Every student of psychology is taught that Radical Behaviorism was displaced by the cognitive revolution, because it was deeply flawed scientifically. Yet it is still practiced in animal behavior modification, and even in some areas of contemporary human clinical psychology.
Here I argue that the continued application of Radical Behaviorism should be retired not just on scientific but also on ethical grounds. Skinner at Harvard and John B. Watson at John Hopkins. Radical Behaviorism came under public attack when Skinner's book Verbal Behavior published in received a critical review by cognitivist-linguist Noam Chomsky in in the journal Language. One of Chomsky's scientific arguments was that no amount of exposure to language, and no amount of reward and reinforcement, was going to lead a dog to talk or understand language; whereas for a human infant, despite all the noise in different environments, language learning universally unfolds.
This implies there is more to behavior than just learned associations. Skinner, [7]. Due to his successful work in behavioural biology, he was able to conduct independent research for five years after his doctoral examination at Harvard in , but in he moved to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis as a lecturer and later professor in psychology, where he no longer continued his experimental studies. It was not until , when Germany was already using remote-controlled bombs against targets in England during World War II V2 rockets that could still be guided in flight [ 5 ] , that Skinner reactivated his eagerness to experiment: he went in search of financial support for a now grotesque top-secret military project.
Skinner trained pigeons whose pecking movements were to be used to keep a long-range missile on course; apparently he planned to add a pigeon to each missile — but radar-based guidance systems were chosen after all. In Skinner returned to Harvard as full professor of psychology and remained at Harvard until his retirement in , when he wrote his novel Walden Two , also under the influence of hundreds of thousands of people returning home from the war, but it took more than a decade for it to become a widely discussed book.
The novel depicts the life of a community formed by operant conditioning and is still internationally acclaimed today. In , Science and Human Behavior was published, in which Skinner transferred the knowledge gained from the animal model to humans. In the further course of the s, Skinner developed so-called learning machines and the method of programmed learning, based on his considerations of learning theory already described in Walden Two.
In , Skinner completed over 20 years of work on Verbal Behavior , his theory of linguistic behavior. Skinner interpreted human language as behavior that is subject to the same laws as all other behavior. Skinner himself considered Verbal Behavior to be his major work. At the same time, however, Verbal Behavior also marks the beginning of the so-called cognitive turnaround. In an essay, he provided a psychological explanation for the lack of effective precautionary measures in spite of existing technical and scientific knowledge.
Skinner, whose major work Science and Human Behavior was published in , wrote books and essays until old age, even after he was diagnosed with leukemia in Associations enable creatures to discover the causal structure of the world.
Association is most helpfully viewed as the acquisition of knowledge about relations between events. Intelligence in behavior is a mark of such knowledge. Classical associationism relied on introspectible entities, such as perceptual experiences or stimulations as the first links in associations, and thoughts or ideas as the second links. Psychological behaviorism, motivated by experimental interests, claims that to understand the origins of behavior, reference to stimulations experiences should be replaced by reference to stimuli physical events in the environment , and that reference to thoughts or ideas should be eliminated or displaced in favor of reference to responses overt behavior, motor movement.
Psychological behaviorism is associationism without appeal to inner mental events. There are different sorts of causes behind introspective reports, and psychological behaviorists take these and other elements of introspection to be amenable to behavioral analysis. For additional discussion, see Section 5 of this entry. The task of psychological behaviorism is to specify types of association, understand how environmental events control behavior, discover and elucidate causal regularities or laws or functional relations which govern the formation of associations, and predict how behavior will change as the environment changes.
Instead, they are learning about the relationship between events in their environment, for example, that a particular behavior, pressing the lever in the presences of a light, causes food to appear. In its historical foundations, methodological behaviorism shares with analytical behaviorism the influence of positivism. One of the main goals of positivism was to unify psychology with natural science.
Though logically distinct, methodological, psychological, and analytical behaviorisms are sometimes found in one behaviorism. It follows analytical strictures at least loosely in paraphrasing mental terms behaviorally, when or if they cannot be eliminated from explanatory discourse. In Verbal Behavior and elsewhere, Skinner tries to show how mental terms can be given behavioral interpretations.
