'We say that a person behaves in a given way because he possesses a philosophy, but we infer the philosophy from the behavior and therefore cannot use it in any satisfactory way as an explanation, at least until it is in turn explained.'
---Skinner.
_______________: : Values are not internalized, they originate in the environment where responses to stimuli change not only the environment but the individual's probability of (future)
response. Values, as Skinner famously said, are reinforcers. What is internal is our 'perception' of reinforcers; the emission (or probability of emission) of behavior based
upon reinforcers are not, however, in the perception, but in our past behavior. If doing Y has previously 'felt good'...
: Now, here we have precisely it, felt good, you see you reject all the Freudian drives etc, but still continue to use notions of pleasure or pain, which all result from an initial biological entity. There are aspects of humanity beyond initial social construction, that are innate to us as biological beings...
Behaviorists do reject Freudian drives, as they rejected James' copious catalog of drives; one reason is that these 'internal' 'drives' are verified only through speculation. Behaviorists, however, do not deny genetic participation (what is 'innate to us as biological beings').
The use of the term 'good,' perhaps you noted, was enclosed in descriptive quotes---and for a reason. Behaviorism does not decree a 'good' or a 'bad.' People do not do things (are not subjected to reinforcement) because anything feels 'good' or 'bad'---responses either have survival value or not (the genesis of reinforcement). What has survival value---say, eating---is 'good,' is called 'good,' because of its survival value.* Are there not things that feel good---say, heroin---which decidedly do not have survival value? Yes, there are: these things have been generalized with things that do have such value (things that feel good). (Generalization is the process in which secondary reinforcers 'take the place' of primary ones.) For instance, most people would call money good---not because printed paper is good, but because it has been frequently paired with things that have survival value (exchange for primary reinforcers)...
As I explained, our 'feelings' (such as good and bad) 'narrate' our responses, they do not cause them.
: I wish to acknowledge [behavior's] greater depth, I wish to emphasize the value of individuals, I wish to encompass a notion of culture and ideology within the model of the self... Also I want to vaguely retain a notion of humanism. Basically, from what I here you say, behaviourism sounds like the apotheosis of commodity fetishism, men no longer encounter each other as men, but as objects...
I must be doing a poor job of discussing behaviorism to have it sound like 'the apotheosis of commodity fetishism'! (?) Because there are laws of behavior (as there certainly are with every other organic thing under the sun), does that mean that 'men [and women] no longer encounter each other as men [and women], but as objects'? There is almost infinite individuality in behaviorism's account of the individual, there is a deep respect for the value of individuals, and there certainly is acknowledgement of both culture and ideology (verbal behavior) in behaviorism. What there is not, however, is the age-old mind-matter dualism and aggrandizing explanatory fictions concerning environmental interdependence. This distinction provides the socialistic implications of behaviorism...
: : We are not affected by the future, we are affected by the past---specifically, the consequences of our past behavior; that is what we are referencing.
: Right, so I'll go through the dictionaries and cross out the words hope and desire and
anticipate...because they are all in the future...
How can our behavior be affected by something that has not happened yet? (Think of tasty but unheathy foods...) You claim that 'imagination' and 'desire' are the progenitors of behavior, but as Wittgenstein taught us (in great detail) we cannot successfully imagine anything outside of what we have been accustomed to imagine. (That is why if a lion could talk, we would not understand...) What we understand are our histories of reinforcement---not literally, not in discrete units of behavior, for certainly verbal behavior has allowed the human species a wide ability to generalize amongst reinforcers (and more specifically, amongst discriminative stimuli and discriminative reinforcers)---but nonetheless what we generalize from are our interactions with our environments, not our interactions with our imaginations. (Where do imaginations come from?---Other imaginations?)
: The gratification of self is the basis of 'self-mastery' the desire to control our environment, and to control our own bodies.
'Self mastery' is self-control---and self-control is not the 'self' controlling the 'self,' but rather one set of reinforcers (usually long-term, inconspicuous) instead of another (usually immediate, conspicuous). A variable-ratio schedule will 'inspire' self-control in either pigeon or human, but it is not the human (or pigeon) that has 'inspired' controlled behavior, it is the schedule that has emitted the 'inspiration' and the controlled behavior. A mistake 'is to regard purpose as a characteristic or essence of the topography of behavior rather than as a relation to controlling variables.'(1) Self 'mastery' requires a relation to variables outside our (immediate) control---otherwise we would need no 'mastery' skills in the first place (we would already be 'masters')...
: ...[B]ut its what makes us human beings and not robots, it is the necessary illusion...
The illusion of autonomy, the illusion of freedom, is precisely the thing that prevents inconspicuous controls from being noticed, from being countered, and from being used by the people instead of the minorities that possess them.
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: : It requires years to learn a language.
: [R]eading a sentence does not give an adequate knowledge of grammar to go off and apply it in other circumstances. We clearly don't learn language parrot
fashion, we learn applicable rules that we start to use for ourselves. Children of two have picked up the basic rules, and start to apply them...given the general content of what we say to children, its unlikely that they learn all those rules from direct empirical experience...
Humans do not learn language as parrots do---simply because parrots face (almost) no discriminative reinforcement; they make a sound---in any context---and receive a reward. With humans, early praise for basic sounds---often out of context---becomes slowly withheld until basic sounds are more shaped, more specific in enunciation and in context. This process takes years, even decades; millions of words are uttered, usually ungrammatically, until application has presented enough instances to emit 'proper' usage, usage that receives specific reinforcement. The rules of language are learned, not in the rules (as some autonomous 'program'),** but in the application, and application is behavior. Children without a verbal community do not learn a language, grammatical or otherwise...
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* 'Organisms presumably eat nourishing foods because genetic variations that increased their likelihood of doing so contributed to the survival of the individual and the species and thus were selected. For simpler species, we do not often say that the foods must "taste good." The issue of enjoyment presumably arose when organisms became susceptible to reinforcement by the same foods. They often ate for two reasons: The behavior was innate and was also reinforced by its consequences. It is the reinforcing effect, not the genetic tendency to eat, that we report when we say that foods "taste good."' (Skinner, 'What is Wrong with Daily Life in the Western World?,' Upon Further Reflection, Prentice-Hall, 1987, p. 17.)** 'Nothing which could be called following a plan or applying a rule is observed when behavior is a product of the contingencies alone. To say [as Chomsky did in his review of Verbal Behavior] that "the child who learns a language has in some sense constructed the grammar for himself" is as misleading as to say that a dog which has learned to catch a ball has in some sense constructed the relevant part of the science of mechanics.' (Skinner, 'Operant Behavior,' Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969, p. 124.)
Note:
1. 'The Inside Story,' Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), p. 291.
