I have appreciated your posts and the attention that you have put into them. Your critical points have helped me considerably to define my position and refine my articles.I must comment, however, on your use of materials. Early in our exchanges you have explored (and ostensibly learned about) behaviorism through the writings of Kahn (post 2814), Dennett (2923), even Ridley quoting Scott (ibid.). Now we have Stevenson & Haberman interpreting Skinner. I would suggest some contact with primary materials. Learn about behaviorism by reading Skinner; draw your own conclusions* (if only to discover that yours are firm)...
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Stevenson & Haberman quote Skinner: "The objection to inner states is not that they do not exist, but that they are not relevant in a functional analysis" (p.35 [of Science and Human Behavior]). What are they referring to? Let us look at the original text, right before the passage they selected:
[W]hen an example of maladjusted behavior is explained by saying that the individual is 'suffering from anxiety,' we have still to be told the cause of the anxiety. But the external conditions which are then invoked could have been directly related to the maladjusted behavior. Again, when we are told that a man stole a loaf of bread because 'he was hungry,' we have still to learn of the external conditions responsible for the hunger. These conditions would have sufficed to explain the theft.(1)
Stevenson & Haberman put Skinner into the position of the logical positivist. (But we don't want people with alleged scientific credentials telling us that people are anxious because they are maladjusted, nor maladjusted because they are anxious; we don't want to hide environmental problems within people...) Not surprisingly, they omit quotes such as this:
A behavioristic analysis does not question the practical usefulness of reports of the inner world that is felt and introspectively observed. They are clues (1) to past behavior and the conditions affecting it, (2) to current behavior and the conditions affecting it, and (3) to conditions related to further behavior. Nevertheless, the private world within the skin is not clearly observed or known...As a result, there is room for speculation, which over the centuries has shown the most extraordinary diversity.(2)
_______________: Still and yet, I'm interested in the "middleman". Now it is understandable that Skinner's stringent scientific methodology eschews any possible consideration of 'mental states' that aren't amenable to direct experimental data collecting. But this does not mean that science cannot use unobservable entities (for example, memory) to explain psychological data. There are many scientific postulates utilizing theory to explain physical data. Magnetic fields and sub-atomic particles are examples.
I think you have conflated invisible (yet verifiable) entities with unobservable (and unverifiable) entities.** Magnetic fields and sub-atomic particles can be confirmed by direct data taking; it's 'inner states' and especially 'human nature' that cannot. What is 'human nature'? Again, Skinner:
What a person is really like could mean what he would have been like if we could have seen him before his behavior was subjected to the action of the environment. We should then have known his 'human nature.' But genetic endowment is nothing until it has been exposed to the environment, and the exposure immediately changes it.(3)
However, I know a better definition of 'human nature':
Genetically determined behavior is what does not have to be learned.(4)
Simply put, everything that a human must learn (from day one of birth, and on) is in the province of the (social and physical) environment---even the descriptions of internal events that must be first taught to individuals before and they can express them. This is true of all 'inner states':
We can teach a child to name an object, for example, by presenting or pointing to the object, pronouncing its name, and reinforcing a similar response by the child, but we cannot do that with a bodily state. We cannot present or point to a pain, for example. Instead, we infer the presence of the pain from some public accompaniment. We may see the child take a hard fall, for example, and say, 'That must have hurt,' or we see a child wince and ask, 'Does something hurt?' We can respond only to the blow or the wince, but the child also feels a private stimulus and may say 'hurt' when it occurs again without a private accompaniment. Since public and private events seldom coincide exactly, words for feelings have never been taught as successfully as words for objects. Perhaps that is why philosophers and psychologists so seldom agree when talking about feelings and states of mind, and why there is no acceptable science of feeling.(5)
Consciousness---your 'middleman'---is a social product.
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Wittgenstein quotes.
: I'm not sure what is meant here. It seems to me that the only important thing is the
perception of realizable choice. Constraints placed on "choice" by gravity, for instance, are less likely to produce distress than certain constraints placed by 'bosses' on 'workers', or any of the social interplay of hierarchical and dominance arrangements where choice is inhibited by socially determined 'rules'.
Behaviorism has never denied that people make choices, it simply points out that people often do not decide the choices that they choose from. Wittgenstein stated that our choosing is ours, not our choices; to not know this increases our sense of liberty, but does not necessarily increase our liberty. Behaviorism wishes to account for the many complicated environmental histories of each individual in order to understand how choices are made---and, with this valuable knowledge, to alter some of them (short-term, individual) that prevent others (long-term, collective) from being considered...
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: : "If the central premise of behaviorism---that all human behavior can, and someday
will, be accounted for by a thorough analysis of environmental variables---is incorrect,
then it can be adduced that humans can---and should be held accountable for their
actions."
