Epistemological Metaphors Part 2

Peirce’s Cable, Quine’s Web, and Neurath’s Boat 
Descartes was inspired by Euclid’s geometric proofs, which demonstrated their claims to truth through incremental steps each with a simple justification in a long chain of reasoning. He likened himself to an architect needing “to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations,” and he sought then to build an edifice of knowledge upon such metaphysical first principles using Euclidean chains of reasoning. 

Letting the “foundation” metaphor alone for now, Peirce pointed out a key problem with the chain metaphor for knowledge. If Descartes had come up with a “long chain of reasoning” which could, by its end convince us that, say, making a cup of coffee is what we ought to do about now, that conclusion would be as weak as the weakest link of reasoning that aided in the construction of the chain. Even with a rock solid foundation on which to base our beliefs, in Descartes architectural model for knowledge, the strength of our foundation is no more important than the strength of each individual link in a chain of reasoning. Rather than model philosophy on mathematics, Peirce recommended that,

“Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premises which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.”

Even better than having one convincing line of thought that leads to a conclusion is the possibility of generating multiple such lines of reasoning to support it. What is emphasized in Peirce’s cable metaphor is the importance of all the inferential connections between fibers or beliefs that don’t necessarily all follow in a single sequence of deductions but rather wrap around one another in mutual support.

    

The problem with Descartes’ chain metaphor is that the strength of the chain fails as easily as a single link can break. And we know that they can break since we’ve all made deductions that we thought were rock solid in the past but were later shown to have serious flaws. Quite heavy links may be found to weigh on the support of a single loop of hair, while a cable can endure the failure of a few fibers so long as there are enough other fibers remaining. It is the interconnectivity of propositions rather than a single sequence of deductions that makes a cable of beliefs strong.

Peirce’s cable could be seen as a hemp rope where no single fiber could extend along the entire length, yet, pulling as hard as we might, it won’t come apart. No single belief imagined as a fiber in such a cable or rope is any more a core or foundational belief without which the whole structure would collapse. W. V. O. Quine saw this sort of interconnectedness and mutual support for our systems of belief as a web. Perhaps we can even mix metaphors and think of the structure of our beliefs as a web of ropes or cables rather than a web of distinct fibers. In any case, we can imagine reweaving parts of such a web while the greater structure remains intact. With enough reweaving, it is possible to imagine that after a time the entire web no longer has any of the same fibers as it did before. It could in principle be completely rewoven without needing a “doubt everything” clearing away of all past knowledge; yet, at no time would the majority of beliefs in the web have gone unsupported by other strands. Our existing beliefs are all the foundation we need to extend and improve our webs of belief without any limits on the degree to which our beliefs could be improved.

While cables, ropes, and webs are excellent antidotes to chains and the myth of core beliefs, my favorite antidote to foundationalism—the thought that we need a rock solid foundation to claim any knowledge which often takes the form of a Platonic essence—is Neurath’s boat. While Descartes modeled his philosophical method on mathematics, following Peirce, Otto Neurath also took science to be the proper model for philosophical thinking. As Quine explained, rather than clearing away all but a single bedrock belief or two upon which to build a system of thought,

"Neurath has likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it. The philosopher and the scientist are in the same boat. Our boat stays afloat because at each alteration we keep the bulk of it intact as a going concern."

It doesn’t merely stay afloat. In fact, as contemporary philosopher of religion and self-described pragmatist Jefferey Stout put it, Neurath’s boat

“can travel the open seas, trade with foreign places, and send parties in search of virgin timber. Its crew can take unimagined treasures on board, plunder shipwrecks for usable gear, and invent an engine to pull weight once pulled by oar.”

Presumably at that point, we could ditch the oars. Note that there is no analogue to doing so in the chain metaphor. Every link is integral to a line of reasoning, whereas in attaining greater understanding of, say, the atom, it may be useful at some point in our educations to think of it as a round particle and later to drop that notion in favor of the Rutherford-Bohr “planetary” model, later a cloud model, and later still some better not yet imagined conception that we perhaps could have never created without such scaffolding. What this ship cannot do is sail into dry dock for a complete overhaul. In Neurath’s words,

"We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction."

