Philosophical Aspects of Behaviorism

David Begelman

Psychological science seeks to develop comprehensive explanations of the behavior of

organisms. The form they should take has long been a contentious issue within the

discipline. Even behaviorists have disagreed among themselves about the approach

that should prevail. In addition, the technological challenges of the laboratory have

divorced psychology from its parent discipline, philosophy. The rupture has not been

uneventful: The two disciplines have often distanced each other like receding galaxies.

One eminent philosopher has characterized psychology as “experimental methods and

conceptual confusion,” while psychologists deem much philosophical commentary

about their discipline to stem from ignorance of its methods and goals.

TYPES OF BEHAVIORISM

Since John B. Watson coined the term “behaviorism,” the movement, at

various points in its development, renounced reliance on the subjective, mentalist,

cognitive, introspective, dualistic, indefinable, private, or mediating variables. All the

same, there are several problems in defining behaviorism. First, it is difficult to

provide a formulation that encapsulates all of its historical forms while avoiding

triviality. Accordingly, characterizing behaviorism minimally as an approach that

anchors the database in observable dependent and independent variables may

sometimes fail to distinguish it from other non-behavioristic psychologies. Second,

extruded mentalistic concepts are not always coextensive. Depending upon how a

theorist construes them, mental states are not always “inferred,” mental predicates do

not always refer to private processes, mentalism does not always imply dualism (as

Jerry Fodor has persuasively argued), mediating variables are not always indefinable,

cognitive variables do not always run an inductive risk, radical behaviorism does not

renounce the study of private events, and so on. Third, many “behaviorist” programs

have increasingly embraced internal variables as cognitively oriented theorists and

clinical practitioners continue to make inroads into the discipline. In radical

behaviorism, “operant-conditioners” like B. F. Skinner and his followers have

abandoned reliance on such things as desires, motives, intentions, feelings, sensations,

judgments, volitions, purposes, consciousness, and the like in causally explaining

human behavior. They seem to have been outnumbered by others—grouped in the past

under the umbrella term methodological behaviorism--calling only for observables at

requisite points in theory construction. Indeed, the chosen emphasis in applied fields is

now dubbed the cognitive-behavioral orientation.

Philosophers, despite their older enchantment with behavioristic formulations in

the philosophy of mind, have lately turned their attention to the study of

consciousness, especially as this bears on the resolution of the mind-brain

problem. In spite of the team effort, they appear to be virtually confounded by

the challenge to explain consciousness in terms of brain states. “Mysterians,”

like the philosopher Colin McGinn, have despaired of any likelihood of a

solution—principally because they cannot conceive what form it could possibly take.

Despite the inroads made by cognitive theory, it should be kept in mind that if the

emphasis in selective therapeutic interventions is on the prediction and control of

behavior, it is unclear why an explanatory need for mentalistic concepts must always

figure importantly in designing curricula of behavior-change. While radical

behaviorists may have misconceived the role of cognitive and mediating variables in

wider explanatory schema, their critics may overestimate reliance on such variables

when the task involves, for example, enriching the verbal repertoires of autistic

children. Accordingly, the relevance of any chosen philosophy of science may depend

upon what arena of endeavor is the focus of professional effort.

PRIVATE EVENTS

Private events for behaviorists in psychology and philosophy seems to have been a springboard for generating controversy. Psychologists of all persuasions generally assume that mental events are private, inferred entities. Yet the logical behaviorism of philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein, in attempting to “rectify the logical geography of mental-status concepts,” challenged this common assumption. Both philosophers held that many mental predicates do not refer to private or internal events, but to the predominantly public ways we are disposed to behave. For them, to feel emotion, for example, is not to infer at some inductive risk the occurrence of a private psychological event, process, or object, but to behave in certain ways—verbally and otherwise—in observable, albeit special circumstances.

Even considering its relevance for a surprising number of mental-status concepts lending themselves to a dispositional analysis, the problem with Ryle’s program consisted precisely in his failure to reconcile logical behaviorism with events like sensations or qualia (i.e., the broad range of subjective raw feels) that are indisputably private to persons experiencing them. In addition, his assault on “the ghost in the machine” involved an attack on metaphysical dualism (i.e., the Cartesian theory that mind was made of different “stuff” than physical events). However, other philosophers have faulted Ryle’s attempt to parlay a program involving the redeployment of mental-status terms into a metaphysical thesis about the nature of reality. Many of the same critics also feel Wittgenstein’s theory that all philosophical problems were the result of linguistic confusions was overdrawn.