: : "If people are accountable for their actions (because the social environment has no or minimal impact), then, conceivably, all social services (such as job training, aid to
mothers with dependent children, etc.) are pointless and should be discontinued."
: This seems overly absolutist.
Perhaps I do not understand you, but that was the point I was trying to make about current ideology which enlists 'human nature' to substantiate current laissez-faire policies...
: One author writing of even such a biological determinist as Lorenz observes: 'To explain our behavior causally does not necessarily take away from our "dignity" or "value," nor does it show us not to be free, for any increase in our knowledge of our own nature increase our power to control ourselves.'
That is actually the concluding premise of Beyond Freedom and Dignity, only our ability to alter social contingencies is far more accessible than genetic contingencies (thus far).
: It is one thing to posit that ideologues will use "theories" (or parts of theories) to justify
political positions - that does not have bearing on a theories validity.
That is true. But speculative internal agents such as a 'nature of aggression' or a 'nature of cooperation' continue to engender speculation because scientific accounts are excluded. While behaviorism is a young (even incomplete) science, speculation is no science at all...
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: Ahh... knocking Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device again. And to compare it to
Creationism! Now That's hyperbole! I really fail to see how the possible existence of such a "device" (unlike organized religion) would have any bearing on social, political, or normative behavior except through some torturous 'slippery slope' argument, (complete with fabricated assumptions) leading to philosophic 'mentalism' which I'm pretty sure Chomsky would deny in any case.
I'm sure he would deny it, too---and because his stance is so speculative, so interpretive, he can pretty well say anything he wants without contradiction. Like religion, his L.A.D. can be 'proved' (only) because one cannot disprove it. Its 'bearing on social, political, or normative behavior' is simply the addition of one more argument for 'human nature.' Consider:
The autonomous is the uncaused, and the uncaused is the miraculous, and the miraculous is God. For the second time in little more than a century a theory of selection by consequences is threatening a traditional belief in a creative mind. And is it not rather strange that although we have abandoned the belief with respect to the creation of the world, we fight so desperately to preserve it with respect to the creation of a poem [or, in Chomsky's case, grammar]?(6)
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_______________Belief Engine.
Nothing here, as far as I can tell, is '"outside" Skinner's frame of reference.'
: 1. The learning unit - "is the key to understanding the belief engine. It is tied to the physical architecture of the brain and nervous system; and by its very nature, we are condemned to a virtually automatic process of magical thinking. "Magical thinking" is the interpreting of two closely occurring events as though one caused the other, without any concern for the causal link."
Magical thinking is not automatic; it arises from incongruous contingencies. The contingencies are 'magical,' not the thinking.
Skinner:
Coincidence is the heart of operant conditioning. A response is strengthened by certain kinds of consequences, but not necessarily because they are actually produced by it. Indeed, it is quite unlikely that a behavioral process could have evolved which took into account the manner in which a response produces an effect.(7)
: 2. The Critical-Thinking Unit
Ditto (restates points one).
: 3. The yearning unit - Contending that we are not simply passive receivers of information, but that we "...actively seek out information to satisfy our many needs. We may yearn to find meaning in life. We may yearn for a sense of identity. We may yearn for recovery from a disease...Often beliefs that might be categorized as irrational by scientists are the most efficient at reducing these yearnings..."
This is operant conditioning. (1) The situation in which behavior and setting meet, (2) the behavior that occurs, and (3) the consequences of the behavior that, in the future, will determine the probability of whether (or not) behavior again occurs (or doesn't). 'Yearning' is simply a collateral product of that probability...
: 4. The input unit - Wherein our "perceptual apparatus" selects and organizes input to form patterns that "make sense". We are a very good pattern making animal.
Stimulus discrimination. However, the patterns are not in the organism, they are in the contingencies. Our past histories of reinforcement determine what contingencies we 'pay attention to' and which ones we neglect...
: 5. The emotional response unit - Experiences accompanied by strong emotion are likely to leave strong impressions, often influencing the very perception and memory of events.
Emotions are the collateral products of exposure to reinforcement (and reinforcement schedules) and (especially) the extinction of behavior previously used to achieve reinforcement. Therefore, 'emotional conditions alter the probability of a whole class of responses.'(8) Often, they can assist in predicting probability of response, although behaviorism strives to know this information sooner (through an analysis of reinforcement contingencies and schedules)...
: 6. Memory unit -
See **.
: 7. The Environmental Feedback Unit - "If we operate on the basis of a belief, and if it "works" for us, even though faulty, why would we be inclined to change it? Feedback from the external world reinforces or weakens our beliefs, but since the beliefs themselves influence how that feedback is perceived, beliefs can become very resistant to contrary information and experience."
