: Well I can agree that we interpret feelings in others by their behavioral responses...This is not the only criteria for interpretation in (radical) behaviorism. Unlike Watson and the logical positivists (who considered 'feelings' outside of---and irrelevant to---observation), Skinner stated (as I quoted in post 3236) that interpretative reports are useful for studying (especially anticipating) 'conditions related to further behavior.'(1) This is to say that sometimes the responding individual is best qualified to interpret feelings. However, what we call feelings---how we express feelings---have been taught; they have been socially determined. Consider Wittgenstein:
If you wanted to support behaviorism you could say: A definition is a piece of behavior; it must say 'This is pain.' It does not follow that pain is a behavior.If someone were to ask 'Is that all?,' then I should answer: In the realm of language that is all.
Similarly, it is a definition to grimace and say 'This is a toothache,' but none to say simply 'This is a toothache'; not even a definition for yourself.(2)
And:
I said that the man who contended that it was impossible to feel the other person's pain did not thereby wish to deny that one person could feel pain in another person's body. In fact, he would have said: 'I may have toothache in another man's tooth, but not his toothache.'(3)
: But this still seems to tell us nothing about whether there are or are not "internal processes" at work, only that we respond to outward manifestations.
Within our skin is an environment as tangible as the environment outside. However, we can only 'know' it (describe it) in terms that originated from others. Skinner:
We acquire the vocabulary which describes our own behavior under great difficulty. The verbal community which can easily teach a child to distinguish colors, for example, cannot with the same technique teach him to distinguish aches, pains, feelings, and emotions. As physical states in the individual, these are a part of the physical world, but the individual himself has a special connection with them. My aching tooth is mine in a very real sense because none of you can possibly get nerves into it, but that does not make it different in nature from the ceiling light which we all react to in more or less the same way.(4)
'Outward manifestations' can originate within. Does this include emotions? A stomach ache could cause a 'bad mood,' a long bout of stomach problems could cause 'depression.' That is still not to say that a bad mood creates the bad mood, or that depression causes depression. Again: feelings are effects of behavior (and behavioral contact with environments), not causes.
(Back to Wittgenstein. As I understand him, I can feel my toothache---as I understand toothache---in your mouth, I can believe that you feel what I understand to be a toothache, can place ((through extrapolation---i.e. 'rule-governed' behavior)) my understanding of pain into your body. Nonetheless, it is always my ((understanding of)) pain I 'feel,' never yours...
: The problem as I see it is that by denying the existence of such "internal" functions, we may be attempting to elicit (through reinforcement techniques, laws, etc.) certain "normative" behaviors.
I am not entirely sure that I understand this important sentence.
As I explained above, what is internal may or may not be a function of behavior (may or may not cause behavior), but the feelings that accompany behavior are not emitting behavior. (Analogy: a photographic image does not create what is photographed, nor is it the photographic process.) Besides my difficulty with the idea that behaviorism 'denies' what is internal, I would replace elicit with emit---the former suggesting S-R cause and effect, the latter suggesting voluntary behavior (specifically, the probability of behavior). Perhaps (if I have misunderstood you) you would indulge me and state your idea again...
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: I would ask you how you would define or explain the following "conditions" or human
"characteristics":
: 1. Attention Deficit Disorder, autism, Tourret's Syndrome, Williams Syndrome, etc.
: 2. The desire for revenge (eye for an eye) (is it something that is "inherent" that must be "unlearned"?
: 3. Is homosexuality "learned" or "unlearned" through reinforcement?
: 4. The "inherent"(?) desire for freedom from forms of restraint.
