Abstract
Learning is one of the most important processes in the development of animal behavioural identity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, and especially during the twentieth century, there have been many explanatory proposals and models aimed at describing this process. In particular, the North American behaviourist school and the Central European school of ethology have produced two strongly structured—but incompatible—traditions in terms of their explicative models. In the second half of the twentieth century, the mentalist interpretation increasingly succeeded in explaining some aspects of expressive intentionality. Today, there are several models that are often forcibly juxtaposed, even when they are incompatible: this is the case with associationist, psychoenergetic and cognitive models. The question I will address is whether this abundance could be replaced by a single model capable of subsuming and resolving the contradictions that still exist in all these explanations.
Roberto Marchesini
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Notes
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For a presentation of the Gestalt theory, a psychological current developed in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, whose privileged field of investigation was perception, see W. Köhler (1970).
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Just think of Pico della Mirandola’s manifesto of humanism. In his De hominis dignitate, the author compares man to a chameleon characterized by freedom and changeability. The human being, therefore, would be endowed with free will, which would allow him to break away from the transience of earthly life so as to rise up, without constraints and conditions, to God. Cf. Pico della Mirandola (2012). This conception of the animal as complete from a predicative point of view, and therefore totally immersed and confined within a precise existential dimension, underlies both Arnold Gehlen’s theory of incompleteness and Martin Heidegger's idea of the animal as poor-in-world. Cf. Gehlen (1988) and Heidegger (1995).
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As for example in the cognitive model TOTE, standing for “test – operate – test – exit”. This model was described in its functional aspects by psychologists George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram in 1960 as signifying the testing between subject status and target status, with the two resolvent functions being defined with the word operate (on) and exit (off). According to the TOTE model, the system does not close through reinforcement but through the achievement of the objective, as Noam Chomsky already emphasized in 1957 by questioning the behaviourist concept of reinforcement. Cf. Chomsky (1957).
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In assimilation, any information present in external reality can be assimilated to the cognitive system where, in a complementary manner, the existing cognitive structures are accommodated, though a sort of internal recognition that allows the system to be reset by virtue of the new integrated elements. See Piaget (1955).
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Marchesini, R., Celentano, M. (2021). Animal Learning: An Epistemological Problem. In: Critical Ethology and Post-Anthropocentric Ethics. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74203-4_4
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