "to a
philosophy which is monistic in ontological terms."
"Jim Blaut wrote: 'But it is not valid to claim that this
is the dominant point of view and the wave of the future.'
My answer: I do not sell cloths, therefore fashions and
mainstreams are more or less irrelevant for me."
Is the Wolfgang Zierhofer who wrote about "fashions" and
"mainstreams" in previous postings...
== "there has been a decline of behavioral approaches in
general"
=="...to treat human behavior as a matter of causal
relations and of deterministic explanations... has become
profoundly discredited."
=="Today, within the humanities human
behavior is... not treated as a result of any causes (or
stimuli)..."
=="...one of the (good) reasons for the decline of
behavioral approaches within many disciplines."
== "As long as the "revitalization of location theory"
follows the behaviorist lines, it will face the same
critique (and fate) again."
Finally:
"So what do you understand by critique? ... [Is] it enough
to throw a little bit of mud ("nonsense", "uninformed",
"extravagant" and other defeating qualifications)?"
Nonsense is not mud, it is nonsense.
Respectfully but finally,
Jim Blaut
I'll respond to your latest comments and leave matters at that.
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