1. Los Horcones considers autism a biological disorder, although they add:
Children are children. Some may have behavioral deficits or autistic behaviors but they do not have something inside them which is called "autism" and produces autistic behaviors...Some children have more autistic behaviors in their repertories than others. So we talk about "autism levels" not just about autism.(5)
I would add that although behaviorism (in general) has left organic brain damage to its respective discipline(s), advocating behavioral approaches in some treatment of mental illness, some of what is known as mental illness has had environmental origins. One conspicuous example is, of course, 'borderline personality disorder' which afflicts (almost exclusively) young females with a definite history of sexual abuse; another is the correlation of prenatal drug abuse and ADD. Skinner, writing in the 1950s, was circumspect but accurate:
Although genetic and organic factors can be efficiently evaluated only by holding environmental factors constant, and although environmental factors can be correctly evaluated only against a stable genetic and organic condition, it is probably a useful practice to explore environmental factors first to see whether any behavioral manifestations remain attributed to genetic and organic causes.(6)
2. Skinner (and behaviorism) has always challenged the notion that aggression is genetic.
3. Skinner only mentioned homosexuality in regards to laboratory animals, observing its prevalence under duress and deprivation. Nonetheless, I would doubt that any behaviorist would challenge the scientific convention that (human) homosexuality is genetic. (Freudians are most embarrassed on this particular subject...)
4. This is a large topic. The aversion to physical restraint is, obviously, one of the few genetic characteristics of human infants conspicuous on day one. Other forms of restraints, however, include characteristics---such as praise (a common form of control in education)---that our society would refuse to call restraint. (Restraint as a word well exemplifies the diversity of language games...)
The passages you have quoted show your attentive eye. Rogers (in the famous Rogers-Skinner debates) was especially critical of the 'Let us agree...' statement, and Skinner took much heat for it before abandoning such specific 'value judgments.'* To quote a far more characteristic position:
It has been argued that behaviorism is or pretends to be value free, but that no value-free science can properly deal with man qua man. What is wrong in this traditional argument can be seen in the expression 'value judgement.' An inner initiating agent is to judge things as good or bad. But a much more effective source of values is to be found in the environmental contingencies. The things people call good are positive reinforcers, and they reinforce because of the contingencies of survival under which the species has evolved.(7)
Darwinistic, but not so dire. The 'contingencies of survival under which the species has evolved' is exactly what we now control through verbal and rule-governed behavior. What behavior is chosen to replace, say, existing behaviors is subject to 'survival value,' obviously, but this 'value' is in many ways now subject to human determination---and experiment---due to increased human control over nature (consider medicine). Because our survival is always in the future (while our behavior is selected only by our past*), we can, in all honestly, only guess---and proceed with caution and flexibility.** This, I believe, is the promise of behaviorism.
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* 'Operant behavior, like natural selection, prepares the organism for a future, but it is only a future that is similar to the selecting past.' ('Why We Are Not Acting To Save The World,' Upon Further Reflection, Prentice-Hall, 1987, p. 3.)
** 'We cannot predict the success or failure of a cultural invention. It is for this reason that we are said to resort to guessing. It is only in this sense that value judgments take up where science leaves off.' ('The Design of Cultures' [1961] Cumulative Record, 3rd ed., Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972, p. 49.) Skinner modified many of his views over the years and values and control are two that received much consideration and alteration. Skinner defended the use of behavioral specialists in the above article (reminiscent of Veblen's 'Soviet of Technicians'); such faith in specialization was dropped during the later 60s, finally replaced by the 'face-to-face' communitarianism expressed in the 1977 article 'Human Behavior and Democracy'---the one I'm always quoting to Red Deathy---from Reflections on Behaviorism and Society. Regarding values, I remind you that although behaviorism per se holds no 'values,' Skinner himself did (such as socialistic communitarianism).
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Notes:
1. Skinner, About Behaviorism (Knopf, 1974), p. 31.
2. Wittgenstein, 'The Language of Sense Data and Private Experience' [1936], Philosophical Occasions (Hackett, 1993), p. 343.
3. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Harper, 1964), p. 53.
4. Skinner, 'Psychology in the Understanding of Mental Disease' [1957], Cumulative Record, 3rd ed. (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972), p. 255.
5. Horcones, 'Autism,' Los Horcones: A Walden Two Community, 1 May, 1998.
6. Skinner, 'Psychology in the Understanding of Mental Disease,' op. cit., p. 253.
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Especially recommended is the 'Lecture on "Having" A Poem.'