Just as the web of beliefs can be rewoven, the ship can be rebuilt, but we can only do it from aboard the ship. Such is the human condition. This rebuilding is the process of criticizing and revising our beliefs. While we can’t call all of our beliefs into question at once—where would we stand to do that?—there is no belief we have that cannot be subjected to such criticism. The complete overhaul (question everything!) of knowledge that Descartes wanted to do is not possible in this analogy, and it isn’t possible in practice either. Though many people hoped at one time that all our knowledge could be erected as a tower on top of solid ground, such a model does not agree with how knowledge functions in practice. And just what is it, a pragmatist wonders, that we wanted to be able to do in that tower that can’t be done in Neurath’s boat?

Peirce’s Cable, Quine’s Web, and Neurath’s Boat are metaphors better suited to how knowledge acquisition functions than are Descartes’ foundation and chain metaphors. The position that Descartes imagined himself to be in deducing his existence was never the position we were actually in. We always already have beliefs. What we need to do is decide which ones to keep, which ones to drop, which ones to change, and which ones to add in an ongoing process that seems very little indeed like clearing a plot of land to erect a building from the ground up. There is no single belief such that if it needed to be updated in light of new experience it would cause the entire tower of knowledge to collapse. The reweaving of a web or the repairs and alterations on a boat while at sea seem much more to the point.

Schema Theory and The Copy View

The following is a short pragmatic take on the history of Western philosophy with regard to mind conceived of as a mirror of nature.

The Copy View
The “copy view” is the position that perception, memory, and other functions of mind are matters of finding or making mental models in the form of internal subjective replicas of external objective reality. Cognition then is the process of using these structures to draw conclusions. Knowledge in this view is having mental structures that are accurate reflections of reality. The copy view differs from other hypotheses about mental structures such as scripts, categories, and schemata in that it goes further in not merely asserting the utility of abstract notions of organizational frameworks but also holding that these representational structures have the same sort of structure of the objective reality they represent. In the copy view, the concept “automobile” is a mental version of a physical automobile where attributes of the mental copy can be matched up with attributes of the objective automobile in a one-to-one correspondence.

Platonism
The copy view of mind has roots going back at least to Plato. In the Platonic view we have knowledge if our forms (categories, concepts, schemes) are the ideal forms. We have true knowledge of “automobile” if our mental version of automobile is the ideal automobile.  In the Platonic view, even numbers share in the essence Duality, and a sick person is participating in the essence Fever. A golden retriever we encounter on the street is just a shadow on the wall of Plato’s Cave cast by the ideal essence of Dogness which is more real than any individual dog.

These ideal forms are educed (brought out from within) through proper education rather than induced (imposed from without). The ideal forms are innate. Plato thought that they are already possessed and can be demonstrated to be so by educing them through Socratic questioning.

Today we deride his tendency to treat abstract constructs as concrete entities with independent existence as “reification.” While the notion of ideal forms sounds pretty nutty today, the Platonic view of knowledge lives on to the extent we formulate mind in terms of subjective mental copies of objective phenomena. (And though we don’t generally reify Duality, or Fever, or Dogness, many people still reify some concepts as in the Christian’s maxim “Jesus is the Truth, the Life, and the Way.”)

Rationalism
Both the Rationalists and Empiricists tacitly accepted the copy view but had different ideas about how we generate conclusions from these mental copies.

The Rationalists (such as Descartes) thought that we have an innate faculty called Reason (a Platonic essence) which we can access to make proper conclusions. In fact, he thought we could generate knowledge through thinking alone (as in his deduction and subsequent momentous pronouncement that he exists, e.g. cogito ergo sum).

Empiricism
The empiricists (notably Locke and Hume) denied that there is knowledge independent of experience. They asserted that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. The is no faculty of Reason (actually, I think for Locke there was, but for the later more thorough-going empiricist Hume, no) or any knowledge whatsoever that is there in the mind until it is gained through interaction with the world. For empiricists, all knowledge comes from experience, and what we experience are our sensory perceptions. We accumulate mental copies and learn associations between them. (Thorndike was in the empiricist tradition as an associationist. Skinner does not seem to take the copy view and did not hypothesize abstract mental structures of any kind for knowledge).

