Cc: "evol psychol"X-eGroups-Remote-IP: 204.127.202.64 From: "Jay R. Feierman" Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 19:24:45 -0600 Subject: Re: [evol-psych] What is "behavior"? What is "actions"? [snipped] Is there something to be learned about why different disciplines want specific terms to be defined differently? The term "behavior" is a good example, since that has been the topic of this thread. Why do ethologists want the definition of behavior to be purely descriptive or phenomenological and the cognitive and evolutionary psychologists want to add other properties into the definition? What would change in cognitive or evolutionary psychology if behavior was just defined descriptively? Or, is this just a dominance issue with each field of study trying to get the other field of study to use its definition? Ethologists would not want function, evolution and development to be in the definition of behavior because they start with descriptively defined behavior and then try to figure out function, evolution and development. Perhaps the issue is the referent or nidus or the starting point around which the discipline is built? [snipped] Regards, Jay R. Feierman