....you were the one who persuaded me to dig up a copy of Skinners "Cumulative Record"! (Besides, though knowledge may be cumulative, the process may be dialectical)You wrote:
"However, behaviorism insists that contingencies cause (either emit or elicit) behavior and feelings are collateral products of these contingencies. In a nutshell: we don't cry because we feel sad and we don't feel sad because we cry (as James had it); we feel sad and we cry because of environmental events that control our behavior."
And Skinner writes: (in connection with art)
"The word "reinforcing," though technical, is useful as a rough synonym for "interesting," "attractive," "pleasing" and "satisfying." And all these terms are commonly applied to pictures. For our present purposes it is particularly useful as a synonym for "beautiful". Pictures are by definition reinforcing in the sense that they are responsible for the fact that artists paint them and people look at them. It is a mistake to suppose that they do this because of how people feel about them. Feelings are mere by-products; the important thing is what a picture does to behavior. The artist puts paint on canvas and is or is not reinforced by the result. If he is reinforced, he goes on painting…"
(p.335)And a little further on:
"When hungry, we are dominated by behavior which has been reinforced by food. When under a threat, we are absorbed in avoidance or escape." (Ibid 395)
But several of these examples describe behavior that is a response to an obvious internal "state". Food will diminish or end the unpleasant sensation of hunger. "Escape" will diminish or end the unpleasant sensation of fear. Both convenient internal mechanisms for producing life sustaining behavior. These mechanisms are not usually under conscious control. These mechanisms Are, however, triggered by external or environmental events.
Well so what, you might say. The actual behavior is what counts and is the only thing that we can "measure". But this is becoming problematic as various fields, for example cognitive neuroscience, have made some real (head)way in discovering why we think the way we do.
For example when you write:
'Reason,' like all emotions, is contingent upon individual histories of reinforcement; there is no one 'reason.' (Here the Enlightenment reveals its autocratic perception of human experience.)
There's reason and then there's reason. Antonio R. Damasio discusses reason as it pertains to decision making in "Descartes' Error":
There are at least two distinct possibilities: [in method of dealing with the plethora of information and images that go into the decision making process] the first is drawn from a traditional "high reason" view of decision making; the second from the "somatic marker hypothesis."
The "high-reason" view, which is none other than the common-sense view, assumes that when we are at our decision-making best, we are the pride and joy of Plato, Descartes, and Kant. Formal logic will, by itself, get us to the best available solution for any problem. An important aspect of the rationalist conception is that to obtain the best results, emotions must be kept out. Rational processing must be unencumbered by passion.
Basically, in the high-reason view, you take the different scenarios apart and use current managerial parlance and perform a cost/benefit analysis of each of them. Keeping in mind "subjective expected utility," which is the thing you want to maximize, you infer logically what is good and what is bad…."
Now, let me submit that if this strategy is the only one you have available, rationality, as described above, is not going to work. At best, your decision will take an inordinately long time, far more than acceptable if you are to get anything else done that day. At worst, you may not even end up with a decision at all because you will get lost in the byways of your calculation…"An alternative view is needed…
"….But now, imagine that before you apply any kind of cost/benefit analysis to the premises, and before you reason toward the solution of the problem, something quite important happens: When the bad outcome connected with a given response option comes into mind, however fleetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling. Because the feeling is about the body, I gave the phenomenon the technical term somatic state…;and because it "marks" an image, I called it a marker.
What does the somatic marker achieve? It forces attention on the negative outcome to which a given action may lead, and functions as an automated alarm signal which says: Beware of danger ahead if you choose the option which leads to this outcome. The signal may lead you to reject immediately, the negative course of action and thus make you choose among other alternatives….
In short, somatic markers are a special instance of feelings generated from secondary emotions. Those emotions and feelings have been connected, by learning, to predicted future outcomes of certain scenarios. When a negative somatic marker is juxtaposed to a particular future outcome the combination functions as an alarm bell. When a positive somatic marker is juxtaposed instead, it becomes a beacon of incentive."
Somatic markers do not deliberate for us. They assist the deliberation by highlighting some options (either dangerous or favorable), and eliminating them rapidly from subsequent consideration. You may think of it as a system for automated qualification of predictions, which act, whether you want it or not, to evaluate the extremely diverse scenarios of the anticipated future before you. Think of it as a biasing device…"*
Well, so far at least, I see no real challenges to the principles of behaviorism - only an enlargement of the context of behavior to include physiological processes that are recently the object of a lot of study (e.g. split-brain experiments).
And finally so what. Aren't we left once again with statistical probabilities that Behavior X will follow Contingency Y and be reinforced by Contingency Z? Maybe so, and that is as far as I should probably take it, at least on this board. But I guess I just never left my three-year-old age of "why?". Like: What is it about Contingency Y that induces Behavior X, and Why does reinforcement Z (praise or prize) result in continued positive response. Shut up bill, it Just Does!
Well Really Finally:
You state:
" I believe behavior (and 'points of view') can only be changed by actual contingent variables, not by 'reasons' or appeals to feelings. To assume that these contingencies are 'in our minds,' inaccessible to functional control, strikes me as one of the most hopeless of philosophies."
Well I do admit to feeling pessimistic at times, but what the hell, we can only live in a way that satisfies our deepest sense of values. As such I "instinctively" or as a result of "contingencies", hammer away at what I perceive to be injustices, self-alienation, unfair inequities, irrational destructiveness and abusive power. I really don't think we're far apart at all. You point to examples of real life situations in which a community seems to be able to function in the absence of the above dehumanizing (assumed) features, while I seek to sensitize a desensitized population in whatever way I can.
Anyway, I'd like to thank you Barry, for you have prodded me into areas I would not have gone into had it not been for your posts. Maybe the result wasn't quite what you had wanted or anticipated, but that should not detract from value. Life is complicated.
bill
