Confirmation Learning Theory: (12 American University Studies Series 8: Psychology)

This work presents a cognitive and deterministic theory of learning and a related theory of performance. The authors assume that the organism is a logical system whose behavior is governed by its anticipation of the future, that this anticipation, called the expectancy, is the basic learning event, that the expectancy arises within a quasi-linguistic representational system, that the organism's confidence in the expectancy changes during learning, and that the strength of the expectancy in real organisms is subjective probability. Carnap's lambda-system of inductive logic is used as an approximation of subjective probability. Formulas from this framework are applied to conditioning, partial reinforcement, and other experimental data.

Table of Contents:
Contents: A precise definition of the expectancy is given and a method of measuring its strength is described. These formulations achieve quantitative predictions of performance in conditioning, latent inhibition, latent extinction, sensory preconditioning, reversal learning, and partial reinforcement experiments.

Review :
The ideas in the book represent a considerable intellectual and scientific achievement. It is genuinely creative in the sense of borrowing the core idea from a prominent twentieth century philosopher (Rudolph Carnap), melding it with contemporary probability theory, incorporating it in a model, and redefining basic parameters in learning research to evaluate the model. Furthermore, a series of innovative experiments are reported which provide additional observations predicted by the new theory. I only hope learning theorists will take the time to read and think about this theory. (James Tedeschi, University of Albany, State University of New York) The book is important... It is one of the few truly synthetic approaches to psychology available at the present time... I am most intrigued at how a strong argument for an authentically psychological approach emerges. Tolman was right. Lewin was right. Even Freud was right. Indeed, everyone who was interested in psychological processes as such is right, as contrasted with the psychophobic behaviorists. (David Bakan, York University, Ontario)