Finally, we reach the 'belief engine.' The behavioral analysis of 'belief' is to be found in the schedules of reinforcement, not in the organism. Let us consider the variable-ratio schedule, the mechanism of all gambling systems. As Skinner put it:
The pathological gambler exemplifies the result. Like the pigeon with its five responses per second for many hours, he is the victim of an unpredictable contingency of reinforcement. The long-term net gain or loss is almost irrelevant in accounting for the effectiveness of this schedule.(9)
Also:
A dedicated person is one who remains active for long periods of time without reinforcement. He does so because...he has been exposed to a gradually lengthening variable-ratio schedule. At first, what he did 'paid off' quickly, but he then moved on to things less readily reinforced. It is perhaps presumptuous to compare a Faraday, Mozart, Rembrandt, or Tolstoy with a pigeon pecking a key or with a pathological gambler, but variable-ratio schedules are nevertheless conspicuous features of the biographies of scientists, composers, artists, and writers.(10)
I have probably stated behaviorism's case poorly, but I hope that I have at least shown that Alcock's thesis is not 'outside' the realm of behaviorism’s explanatory system. When he states that '[c]oncern for truth is a higher order acquired cognitive orientation that reflects an underlying philosophy...,' he is asserting that the contingencies in the social and physical environment have a 'philosophy,' only he makes such a presumption seem plausible by putting those contingencies inside each person (where we expect to find philosophies). Truth often is a matter of stimulus discrimination, but to say that such discriminations are made by people neglects the fact that people make these discriminations after they have a reason...
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The 'middleman' is an important quest. You have every reason to ponder, to explore, and to add to what we know about our 'inner states.' I believe that behaviorism can be of assistance in this quest. One does not wish to search for what is not there but rather for what is there (and there is much to discover). I sign off with these words from Wittgenstein in his quest:
[W]hen 'I raise my arm,' my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?'How do you know that you have raised your arm?'---'I feel it.' So what you recognize is the feeling? And are you certain that you recognize it right?---You are certain that you have raised your arm; isn't this the criterion, the measure, of the recognition?(11)
* This is especially pertinent to Chomsky. Chomsky's review of Verbal Behavior was 50 pages, the book itself some 500. As Richelle pointed out, 'Chomsky managed to persuade his readers that they could dispense with reading Skinner's book.'(Richelle, B.F. Skinner: A Reappraisal, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993, p. 114.)** Opponents of behaviorism have traditionally enlisted memory to refute behaviorism's account of inner states. Skinner has dispatched such 'problems' thus: 'When an organism exposed to a set of contingencies of reinforcement is modified by them and as a result behaves in a different way in the future, we do not need to say that it stores the contingencies. What is "stored" is a modified organism, not a record of the modifying variables [events remembered].' (Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969, p. 274.) Memory, of course, is the great Wittgensteinian theme and on many occasions he adopted a stance quite compatible to Skinner's:
Why should I deny that there is a mental process? But 'There has just taken place in me the mental process of remembering...' means nothing more than: 'I have just remembered...' To deny the mental process would mean to deny the remembering; to deny that anyone ever remembers anything... 'Are you not really a behaviorist in disguise? Aren't you at bottom really saying that everything except human behavior is a fiction?'---If I do speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction.
(Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, 1958, § § 306 and 307.) Recall his admonition that 'understanding is not a mental process' (Ibid., § 154); the same may be said of memory---that it is something that has happened to us (environmental contingencies have changed our responses to the environment), not something we 'have' in the sense that there is nothing else to explain behavior (although our 'consciousness,' such as memory, is a collateral product of our being altered by environmental contingencies---some of which prior behavior has set in motion).
Notes:
1. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (Macmillan, 1953), p. 45.
2. Skinner, About Behaviorism (Knopf, 1974), p. 31.
3. Ibid., p. 150.
4. MacCorquodale, 'On Chomsky's Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior,’ The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 13: 1, January 1970, p. 92.
5. Skinner, 'The Place of Feeling in the Analysis of Behavior,' Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior (Merrill, 1989), p. 4.
6. Skinner, 'A Lecture on "Having" a Poem' [1971],Cumulative Record 3rd Edition (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972), p. 354.
7. Skinner, 'The Force of Coincidence,' Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (Prentice-Hall, 1978), p. 172.
8. Skinner and Holland, The Analysis of Behavior (McGraw-Hill, 1961), p. 215, § 31-2.
9. Skinner, Science and Human Nature (Macmillam, 1953), p. 104.
10. Skinner, The Technology of Teaching (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968), p. 165.
11. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, 1958), § § 621 and 625.
