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The Meaning of Behaviour (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,637
Discovery Miles 26 370
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The Meaning of Behaviour (Hardcover)
Series: Psychology Library Editions: Personality
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Originally published in 1983, this title is a determined attack on
personality theories current at the time. It critically examines
their basic motivational constructs and rejects any that invoke
goal-seeking as being inescapably teleological and therefore
unacceptable as natural science. Dr Maze argues the necessity for
an unqualified determinism in psychology, yet one that incorporates
the role of cognitive processes in the formation of behaviour.
However, action theories which profess to offer a causal account of
apparently goal-seeking or voluntarist behaviour by reference to
the internal states of desire for a goal and a belief about how to
get it are also dismissed. For the concept of belief as an internal
state is argued to be a relativistic one, defined as being
intrinsically related to its object. This is an incoherent notion
and one which cannot specify anything acceptable as a causal state.
The one motivational theory in dynamic psychology which offered a
solution to these problems was Sigmund Freud's formulation of his
instinctual drive concept, defined as an innate physiological
driving mechanism with preformed consummatory behaviours: his
'specific actions'. But his hydraulic models have been
patronisingly dismissed by modern neurologists, arguing that there
are no 'flush-toilets' in the central nervous system. This book
argues that such a glib dismissal is shallow minded, and that a
reformulation of Freud's concept in terms of modern neuroscience is
readily available, though the problem of identifying the relevant
structures remains formidable. The book is of immediate interest to
all those seriously concerned with the springs and meanings of
human behaviour, whether they be psychologists, psychoanalysts,
philosophers or those generally interested in social and ethical
theory.
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