On the other hand, for radical behaviorists like Skinner, mental-status terms however defined point inferentially to private events of a non-causal nature. It is quite in the idiom of Skinner to declare that Smith did not behave that way because he was angry, but because he was reinforced for doing so. It is not altogether clear whether radical behaviorists on occasion (1) deny the existence of mentalistic entities, in the manner of eliminative materialism; (2) acknowledge their existence, although consider them redundant in a behavioral analysis, or (3) regard them as pre-scientific concepts that can be translated into observable behavioral terms. The three slants are on quite different explanatory wavelengths. The last-named version is reminiscent of a theory proposed by Rudolph Carnap, a logical positivist and original member of the Vienna Circle. He felt that mental concepts could be recast as physicalistic ones by means of “reduction-sentences.” One of his colleagues, Carl Hempel, originally sympathetic to the “recasting” of mental terms, subsequently abandoned this point of view.

Radical behaviorists (i.e., Skinnerians) conceive the reduction or elimination of

mentalistic terms as a one-way street. Suppose the process went in the reverse

direction, and a behavioral analysis could not even be conceived without the

introduction of mentalistic concepts? The following might serve as an illustration.

An experimenter undertakes to place a pigeon on a schedule of reinforcement under which the latter is made contingent on the number of responses emitted (ratio scheduling). Accordingly, reinforcement is delivered every third response (fixed ratio or FR3 scheduling). There is nonetheless an undetermined interval schedule (reinforcement based on the time elapsing between responses) that fits the FR3 schedule already specified. This is because the latter is denotatively the same as an unspecified variable interval schedule (VI) overlapping it. Thus, if the pigeon takes ten minutes to emit the first three responses before reinforcement, five minutes to emit the next three responses before reinforcement, and two minutes to emit the following sequence of three responses before reinforcement, a VI schedule also describes its history of reinforcement. (In the unlikely event that the time elapsing between reinforcements after three responses was always the same, say five minutes, the overlapping schedule would be a FI5 one.) The question then arises: Has the pigeon been placed on a FR or VI schedule? If the answer is “both,” no ultimate distinction can be drawn between ratio and interval schedules of reinforcement, since both types describe the same facts.

In the manner of a distinction drawn by W. V. Quine, we might say that both types of scheduling fit the facts, but the E’s arrangement guides the scheduling in question. However, since “guiding” in Quine’s sense involves a causal relationship, why should the FR schedule be considered the preferred causal account in contrast to the VI schedule denotatively identical to it? The only deciding factor here in determining schedule-type is the E’s intention, a mentalistic concept. The conclusion, hardly a comforting one for behaviorists who wish to extrude mentalistic concepts from explanatory schema, is that some behavioristic concepts cannot even be operationally defined without the introduction of mentalisms like intentionality!

Quine, a behavioristically-oriented philosopher sympathetic to Skinner’s views, likewise felt “intentionality” was either an irreducible concept requiring a “science” all its own or an idiom without scientific foundation. He opted for the latter alternative. On the other hand, Hempel’s renunciation of the physicalism of the Vienna Circle was based on the realization that there can be no recasting of mentalistic into physicalistic terms without the subsequent reintroduction of the former somewhere along the line.

Many behavioral psychologists, especially in the therapeutic area, rely on private events as a central feature of their applications. Clinical techniques such as Joseph Wolpe’s systematic desensitization, Joseph Cautela’s covert sensitization, Lloyd Homme’s coverant control, and forms of cognitive-behavioral techniques favored by Aaron T. Beck, Albert Ellis, Donald Meichenbaum, and Michael Mahoney, focusing upon internal cognitions, have enjoyed popularity. Even Skinner has insisted that providing an adequate explanatory treatment of private (not mental!) events is at the heart of his radical behaviorism.

Skinner adopted what might be called a third-person perspective on private events, or those occurring “under the skin.” Acknowledging such realities as sensations, he construed the acquisition of verbal self-descriptive repertoires about them as reinforced by the verbal community. Thus, self-awareness about private states is a social product: Others reinforce our self-statements about our sensations on the basis of their overt behavioral manifestations. The statement I have a toothache is thus acquired through mentoring from the outside, as it were.

The radical behaviorist theory may founder on the failure to draw an essential distinction. Does “self-awareness” pertain to correctly speaking about one’s pains or experiencing them, or both? It is patent that our sensation-language must be learned, and is therefore subject to error: We are not born knowing how to use certain terms. However, do we feel pain only on the condition we get a little help from our friends?