Empiricists and Rationalists are historically in agreement about the premise of mental structures and knowledge as fundamentally representational in nature—the copy view. The disagreements were about whether or not there is non-experiential knowledge and whether reason is an innate faculty.

The Kantian Synthesis
Enter Kant to try to resolve the impasse between Rationalists and Empiricists. Kant thought that the empiricists had made valid criticisms of the rationalist view (such as through Hume’s thought experiment of a baby deprived of all sensations until its 18th year. It seems reasonable to think that this 18 year old would not possess any knowledge whatsoever.) But Kant thought the empiricist’s view was inadequate since there must be some mechanism prior to experience to give structure to perceptions. Otherwise no one could ever identify an object as the same object under different lighting conditions or different angles of view as sensory perceptions are never exactly the same and always in flux. Kant famously summarized, "Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind."

Unlike the empiricists, Kant didn’t think reality was directly knowable through the senses because our language and senses amount to a sort of lens which intervenes between a mental “eye” and its object. (Such ocular metaphor’s for knowledge--to “see” is to know, beliefs are “views,” memories are reviewed by “the mind’s eye,”  new understanding is “insight”--are typical of the copy view and are deeply embedded in our language.) Because of the filtering properties of the “lens,” we can’t know if our copies are accurate.

Kant agreed with the empiricists that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses but made an exception for what was already in the mind from the very beginning--not any knowledge or any built-in faculty of reason but rather a system that creates structure to our experiences. He struck middle ground by proposing that certain concepts or categories (certain schemes or schemata in our terms) such as for quantity, time, and causality are innate.

Piaget can be thought of as having proven Kant wrong to some degree by showing that the schemes Kant wrote about are actually developed over time rather than in-born.

Note that the schemes or categories for Kant and Piaget are not mental copies of reality but rather more abstract mental structures; however, the copy view persisted for Kantians with regard to true beliefs and accurate memories. Kant left us with the problem of being hopelessly out of touch with reality since in the Kantian picture, our senses always intervene between the mind and what it perceives and our languages impose categories on thought and limits on what thoughts are thinkable.

We don’t have a way to directly compare a belief to reality to see if it properly represents it, since in the Kantian view, reality is only indirectly accessible to mind. Only the representations (categories, schemes) of reality rather than reality itself are directly known.  Note the parallel to the Platonic problem of living in a world of shadows. 

Pragmatism
The pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey) got us around the Platonic appearance-reality quandary by questioning whether beliefs are best thought of as representations of reality. With the benefit of the Darwinian perspective, they saw language use and rational thought in general as evolving to cope with reality rather than evolving to represent reality.

There is no evolutionary reason why the structure of thought would need to be fundamentally representational to be useful for helping us get what we want, so it is doubtful that the “copy view” captures anything fundamental about cognition.  

While there may be some mental activity best imagined as a matter of making copies, the accuracy of copying is only of secondary importance to utility. In general, thinking is a sort of tool use, and tools don’t need to copy reality to be useful. The relevant test of a hammer is whether it drives nails, not whether it correctly copies reality. So it is with the human tools we call language and rational thought where the relevant test is the ability to coordinate human behavior to meet our various desires and needs.

Schema Theory and The Copy View
Like copies, schemata are mental structures, but their organization is more abstract. The “automobile” concept is not though of as aimed at a Platonic ideal form but a malleable framework of abstract structures. In the schema view, mind is a structure of structures as well as the on-going processes of structuring and restructuring.

In schema theory, memory is not a matter of re-presenting a stored mental copy to the mind’s eye. Memory retrieval is a process of construction.

Epistemological Metaphors Part I

In a 2007 debate between Richard Dawkins and Oxford colleague John Lennox, Lennox espoused the view that atheists can be moral but that only believers can have a foundation for morality. Atheists can of course be good, in Lennox’s view, but only a theist can tell us why we ought to be good by appealing to a metaphysical foundation for moral beliefs. In fact, a good atheist, it is claimed, can only be good because of tacitly smuggling in theistic foundational beliefs without acknowledging them as such. Likewise, the Christian notion that Jesus is Truth itself is often put forth as a necessary foundation for scientific beliefs as well. Scientism also includes such a premise that all knowledge needs to rest on something unshakable and that this view spells the doom of scientism. Under scientism, the scientific method is put forth as an alternative foundation to counter the likes of Lennox. As explained previously and as Lennox might be quick to point out, since the scientific method itself cannot be verified through the scientific method, scientism fails to serve as the sort of foundation to compete with the Christian one that Lennox claims. However, Plato's Euthyphro Dilemma preemptively demonstrated that the Christian moral foundation has the same problem of not being able to support its own weight. 

