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.