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.