Atheists frequently also buy into the view that in order to make knowledge claims both ethical and factual, we need to reject pragmatism in favor of realism and the correspondence theory of truth. Consider for example Sam Harris's desire to find a way to say “that stoning women for adultery is really wrong, in some absolute sense.”  He seems to be demanding the sort of foundation for knowledge that Lennox says atheists are lacking. But do we need to accept the premise that we need to always think of knowledge in terms of architecture? Granted, if we do, then it indeed seems that a failure to find some bedrock on which to construct our tower of knowledge puts our whole belief structure at risk. Our tower of knowledge--the set of all our other beliefs when thought of as derived from foundational beliefs--would be no more secure than the foundational beliefs upon which all our other beliefs rest. But is knowledge construction, as the foundation metaphor suggests, really all that much like building a tower from the ground up? 

Skepticism 

The foundation metaphor for knowledge hearkens back to the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes, who set a standard for knowledge as only that which is “based on a reason so strong that it can never be shaken by any stronger reason.” He distinguished knowledge from mere conviction, the state of being persuaded where there “remains some reason which might lead us to doubt.” Knowledge then must be rooted in beliefs that we simply cannot doubt.

    

Generations of philosophers followed Descartes in thinking that beliefs must be founded on unassailable first principles before we ought to be comfortable in claiming to know anything. That imperative and the fact that no such principles seem readily available have left many of us feeling very uncomfortable indeed since we can find few beliefs if any that cannot ever be doubted. This discomfort is what Richard Bernstein called “Cartesian anxiety” (a term we saw earlier). In spite of all the broad success we have had in coordinating our behavior through language use to get what we want and in disregard of our ever-increasing ability to meet our needs and improve our lives through the use of our beliefs and reasoning, Cartesian thinking still leaves many of us fearing that perhaps we still don’t actually know anything at all. We could all be bodies fooled into thinking that they are having experiences that are really just part of a simulation as in the movie The Matrix.

    

Does Descartes himself who taught us to demand such a foundation for our knowledge even meet his own demand? Consider Descartes’ thought experiment from his Second Meditation:

“I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”

And there you have it. Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. With his apparent uncanny knack for skepticism, it seems Descartes could perform the impressive feat of doubting even the existence of his own body, but he could not, alas, doubt that he thinks. Upon this indubitable foundational belief, Descartes carefully deduced that he must in fact exist. He then “proved” the existence of God (not worth going into) and went on to reason his way to knowledge that he has a body without merely accepting at face value the reports of his possibly unreliable senses. (His argument hinged on the fact that a benevolent God would not have given him senses that were completely unreliable.) As must be obvious, it didn’t take long for philosophers to find ways to doubt the premises and chains of reasoning that Descartes had claimed were indubitable. 

What remained long after Descartes—that which warrants his designation as the father of modern philosophy—was not an edifice of beliefs we could thereafter claim as true knowledge having met the demand for solid reason resting upon an indubitable foundation. Philosophers have been able to find fault with  Descartes’ “basis on which it seems to me that all human certainty can be founded.” What remained, instead of any specific claims to knowledge, was his systematic way of doing philosophy and the belief that we really must have such an unassailable foundation to be able to claim knowledge.

    

Sam Harris was afraid that if we all became pragmatists it would be “a recipe for End of Days chaos,” because we would all then lose the conviction that we can know anything—“about anything,” he emphasized in the throes of a particularly dramatic case of Cartesian anxiety.  Harris fears that we would all have to be extreme skeptics if we were all pragmatists. I find that claim ironic because pragmatism actually began with anti-skepticism—with C. S. Peirce’s essay “The Fixation of Belief” where he pointed a way out of this Cartesian skepticism.

