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.