Behaviorist
Behaviorism (international spelling: behaviourism) describes positions ranging from the simple proposition that behavior is interesting and worth investigating, through the belief that the observation of behavior is the best or even the only means we have for investigating psychological and mental processes, to the claim that behavior is the one appropriate subject of psychology, and sometimes that mental terms (belief, goal, etc.) have no referents and/or only refer to behavior. A person who holds one of these views is described as a behaviorist.
Origins
J. B. Watson
Early in the 20th century, John B. Watson argued in his article Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist for the value of a psychology which concerned itself with behavior in and of itself, not as a method of studying consciousness. This was a substantial break from the structuralist psychology of the time, which used the method of introspection and considered the study of behavior valueless. Watson, in contrast, studied the adjustment of organisms to their environments, more specifically the particular stimuli leading organisms to make their responses. Much of Watson's work was comparative, i.e., he manipulated and observed changes in the behavior of animals. Watson's work was much influenced by the work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who had stumbled upon the phenomenon of classical conditioning (which were essentially learned reflexes) in his study of the digestive system of the dog, and subsequently investigated the phenomena in detail. Watson's ideas heavily emphasized physiology and the role of stimuli in producing conditioned responses. For this reason, Watson has often been described as an S-R (stimulus-response) psychologist.
Methodological behaviorism
Watson's behaviorist manifesto persuaded most academic researchers in experimental psychology of the importance of studying behavior. In the field of comparative psychology in particular, it was consistent with the warning note that had been struck by Lloyd Morgan's canon, against some of the more anthropomorphic work such as that of George Romanes, in which mental states had been freely attributed to animals. It was eagerly seized on by researchers such as Edward L. Thorndike (who had been studying cats' abilities to escape from puzzle boxes). However, most psychologists took up a position that is now called methodological behaviorism: they acknowledged that behavior was either the only or the easiest method of observation in psychology, but held that it could be used to draw conclusions about mental states. Well-known behaviorists such as Clark L. Hull, who described his position as neo-behaviorism, and Edward C. Tolman, who developed much of what would later become the cognitivist program: Tolman argued that rats constructed cognitive maps of the mazes they learned even in the absence of reward, and that the connection between stimulus and response (S->R) was mediated by a third term - the organism (S->O->R). His approach has been called, among other things, purposive behaviorism.
Methodological behaviorism remains the position of most experimental psychologists to-day, including the vast majority of those who work in cognitive psychology - so long as behavior is defined as including speech, at least non-introspective speech.
B.F. Skinner and radical behaviorism
B.F. Skinner, who carried out experimental work mainly in comparative psychology from the 1930s to the 1950s, but remained behaviorism's best known theorist and exponent virtually until his death in the 1990s, developed a distinct kind of behaviorist philosophy, which came to be called radical behaviorism. He also claimed to found a new version of psychological science, which he called behavior analysis or the experimental analysis of behavior.
Definition of radical behaviorism
Skinner's position was a rejection of methodological behaviorism and a return to the strongest version of Watson's views: he argued, first, that behavior should be studied for its own sake, and not as a way of observing mental processes, and second, that in fact such processes were of no interest - since they could only be observed by means of behavior, and had no supposed consequences other than to produce behavior, science need only be concerned with the behavior itself.
Skinner's conceptual innovations
This essentially philosophical position gained strength from the success of Skinner's early experimental work with rats and pigeons, summarised in his books The behavior of organisms (1938) and Schedules of reinforcement (1957, with C. B. Ferster). Of particular importance was his concept of the operant response, of which the archetype was the rat's leverpress. In contrast with the idea of a physiological response, an operant is a class of structurally distinct but functionally equivalent responses. For example, while a rat might press a lever with its left paw or its right paw or its tail, all of these responses operate on the world in the same way and have a common consequence. Operants are often thought of as species of responses, where the individuals differ but the class coheres in its function--shared consequences with operants and reproductive success with species.