    

Peirce noted Descartes’ method, doubt everything!, is not something we can ever do. Though Descartes is to be admired for questioning and defending his basic assumptions rather than taking too much for granted as so many of his predecessors had done, we can get along without the radical skeptic. We can only hold beliefs in doubt with respect to beliefs to which we remain committed. There is simply no way to follow the philosopher’s dictum, “doubt everything,” and one wonders how Descartes ever convinced himself that he had done it.

    

In Peirce’s account of inquiry, there is “real doubt,” which is the irritation that moves us to inquiry, and then there is Cartesian “fake doubt,” which need not and cannot be satisfied because it doesn’t arise out of any real dissatisfaction. The aim of inquiry is always to satisfy our real doubts rather than to achieve the perfect certainty of indubitable beliefs. Peirce was convinced that inquiry has as its aim the satisfaction of doubt because when this irritation is satisfied through the course of inquiry, inquiry ceases.

   

If inquiry is concerned with satisfying the doubts we actually have, rather than being concerned with resting on a position that simply could never be doubted, then our position is very different from the one Descartes imagined in his thought experiment. We are justified in claiming knowledge when we have considered the available evidence, arguments, and counter-arguments yet have no real doubts rather than only when we are in a position to say that our beliefs could never be doubted. All beliefs can, in principle, be doubted. What we claim to know is what we have good reason to believe and have no good reason to doubt; yet all of our beliefs can be held in doubt, and any one of our particular beliefs may in fact turn out to be false. That doesn’t mean that we can never have good reason to think that our beliefs are true. Science, for example, is quite comfortable with Peirce’s notion of fallibility—that we could be wrong. The fact that scientists are willing to hold any belief in doubt if only for the sake of argument is part of what makes science so successful at finding new and better beliefs and correcting false beliefs. At least some of our beliefs are almost certainly false, but given our broad success in life, we just can’t be as wrong about the majority of them as a Cartesian worrywart might fear.

Freedom and Truth: Education as Liberal and Conservative

Socrates reportedly thought of himself as a midwife whose role was to elicit from the subject something preexisting deep within himself which had previously been lying dormant. The Socratic method was that of feigning ignorance while asking questions leading the subject to come to a predetermined conclusion on his own. Learning in this model is remembering. When the subject learns, it is because he got himself into proper relation to what was there all along--such essences as Reason (seen as an innate human faculty of drawing proper conclusions from true statements) and Truth (the essence to which all true statements point) must be brought out from within. Knowledge in the Platonic conception is discovered rather than created, found not made. When we refer to the field of study concerned with teaching and learning as “education,” we are using a term rooted in a Socratic view of teaching as “educing”--bringing out what was latent.

In his essay “Education as Socialization and as Individualization” (1989), Richard Rorty contrasted liberal education as a matter of educing against a conservative view of education as a matter of inducing. In the liberal perspective (and in a Rortian slogan), if we take care of freedom, truth will take care of itself. For conservatives on the other hand (and based on a far more famous slogan), the truth will set you free. Rorty explains the conservative theory as follows:

“Once such obstacles as the passions or sin are overcome, the natural light of reason will guide us to the truth. Deep within our souls there is a spark that the right sort of education can fan into flame. Once the soul is afire with love of truth, freedom will follow--for freedom consists of one’s capacity to be rational.”

Both sides accept the Platonic premise about our epistemic situation where learning is understood as getting into the proper relation to the latent faculty of Reason viewed as the natural light by which we recognize Truth conceived as ready-made and discoverable, found not made. The distinction between liberal and conservative approaches to education then can be made by determining the view of the relationship between freedom and truth implied or explicated in the approach. Is truth the way to freedom, or is freedom the way to truth?

Rorty explained the political divide on the education front as follows:

“When people on the political right talk about education, they immediately start talking about truth. Typically, they enumerate what they take to be familiar and self-evident truths and regret that these are no longer being inculcated in the young.”

On the other hand,

“When people on the political left talk about education, they talk first about freedom. The left typically views the old familiar truths cherished by the right as a crust of convention that needs to be broken through, vestiges of old-fashioned modes of thought from which the new generation should be freed.”

