Paradigm Shifts
...sually takes a lot of facts, data, and proof in order to persuade a person to shift to a new paradigm. At this point, you might wonder what does this have to do with taste aversion, germ theory and Freud and Skinner. I will attempt to answer these questions below. First let’s take a look at taste aversion. In R25, it talks about traditional theory that in order for a behavior to continue/discontinued, the positive/negative reinforcement must come in a short time after the behavior. However, Garcia and Koelling proposed a theory indicating that positive/negative reinforcement does not have to come immediately after a behavior in order to be effective, instead the reinforcement could still be effective if it comes after an extended amount of time after the behavior was performed. Therefore, this is why it is so hard to poison a rat, even though the negative reinforcement comes at a much later time than the behavior. Since this theory is sufficiently different than the traditional view and it also offers a lot of subsequent questions and problems to solve, it could be said that in essence, this proposed theory by Garcia and Koelling is like a new paradigm. Secondly, let’s examine the germ theory. The germ theory is rather innovative. With the traditional view, environmental and lifestyle factors affects the chance of acquiring certain kinds of diseases like ulcer, malaria, and hepatitis. Paul Ewald offers a different explanation. He claims those diseases are caused by germs rather than the environment and spread through infections. Once again, this is a new paradigm in the biological world since this theory opposes traditional thought. This theory is met with some criticism, in R24 James Bull claims Ewald’s hypotheses are “too crude to capture the teeming complexity of microbial evolution”. Does this statement sound similar to some of our reaction when we heard Skinner’s theory? In a way, Ewald is like the Skinner of the biological world. He sees a problem with the old paradigm, just like how Skinner saw a problem with Freud’s paradigm. Then both Ewald and Skinner try to present their new paradigm. The critics claim Ewald and S...