Radical behaviorism is concerned with the behavior of organisms, not with internal processing if treated or described differently from overt behavior. So, it is a form of methodological behaviorism. Finally, radical behaviorism understands behavior as a reflection of frequency effects among stimuli, which means that it is a form of psychological behaviorism.
Behaviorism of one sort or another was an immensely popular research program or methodological commitment among students of behavior from about the third decade of the twentieth century through its middle decades, at least until the beginnings of the cognitive science revolution. Cognitive science began to mature roughly from until see Bechtel, Abrahamsen, and Graham, , pp. In addition to Ryle and Wittgenstein, philosophers with sympathies for behaviorism included Carnap —33 , Hempel , and Quine Quine, for example, took a behaviorist approach to the study of language.
Quine claimed that the notion of psychological or mental activity has no place in a scientific account of either the origins or the meaning of speech. Among psychologists behaviorism was even more popular than among philosophers. In addition to Pavlov, Skinner, Thorndike, and Watson, the list of behaviorists among psychologists included, among others, E.
Tolman — , C. Hull —52 , and E. Guthrie — Behaviorists created journals, organized societies, and founded psychology graduate programs reflective of behaviorism.
Behaviorists organized themselves into different types of research clusters, whose differences stemmed from such factors as varying approaches to conditioning and experimentation. Behaviorism generated a type of therapy, known as behavior therapy see Rimm and Masters ; Erwin It developed behavior management techniques for autistic children see Lovaas and Newsom and token economies for the management of chronic schizophrenics see Stahl and Leitenberg It fueled discussions of how best to understand the behavior of nonhuman animals and of the relevance of laboratory study to the natural environmental occurrence of animal behavior see Schwartz and Lacey Behaviorism stumbled upon various critical difficulties with some of its commitments.
One difficulty is confusion about the effects of reinforcement on behavior see Gallistel In its original sense, a stimulus such as food is a reinforcer only if its presentation increases the frequency of a response in a type of associative conditioning known as operant conditioning. A problem with this definition is that it defines reinforcers as stimuli that change behavior. The presentation of food, however, may have no observable effect on response frequency with respect to food even in cases in which an animal is food deprived or hungry.
One alternative direction has been the study of the role of short term memory in contributing to reinforcement effects on the so-called trajectory of behavior see Killeen Another stumbling block, in the case of analytical behaviorism, is the fact that the behavioral sentences that are intended to offer the behavioral paraphrases of mental terms almost always use mental terms themselves see Chisholm In the example of my belief that I have a 2pm dental appointment, one must also speak of my desire to arrive at 2pm, otherwise the behavior of arriving at 2pm could not count as believing that I have a 2pm appointment.
Critics of analytical behaviorism have charged that we can never escape from using mental terms in the characterization of the meaning of mental terms. This suggests that mental discourse cannot be displaced by behavioral discourse.
At least it cannot be displaced term-by-term. Perhaps analytical behaviorists need to paraphrase a whole swarm of mental terms at once so as to recognize the presumption that the attribution of any one such mental term presupposes the application of others see Rey , p. The first reason is epistemic or evidential.
Warrant or evidence for saying, at least in the third person case, that an animal or person is in a certain mental state, for example, possesses a certain belief, is grounded in behavior, understood as observable behavior.
Moreover, the conceptual space or step between the claim that behavior warrants the attribution of belief and the claim that believing consists in behavior itself is a short and in some ways appealing step. If mental state attribution bears a special connection with behavior, it is tempting to say that mentality just consists in behavioral tendencies. The second reason can be expressed as follows: One major difference between mentalistic mental states in-the-head and associationist or conditioning accounts of behavior is that mentalistic accounts tend to have a strong nativist bent.
This is true even though there may be nothing inherently nativist about mentalistic accounts see Cowie Mentalistic accounts tend to assume, and sometimes even explicitly to embrace see Fodor , the hypothesis that the mind possesses at birth or innately a set of procedures or internally represented processing rules which are deployed when learning or acquiring new responses. Behaviorism, by contrast, is anti-nativist. Behaviorism, therefore, appeals to theorists who deny that there are innate rules by which organisms learn.