Instead of becoming free of our base desires and sinful natures through being educated in important time-tested truths, lefties think we need to first be freed from oppressive social conventions of the past so the light of truth can be revealed. The radical liberal view of education as educing is the process of removing the social claptrap imposing on our true selves to uncover the Truth that was always there. We can see such a radical liberal perspective in the thinking of Nietzsche and Rousseau for whom society was a corrupting influence, and the conservative view that students today are not accumulating beliefs in the right collection of true statements in the work of E. D. Hirsch.

Such an analysis reveals John Dewey’s progressive movement and the Piagetian constructivists as getting around the traditional dispute between liberal and conservative approaches to education by denying the metaphysical premise upon which both approaches are based. Truth is not a thing to be discovered. Knowledge is a construct. It is made rather than found but not out of thin air. Education in a more modest liberal view is seen neither as a matter of inducing or educing but of active engagement with the world. Education is not a matter of conservative social control, though education has the perpetuation of society as one of its aims, and it is not a matter of freeing humans from the chains of society as the radical liberal sees it, though it has the function of preparing us to critique and improve society. It is part of the developmental process of making an animal into a human being.

As for freedom and truth, I agree with Rorty and the liberals who say that if you take care of freedom, truth will take care of itself, but Rorty breaks from the radical left's perspective on education in specifying that the freedom we need to take care of is economic, social, and political rather than letting eight-year-olds decide what they feel like learning.

Pavlov...Pavlov...hmmm...Nope, Doesn’t Ring a Bell

Obviously it would be unreasonable to think that the explanation for the dog’s drooling in Pavlov’s experiments is because the dog wanted to mess with Pavlov, but note that the explanation suggested in the comic is entirely consistent with the data generated through observation of the dog’s behavior. Such a conclusion (which would be absurd in the case of dogs but plausible in the case of humans) is ruled out by the behaviorists based on their own a priori assumptions rather than by the data. Though the assumption is valid in the case of Pavlov’s dogs, it functions in the experiment as an unacknowledged unobservable which undermines Skinner’s claims to  “radical” behaviorism. Skinner’s behavioristic rejection of theorizing about unobservable mechanisms is nevertheless revealed to be a theory founded on an unobservable mechanism. The behaviorist believes that external stimulus rather than such processes causally explain the results of her experiment, but as Hume pointed out, causality is never directly observed. We observe the bell ringing, and then we observe the dog drooling, but we never observe the bell causing the dog to drool. To make the causal leap the experimenter has to bring into the picture some theory that cannot logically be accounted for by observation of behavior alone. The leap can only be made by appealing to the experimenter’s own unobservable mental construct of the concept of causality.

Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism Part II

(Comic by Craig Swanson)

Instead of making assertions about the primacy of the mind or the environment as the correct level of description and the proper basis for psychology to rise to the stature of a science as the behaviorists and cognitivists assert, the Deweyan pragmatist can see no non-question begging argument for holding one sort of description as more fundamental than any other sort of description. Since we think that phenomena never exhaust description, we pragmatists can agree with the behavorists that all psychological phenomena can have a behavioral description and with the cognitivists that all psychological phenomena can have a cognitive description as well. Where pragmatists part company with both schools of thought (if cognitivists are “purists” in the way Skinner was) is with the insistence that phenomena only ever ought to be described with a particular set of terms.

In “What Ever Happened to Psychology as the Science of Behavior?” (1987), B. F. Skinner addressed some common objections to a purely behavoristic approach to psychology. Among them were those made by members of the “helping professions” such as psychotherapists and, presumably, teachers. Skinner writes,

“Psychotherapists must talk with their clients and, with rare exceptions, do so in everyday English, which is heavy laden with references to internal causes--‘I ate because I was hungry,’ ‘I could do it because I knew how to do it,’ and so on.”

Skinner argues that though such language may be necessary in certain contexts, nevertheless  “private states are almost always poorly correlated with the public evidence.” More precise and “accurate” descriptions in terms of behaviors in response to external stimuli are necessary to give a scientific account of why people do what they do. Skinner believes that references to internal states and private events are “often accurate enough to be useful,” but he implies that there are nevertheless not the correct way of describing, say, why someone eats. Whether or not one eats depends on “a history of deprivation” rather than upon feeling hungry. He insists that while explanations of behavior in terms of states of mind may have value in certain practical settings, when it comes to theory making, psychologists ought to adhere to vocabulary fitting his observable stimulus-response scheme.  