Skinner in addition was skeptical about knowledge of private events. He has averred, “Everyone mistrusts verbal responses which describe private events.” Yet some reasons he supplies for his skepticism do not validate the generalization. He has stated, for example, “The individual who excuses himself from an unpleasant task by pleading a headache cannot be successfully challenged, even though the existence of the private event is doubtful.” But the boy who cries wolf once too often is, as a cultural practice, frequently and successfully challenged. Moreover, when we are in the dark about the existence of headaches in sometime liars, the skepticism arises from our doubting the reliability of these persons, not because what they report is a private event. We can also harbor doubts about their reports of public events, and there are circumstances in which it would be absurd to doubt their private sensations, as when they report them as they howl under a dentist’s relentless drill or when an anvil is dropped on their foot.

According to Skinner, the verbal community is in a disadvantageous position with respect to reinforcing statements about occurrences it was not privy to because of their inaccessibility. Yet such a concession renders his theory counterintuitive. Suppose “self-awareness” covered experiencing sensations, and the verbal community reinforced first-person statements about pains incorrectly. Would it then be possible to experience pains without actually having them, or have them without being aware of them? How does one manage to have a severe headache without being aware of it or experience a toothache without having one? Yet on a given interpretation of Skinner’s views, such absurd consequences would appear to be a possibility.

Alternatively, the upshot of faulty instruction by the verbal community may result merely in a cockeyed use of sensation terminology, hardly affecting the private sensations we harbor. The family of paradoxes surrounding sensation statements was dealt with at great length in the later writings of Wittgenstein—with a rather different outcome than Skinner’s treatment of the problem.

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Behaviorists sometimes take a characteristic tack on value judgments, including moral appraisals. They have held that statements containing terms like “good,” “ought,” “rights,” “values,” and the like implicitly assert something about reinforcement. The thrust of this view is succinctly expressed in Skinner’s dictum that “A list of values is a list of reinforcers.” The doctrine is actually a scion of an older moral tradition called “naturalism,” the theory that statements about what “ought” to be are derivable in one form or another from statements about what “is.” This “is-ought” dichotomy was discussed by the eighteenth century philosopher David Hume, who argued for the impossibility of deriving “ought” statements from factual propositions because of the categorical disparity between the two. His position has been adopted by most contemporary philosophers. What is their beef with the behavioristic formulation?

According to many anti-naturalistic philosophers, just because the way some individual has behaved prompts others to judge his action as “right” or “wrong” does not justify contending that what is meant by the terms is a descriptive property of his behavior, implicit or otherwise. Hence, prescriptive terms are not translatable into behavioral terms. Arguing that “good” functions as a name, or oblique reference to empirical properties of behavior or its reinforcing consequences because a pattern has occasioned moral judgment is tantamount to suggesting that the number two admits of a behavioral analysis because it occurs in the verbal behavior of those categorizing human events numerically!

There is no denying that events subject to behavioral analysis play a role in occasioning value judgments. Indeed, behavior is the grounding upon which moral statements or arguments are sustained or justified. However, this is a far cry from the theory that the virtual meaning of prescriptive terms is behavioral data, or that the former can be “reduced” to the latter. Consequently, we cannot maintain, as does Skinner, that You ought to tell the truth means If you tell the truth, you will be reinforced for doing so. Does You ought to racially discriminate mean If you racially discriminate, you will be reinforced for doing so? It seems obvious that whether discrimination is right or wrong cannot be decided by reviewing the history of who was reinforced for practicing it. As a matter of historical record, many moral reformers we revere were punished, not positively reinforced, for ideas they felt obliged to popularize. They did not regard their treatment by society as a yardstick of their moral stance, and this is often taken as evidence of the stature and probity of such figures.

THEORY AND APPLICATION

Despite the contentious nature of discussions about behaviorism on the meta-theoretical level, there is no denying its progress in so-called therapeutic “applications.”
The creation of techniques to change the plight of disabled populations, persons with psychiatric disorders, and innovations in the educational curricula of normal populations have been too numerous to mention. Recent research on compromised clinical populations has indicated a degree of overlap when it comes to the therapeutic efficacy of treatment procedures inspired by differing orientations in psychology. However, behavioral techniques have a distinct advantage in connection with intellectually compromised clinical populations, pervasive developmental disorders and autism, learning disabilities, depression, specific fears, panic disorder, speech dysfluencies, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and types of sexual dysfunction.

All the same, the nature of the connection between theory and application has received little attention. Behavior therapists, for example, often speak about their clinical armamentarium as a set of “experimentally derived treatment techniques.” What sense of the term “derived” is functioning here?

