## 1. What is Behaviorism?



One has to be careful with "ism" words. They often have
both loose and strict meanings. And sometimes multiple meanings of
each type. 'Behaviorism' is no exception. Loosely
speaking, behaviorism is an attitude - a way of conceiving of
empirical constraints on psychological state attribution. Strictly
speaking, behaviorism is a doctrine - a way of doing
psychological or behavioral science itself.



Wilfred Sellars (1912-89), the distinguished philosopher, noted
that a person may qualify as a behaviorist, loosely or attitudinally
speaking, if they insist on confirming "hypotheses about
psychological events in terms of behavioral criteria" (1963, p.
22). A behaviorist, so understood, is someone who demands behavioral
evidence for any psychological hypothesis. For such a person, there is
no knowable difference between two states of mind (beliefs, desires,
etc.) unless there is a demonstrable difference in the behavior
associated with each state. Consider the current belief of a person
that it is raining. If there is no difference in his or her behavior
between believing that it is raining and believing that it is not
raining, there is no grounds for attributing the one belief rather
than the other. The attribution is empirically empty or unconstrained.




Arguably, there is nothing truly exciting about behaviorism loosely
understood. It enthrones behavioral evidence, an arguably inescapable
premise not just in psychological science but in ordinary discourse
about mind and behavior. Just how behavioral evidence should be
'enthroned' (especially in science) may be debated. But
enthronement itself is not in question.



Not so behaviorism the doctrine. It has been widely and vigorously
debated. This entry is about the doctrine, not the attitude.
Behaviorism, the doctrine, has caused considerable excitation among
both advocates and critics. In a manner of speaking, it is a doctrine,
or family of doctrines, about how to enthrone behavior not just in the
science of psychology but in the metaphysics of human and animal
behavior.



Behaviorism, the doctrine, is committed in its fullest and most
complete sense to the truth of the following three sets of claims.


1. Psychology is the science of behavior. Psychology is not the
science of the inner mind - as something other or different from
behavior.
2. Behavior can be described and explained without making ultimate
reference to mental events or to internal psychological processes. The
sources of behavior are external (in the environment), not internal
(in the mind, in the head).
3. In the course of theory development in psychology, if, somehow,
mental terms or concepts are deployed in describing or explaining
behavior, then either (a) these terms or concepts should be eliminated
and replaced by behavioral terms or (b) they can and should be
translated or paraphrased into behavioral concepts.



The three sets of claims are logically distinct. Moreover, taken
independently, each helps to form a type of behaviorism.
"Methodological" behaviorism is committed to the truth of
(1). "Psychological" behaviorism is committed to the truth
of (2). "Analytical" behaviorism (also known as
"philosophical" or "logical" behaviorism) is
committed to the truth of the sub-statement in (3) that mental terms
or concepts can and should be translated into behavioral concepts.



Other nomenclature is sometimes used to classify behaviorisms. Georges
Rey (1997, p. 96), for example, classifies behaviorisms as
methodological, analytical, and radical, where "radical"
is Rey's term for what is here classified as psychological
behaviorism. The term "radical" is instead reserved for
the psychological behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. Skinner employs the
expression "radical behaviorism" to describe his brand of
behaviorism or his philosophy of behaviorism (see Skinner 1974, p.
18). In the classification scheme used in this entry, radical
behaviorism is a sub-type of psychological behaviorism, primarily,
although it combines all three types of behaviorism (methodological,
analytical, and psychological).


## 2. Three Types of Behaviorism



Methodological behaviorism is a normative theory about the scientific
conduct of psychology. It claims that psychology should concern itself
with the behavior of organisms (human and nonhuman animals).
Psychology should not concern itself with mental states or events or
with constructing internal information processing accounts of
behavior. According to methodological behaviorism, reference to mental
states, such as an animal's beliefs or desires, adds nothing to
what psychology can and should understand about the sources of
behavior. Mental states are private entities which, given the
necessary publicity of science, do not form proper objects of
empirical study. Methodological behaviorism is a dominant theme in the
writings of John Watson (1878-1958).



Psychological behaviorism is a research program within psychology. It
purports to explain human and animal behavior in terms of external
physical stimuli, responses, learning histories, and (for certain
types of behavior) reinforcements. Psychological behaviorism is
present in the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), Edward Thorndike
(1874-1949), as well as Watson. Its fullest and most influential
expression is B. F. Skinner's work on schedules of
reinforcement.



To illustrate, consider a hungry rat in an experimental chamber. If a
particular movement, such as pressing a lever when a light is on, is
followed by the presentation of food, then the likelihood of the
rat's pressing the lever when hungry, again, and the light is
on, is increased. Such presentations are reinforcements, such lights
are (discriminative) stimuli, such lever pressings are responses, and
such trials or associations are learning histories.