Skinner is convincing on the count that there ought to be a science of behavior, and he makes important critiques on psychology as a science of the mind, but why can’t there be separate and parallel pursuits in cognitive psychology and in behavioral psychology? Why must we think of one sort of description as the deep truth while the other sort is merely useful for certain practices? Consider that as the physical sciences developed, they split into parallel pursuits of understanding in terms of physics and chemistry which are themselves often split further for distinguishing study on describing phenomena on the quantum, atomic, molecular, and bio-molecular levels among others. No particular level of description ought to be regarded as the “correct” level of description. All descriptions are practical in that they are made for pursuit of certain human purposes. Theory only ever has meaning because of its relation to practice.

Skinner notes that “it has been a long time since anyone challenged a physicist who said, ‘That desk is made of solid oak,’ by protesting, ‘But I thought you said that matter was mostly empty space.’” He grasps that both descriptions are true and that the truth of contradictory descriptions of the table as simultaneously “empty” and “solid” depend on the level of description most useful in the given context. However, I sense that in Skinner’s view the physicist’s description is somehow thought to be more true and getting at a deeper reality than that of the carpenter. There is a “physics envy” common among social scientists at play here.

The pragmatist’s therapy for physics envy is their assertion that there are no privileged perspectives. While some perspectives are better than others in definable ways and for particular purposes, there is no such thing as a perspectiveless perspective or a View From Nowhere. The physicist is no more than the carpenter offering us a God’s-Eye-View that is adequate to the true essence of tableness. Descriptions ought not be thought of as adequate to essences but rather adequate to human purposes and on an epistemological par. What Dewey called “the nest and brood of Greek dualisms” is revealed as responsible for the impasse between behavorists and cognitivists. This is true for at least those behavorists and cognitivists who are “purists” in an insistence that there is one and only one correct basis for psychology to proceed if it is to be regarded as a science.

The way to get past the impasse is to learn from Dewey how to proceed in life without metaphysics--the ancient notion that there is a Way Things Really Are which is independent of human purposes to which we have a duty to conform. In his implication that one description of the table is more in touch with the true essence of the table while the other is merely a figure of speech, he is invoking something “out there” which is unobservable which is no better than the “in here” unobservables that he was so skilled at calling into question. He is insisting that humans have a duty to something not themselves--that human purposes are subordinate to another purpose, a Platonic notion of Truth.

Skinner is right to think that saying the table is made of “solid oak” is a figure of speech; however, the physicist’s description of the table as mostly empty space is also figure of speech. What else could a description be? Verbally contradictory accounts of the table as “solid” and also as “empty” are both true depending on the use to which they are put, and neither one shares any more than the other in the unobservable essence of Truth. Pragmatists hope to get us to stop thinking that there is something that the table really is beyond all appearances by getting us to stop thinking in terms of the Greek appearance-reality dualism. Instead of spending his time arguing that behavorism is the single correct mode of psychological research, a more pragmatic and more radical behaviorist would have made his case by demonstrating the success that a behavoristic methodology has already had in making like better. Rather than spend his final years demanding that we all acknowledge that behavoristic psychology is what psychology really is and that we hold those who have found it fruitful to use other vocabulary as having failed to provide an account of the intrinsic nature of a psychological phenomenon, Skinner would have been more true to behaviorism is he had argued that behaviorism is one way of doing psychology that has born some interesting results and shows a lot of promise for the future as he did much earlier in his career when he sketched his utopian vision in Walden Two. If Skinner had only been more true to his hope for psychology to eschew the unobservable, if he had only been even more radical in his behaviorism, he would have made a better case for a science of behavior.

Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism Part I

B. F. Skinner’s radical behaviorism was intended as a broader rather than a more narrow conception of behaviorism than that of his predecessor John B. Watson. In that sense it was radical in the way that William James’s radical empiricism was radical. John Dewey was convinced by James that the sense data empiricism of Locke and Hume was insufficiently empirical. British empiricism excluded certain experiences such as our own thoughts and feelings, but James objected that thoughts and feelings where excluded on metaphysical grounds rather than on empirical grounds. They were rejected due to ideas taken for granted about the fundamental ordering of reality into the dualistic picture of subjects and objects. A thorough-going empirical approach to the question (an approach that takes experience as primary as empiricists claim to do) would hold such ideas about the primary division of reality into metaphysical categories themselves as answerable to experience rather than the other way around.