To Skinner and Watson organisms learn without being innately or pre-experientially provided with implicit procedures by which to learn. Learning does not consist, at least initially, in rule-governed behavior. Learning is what organisms do in response to stimuli. For a behaviorist an organism learns, as it were, from its successes and mistakes. See also Dennett PDP model building takes an approach to learning which is response oriented rather than rule-governed and this is because, like behaviorism, it has roots in associationism see Bechtel ; compare Graham with Maloney Whether PDP models ultimately are or must be anti-nativist depends upon what counts as native or innate rules Bechtel and Abrahamsen , pp.
The disdain is most vigorously exemplified in the work of Skinner. Suppose we try to explain the public behavior of a person by describing how they represent,conceptualize or think about their situation.
Suppose they conceive or think of their situation in a certain way, not as bare, as filled with items without attributes, but as things, as trees, as people, as walruses, walls, and wallets. Suppose, we also say, a person never merely interacts with their environment; but rather interacts with their environment as they perceive, see, or represent it. So, for example, thinking of something as a wallet, a person reaches for it. Perceiving something as a walrus, they back away from it.
So understood, behavior is endogenously produced movement, viz. Skinner would object to such claims. He would object not because he believes that the eye is innocent or that inner or endogenous activity does not occur. He would object because he believes that behavior must be explained in terms that do not themselves presuppose the very thing that is explained. The outside public behavior of a person is not accounted for by referring to the inside inner processing, cognitive activity behavior of the person say, his or her classifying or analyzing their environment if, therein, the behavior of the person ultmately is unexplained.
Skinner charges that since mental activity is a form of behavior albeit inner , the only non-regressive, non-circular way to explain behavior is to appeal to something non-behavioral. It aims to refrain from accounting for one type of behavior overt in terms of another type of behavior covert , all the while, in some sense, leaving behavior unexplained.
Also Skinner himself is not always clear about his aversion to innerness. Each of these Skinner takes to be incompatible with a scientific worldview see Skinner ; see also Day He readily admits that private thoughts and so on exist. Skinner countenances talk of inner events but only provided that their innerness is treated in the same manner as public behavior or overt responses.
An adequate science of behavior, he claims, must describe events taking place within the skin of the organism as part of behavior itself see Skinner Skinner does not have much to say about just how inner covert, private behavior like thinking, classifying, and analyzing can be described in the same manner as public or overt behavior.
But his idea is roughly as follows. Just as we may describe overt behavior or motor movement in terms of concepts like stimulus, response, conditioning, reinforcement, and so on, so we may deploy the very same terms in describing inner or covert behavior.
One thought or line of thought may reinforce another thought. An act of analysis may serve as a stimulus for an effort at classification. And so on. Skinner is the only major figure in the history of behaviorism to offer a socio-political world view based on his commitment to behaviorism. Skinner constructed a theory as well as narrative picture in Walden Two of what an ideal human society would be like if designed according to behaviorist principles see also Skinner One possible feature of human behavior which Skinner deliberately rejects is that people freely or creatively make their own environments see Chomsky , Black Critics have raised several objections to the Skinnerian social picture.
It is a question asked of the fictional founder of Walden Two, Frazier, by the philosopher Castle. Schneider and Edward K.
Morris write in The Behavior Analyst. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. In the late s and s, Skinner began to develop his own view of radical behaviorism.
Applied behavior analyst, clinical supervisor, and college professor are just a few examples of occupations in which radical behaviorism may play a role. Applied behavior analysts work with individuals to identify certain negative behaviors and then develop strategies to change them to produce more positive outcomes. For example, an applied behavior analyst could work with a child who is being disruptive in class to identify factors that may be causing such behavior and then develop strategies to encourage acceptable participation.
These professionals could also work to help adjust the behavior of adults, such as athletes or office workers. In an office, if there is an employee who is creating problems, or perhaps an employee who is struggling to meet certain benchmarks or goals, an applied behavior analyst can work with the individual to identify negative behaviors, the factors influencing those actions, and methods to achieve more suitable behaviors.
Clinical supervisors oversee and work with other mental health professionals to ensure that they are providing high-quality care to patients. Practitioners could also use radical behaviorism techniques when treating patients. Professors and instructors can teach radical behaviorism in class, but they can also use it as a tool to produce more positive educational outcomes.
They can apply radical behaviorism to help increase efficiency and move toward personal goals.
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