This is one of the clear distinctions between Skinner's notions and the S-R notions of many of his predecessors. Another crucial contribution was his clarification of the key concept of reinforcement, which had been introduced by Thorndike and used extensively by Hull, but seemed to be mired in issues of definitional circularity. Whereas Thorndike had tried to define reinforcement mentalistically, as a "satisfying state of affairs", and Hull had tried to define it physiologically, in terms of the reduction of a drive, Skinner defined it empirically: if an event was experimentally observed to increase the rate of response, it was then called a reinforcer for that particular animal at that time. Food, water, brain stimulation, sex, social contact, and reinforcing drugs are all reinforcers that have been used in operant research with animals. The issue of whether these stimuli were satisfying to the animal (Thorndike's definition) was thereby bypassed, and the issue of whether they involved the reduction of a drive was left open for empirical physiological investigation (and it was quickly realised that many do not).
Skinner's empirical work expanded on earlier research on trial-and-error learning by researchers such as Thorndike and Guthrie with both conceptual reformulations - Thorndike's notion of a stimulus-response 'association' or 'connection' was abandoned - and methodological ones - the use of the 'free operant', so called because the animal was now permitted to respond at its own rate rather than in a series of trials determined by the experimenter procedures. With this method, Skinner carried out substantial experimental work on the effects of different schedules and rates of reinforcement on the rates of operant responses made by rats and pigeons. He achieved remarkable success in training animals to perform unexpected responses, and to emit large numbers of responses, and to demonstrate many empirical regularities at the purely behavioural level. This gave credibility to his conceptual analysis.
Radical behaviorism and language
As Skinner turned from experimental work to concentrate on the philosophical underpinnings of a science of behavior, his attention naturally turned to human language. His early attempt to explain language learning in terms of reinforcement theory, in his book Verbal behavior (1957), was vigorously attacked by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky was easily able to show that Skinner had not taken into account what was known about language by linguists, but the widely held belief that he effectively disposed of a behaviorist analysis of language learning is not really sustainable. Although in the early days of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics it was fashionable for psychologists to adopt a Chomskian position towards language, Chomsky himself has increasingly taken the view that his generative grammar has nothing to say about how humans actually produce or understand grammatical sentences, while his strident nativism is a block rather than a support in constructing a research program in developmental linguistics.
In any case, what was important for a behaviorist analysis of human behavior was not language acquisition so much as the interaction between language and overt behavior. In an essay republished in his 1969 book Contingencies of reinforcement, Skinner took the view that humans could construct linguistic stimuli that would then acquire control over their behavior in the same way that external stimuli could. The possibility of such instructional control over behavior meant that contingencies of reinforcement would not always produce the same effects on human behavior as they reliably do in other animals. The focus of a radical behaviorist analysis of human behavior therefore shifted to an attempt to understand the interaction between instructional control and contingency control, and also to understand the behavioral processes that determine what instructions are constructed and what control they acquire over behavior. Important figures in this effort have been A. Charles Catania and C. Fergus Lowe.
Behaviorism in philosophy
Although behaviorism is primarily thought of as a psychological movement, there have also been points of view within philosophy that have called themselves, or have been called by others, behaviorist. The best known is the logical behaviorism of Gilbert Ryle. While exponents of it do not in general align themselves with Skinner - who is not well regarded in the intellectual community - logical behaviorism does have many points in common with Skinner's radical behaviorism, not least a resolute opposition to methodological behaviorism, and a policy of avoiding the use of mental events in scientific explanations of behavior. Logical behaviorism, true to the tradition of behaviorism, leaves no room for qualia. According to logical behaviorism qualities are not in objects; they are just dispositions to act in specific ways and can be seen as IF->THEN statements.
It is also often argued - especially by theoreticians within the experimental analysis of behavior community - that the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein is essentially behaviorist. Wittgenstein did not call himself a behaviorist, and his style of writing is sufficiently elliptical and allusive to admit of a range of interpretations, but his determination to bypass unanswerable questions
Behaviourists
Leading developers of behaviorism (in rough chronological order):
See also
External Links
- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/
- http://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/genetics/behavior/learning/behaviorism.html
- http://www.bfskinner.org
- http://www.aect.org/intranet/publications/edtech/02/02-05.html
- http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Skinner/Theories
References and further reading
- Ferster, C. B., and Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of reinforcement. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
- Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
- Skinner, B. F. (1945). The operational analysis of psychological terms. Psychological Review, 52, 270-277, 290-294.
- Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
- Skinner, B. F. (1969). Contingencies of reinforcement: a theoretical analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
- Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20, 158-177. (on-line)
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