Similarly, the behaviorism of Watson was not as thoroughly behavioristic as Skinner’s. Skinner’s behaviorism was radical in including more phenomena as counting as behavior than behaviorists like John B. Watson were willing to allow. For Skinner, anything that an organism does counts as behavior including thinking and feeling. Internal events are valid primary phenomena in Skinner’s view while they were considered to be mere secondary effects (epiphenomena) by Watson.

While Skinner’s radical behaviorism encompassed a larger collection of phenomena as behaviors than Watson’s behaviorism, what unites Skinner and Watson as behaviorists and distinguishes them from cognitivists is that they both wanted to exclude from psychology explanations that depend on such terms as interpretation, representation, intentions, desires, memories, and beliefs. They wanted psychology to be a science of behavior rather than a science of the mind. Though they differed on whether thinking and feeling are behaviors, both Watson and Skinner were behaviorists in the strong sense that they believed that behavior ought to always be explained by environmental stimuli rather than by non-behavioral internal states. Since in Skinner’s view thinking and feeling are behaviors, then explanations of behavior that rely on appeals to such mental states are circular explanations. To explain behavior in a non-circular way, Skinner argues, we have to explain it in terms of something that is not behavior, i.e., the organism’s environment.

One might expect that Dewey as a pragmatist would be fairly sympathetic to this view since he and William James followed C. S. Peirce’s suggestion

“that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up by the application of the following maxim for attaining clearness of apprehension: consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

Likewise, James frequently talked about ideas in terms of their “cash value” and recommended understanding the meaning of a belief by explicating the particular ways the idea if believed would play itself out in everyday experience. Richard Rorty even claimed to hold to “epistemological behaviorism” in describing his philosophical views on theories of knowledge.

It may seem that the pragmatists are taking a behavioristic approach by excluding talk about a Cartesian self from consideration while emphasizing external action. Perhaps it seems that, like Skinner, the pragmatists also wanted to forbid “appeal to something inside a person to explain what a person does.” On the contrary, the pragmatists were doing something more subtle than endorsing behaviorism. They were pointing out the contingency of the underlying presupposition of a metaphysical dichotomy between Inner and Outer that behaviorism and cognitivism both take for granted. The dispute between behaviorists and cognitivists from the pragmatist’s perspective is one more consequence of what Dewey called “that whole nest and brood of Greek dualisms” that we’ve inherited in the Western philosophical tradition--the set of assumptions about reality that we now too often take as simply given. Both cognitivists and behaviorists seem to accept that reality cleaves neatly along a division between subjects and objects, mind and environment, “in here” and “out there” as though such categorizations were not the consequence of a particular way of thinking about reality but rather the way reality is regardless of what anyone thinks about it.

Rather than endorsing the behaviorist’s view, Peirce’s maxim was aimed at dissolving such metaphysical disputes as those between the idealists and the realists. Questions like, “if a tree falls in the middle of the woods and no one is around to hear it...” are revealed as merely philosophical in the pejorative sense of the term once we demand that a difference in opinion on such a matter must be able to make a difference in lived experience to be worth discussing. This was no demand for conformity to reality as it truly is but instead an endorsement of the view that no particular perspective on reality is the final say on reality. By getting us to think of beliefs as “habits of action,” Peirce and the other pragmatists were not arguing that habits of action are what beliefs really are (as the behaviorists do). He wasn’t saying as Watson did that mind does not exist. He was not taking a metaphysical position on anything let alone the existence of the mind. Instead he was questioning the wisdom of taking metaphysical positions in general.

I will argue in the next post that Skinner should been even more radical in his behaviorism specifically in his rejection of the unobservable from theory. We will see that Skinner's demand for us to see behaviorism as a description of the way things really are rather than as a good methodology for certain sorts of inquiry amounts to a tacit endorsement of appeal to something unobservable.