In a study authored by C. B. Truax, it was discovered that Rogerian therapy, in contrast to representing “unconditional positive regard,” was actually selectively reinforcing clients’ verbal behavior. An impartial observer might conclude that what he or she was privy to was not client-centered therapy, but another form of behavior therapy. One might describe the therapeutic transaction as “unintentional behavior therapy,” since the Rogerian therapist was unaware of the selective nature of his approach. Had the therapeutic ministration been effective, its success could therefore be explained in behavioristic terms.

The epiphany is that the therapeutic success of many forms of psychotherapy can be explained—or at least analyzed--in behavioristic terms. (And no wonder: If the latter is presumed to account for human behavior in general, professional therapeutic behaviors naturally fall within their purview.) Since behavior-theory has a wide explanatory compass, are therapeutic regimens of sundry types “derivations” if this framework can explain their success? The answer, it seems to the present author, is a simple one. “Derivations” are simply those applications practiced by professionals who self-consciously use a special vocabulary and inventory of concepts to explain their effectiveness. Considering the wide compass of behavior-theory, it is difficult to envision how it might fail to “explain” the success of most treatment techniques. Consequently, effective psychotherapies can be construed as “derivable” from behavior-theory, in the sense that the latter is consistent with or embraces a set of therapeutic results. The practitioner in question need only play a certain theoretical language-game.

Even failed psychotherapies can be explained behaviorally. In the Truax experiment, the client-centered interventions turned out to be selective reinforcements of verbal behavior. Yet if “unconditional positive regard” remained true to form, it could be analyzed as “non-contingent reinforcement of verbal behavior.”

The failure of behaviorally oriented social experiments like the Walden II-style “utopias” in Virginia and Mexico hardly documents a failure of behaviorism or its philosophy of science; they only imply misappropriations of concepts like “reinforcement,” “aversive control,” or “extinction.” Such concepts are more advantageously viewed as explanatory principles embracing a wide variety of techniques, rather than as names of specific interventions in parochial armamentaria. Theoretical orientations in psychology do not specify roadmaps or blueprints for particularized therapeutic techniques deducible from them, but only an inventory of concepts and principles embracing whatever applications are in fact developed. That the opposite viewpoint has enjoyed popularity is more a matter of historical, than it is logical, significance.

CAUSALITY AND FREEDOM

Determinism is often construed as the philosophical theory that every event has a set of

causally sufficient conditions that necessitate it. Some commentators regard it more as

a guiding, or heuristic principle in the conduct of scientific inquiry—for good reason.

It is hardly challenged or falsified by the failure to isolate the causes of any particular

event, while the causation of most human behaviors has not been demonstrated. Other

philosophers regard determinism, as well as arguments for it, as incoherent or badly in

need of clarification. Be that as it may, determinism does not really warm up in

philosophical circles until it squares off with freedom and moral responsibility, notions

often regarded in behaviorist psychology as “figments,” “scientific fictions,” or “relics

of autonomous man.”

Behavioral psychology’s purge of freedom and responsibility frequently goes

hand in hand with attributing to the environment those achievements traditionally

reserved for persons. Many philosophers would consider this to be a case of double

standards in behavioral psychology. If Jones is not responsible for his achievements

because his environment “caused” him to behave the way he does, why isn’t he

responsible for Smith’s behavior if something he does causes Smith to behave in a

certain way? Moreover, if “responsibility” is nullified once the causes of a particular

event are demonstrated, how can environments be held responsible for human patterns

when they are likewise the causal result of a set of prior conditions? When mentalistic

psychologies are criticized because they tend to invoke environmentally unanchored

independent variables, no formulation—including behaviorism—meets the proposed

criterion of explanatory adequacy. Carrying the logic to an extreme, it might be argued

that neither persons nor environments could be held responsible because of a problem

of infinite regress.

In philosophy, the determinism-free-will controversy is far from resolved, and

there are philosophers who believe that freedom and moral responsibility are not

precluded by determinism, even if the latter were true. They are called

“compatibilists,” or “soft determinists.” Some of them have even held that human

freedom requires causal necessitation, since the alternative is indeterminism, for them

an even more serious threat to cherished concepts.

Despite the conceptual difficulties in some forms of behaviorism, programs of

effective behavior change can be undertaken by sidestepping philosophical issues.

These programs, especially on the therapeutic level, can move ahead without

underlying metaphysical assumptions, and on the basis that efforts to help clients take

a recognizably efficacious form. Psychologists who are flawed philosophers often

make promising agents of desirable behavior-change, while impeccable philosophers

tend to leave the world exactly as they find it: An accomplishment that is nothing to

write home about.

David Begelman

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

PRIVATE EVENTS

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

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