Analytical or logical behaviorism is a theory within philosophy about
the meaning or semantics of mental terms or concepts. It says that the
very idea of a mental state or condition is the idea of a behavioral
disposition or family of behavioral tendencies, evident in how a
person behaves in one situation rather than another. When we attribute
a belief, for example, to someone, we are not saying that he or she is
in a particular internal state or condition. Instead, we are
characterizing the person in terms of what he or she might do in
particular situations or environmental interactions. Analytical
behaviorism may be found in the work of Gilbert Ryle (1900-76)
and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-51) (if perhaps
not without controversy in interpretation, in Wittgenstein's
case). More recently, the philosopher-psychologist U. T. Place
(1924-2000) advocated a brand of analytical behaviorism restricted to
intentional or representational states of mind, such as beliefs, which
Place took to constitute a type, although not the only type, of
mentality (see Graham and Valentine 2004). Arguably, a version of
analytical or logical behaviorism may also be found in the work of
Daniel Dennett on the ascription of states of consciousness via a
method he calls 'heterophenomenology' (Dennett 2005, pp.
25-56). (See also Melser 2004.) 


## 3. Roots of Behaviorism



Each of methodological, psychological, and analytical behaviorism has
historical foundations. Analytical behaviorism traces its historical
roots to the philosophical movement known as Logical Positivism (see
Smith 1986). Logical positivism proposes that the meaning of
statements used in science must be understood in terms of experimental
conditions or observations that verify their truth. This positivist
doctrine is known as "verificationism." In psychology,
verificationism underpins or grounds analytical behaviorism, namely,
the claim that mental concepts refer to behavioral tendencies and so
must be translated into behavioral terms.



Analytical behaviorism helps to avoid a metaphysical position known as
substance dualism. Substance dualism is the doctrine that mental
states take place in a special, non-physical mental substance (the
immaterial mind). By contrast, for analytical behaviorism, the belief
that I have as I arrive on time for a 2pm dental appointment, namely,
that I have a 2pm appointment, is not the property of a mental
substance. Believing is a family of tendencies of my body. In
addition, for an analytical behaviorist, we cannot identify the belief
about my arrival independently of that arrival or other members of
this family of tendencies. So, we also cannot treat it as the cause of
the arrival. Cause and effect are, as Hume taught, conceptually
distinct existences. Believing that I have a 2pm appointment is not
distinct from my arrival and so cannot be part of the causal
foundations of arrival.



Psychological behaviorism's historical roots consist, in part,
in the classical associationism of the British Empiricists, foremost
John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-76). According
to classical associationism, intelligent behavior is the product of
associative learning. As a result of associations or pairings between
perceptual experiences or stimulations on the one hand, and ideas or
thoughts on the other, persons and animals acquire knowledge of their
environment and how to act. Associations enable creatures to discover
the causal structure of the world. Association is most helpfully
viewed as the acquisition of knowledge about relations between events.
Intelligence in behavior is a mark of such knowledge.



Classical associationism relied on introspectible entities, such as
perceptual experiences or stimulations as the first links in
associations, and thoughts or ideas as the second links. Psychological
behaviorism, motivated by experimental interests, claims that to
understand the origins of behavior, reference to stimulations
(experiences) should be replaced by reference to stimuli (physical
events in the environment), and that reference to thoughts or ideas
should be eliminated or displaced in favor of reference to responses
(overt behavior, motor movement). Psychological behaviorism is
associationism without appeal to inner mental events.



Don't human beings talk of introspectible entities, thoughts,
feelings, and so on, even if these are not recognized by behaviorism
or best understood as behavioral tendencies? Psychological
behaviorists regard the practice of talking about one's own
states of mind, and of introspectively reporting those states, as
potentially useful data in psychological experiments, but as not
presupposing the metaphysical subjectivity or non-physical presence of
those states. There are different sorts of causes behind introspective
reports, and psychological behaviorists take these and other elements
of introspection to be amenable to behavioral analysis. (For
additional discussion, see Section 5 of this entry). (See, for
comparison, Dennett's method of heterophenomenology; Dennett
1991, pp. 72-81)



The task of psychological behaviorism is to specify types of
association, understand how environmental events control behavior,
discover and elucidate causal regularities or laws or functional
relations which govern the formation of associations, and predict how
behavior will change as the environment changes. The word
"conditioning" is commonly used to specify the process
involved in acquiring new associations. Animals in so-called
"operant" conditioning experiments are not learning to,
for example, press levers. Instead, they are learning about the
relationship between events in their environment, for example, that a
particular behavior, pressing the lever in the presences of a light,
causes food to appear.



In its historical foundations, methodological behaviorism shares with
analytical behaviorism the influence of positivism. One of the main
goals of positivism was to unify psychology with natural science.
Watson wrote that "psychology as a behaviorist views it is a
purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its
theoretical goal is ... prediction and control" (1913, p.
158). Watson also wrote of the purpose of psychology as follows:
"To predict, given the stimulus, what reaction will take place;
or, given the reaction, state what the situation or stimulus is that
has caused the reaction" (1930, p. 11).



Though logically distinct, methodological, psychological, and
analytical behaviorisms are sometimes found in one behaviorism.
Skinner's radical behaviorism combines all three forms of
behaviorism. It follows analytical strictures (at least loosely) in
paraphrasing mental terms behaviorally, when or if they cannot be
eliminated from explanatory discourse. In Verbal Behavior (1957) and
elsewhere, Skinner tries to show how mental terms can be given
behavioral interpretations. In About Behaviorism (1974) he says that
when mental terminology cannot be eliminated it can be
"translated into behavior" (p. 18, Skinner brackets the
expression with his own double quotes).



Radical behaviorism is concerned with the behavior of organisms, not
with internal processing (if treated or described differently from
overt behavior). So, it is a form of methodological behaviorism.
Finally, radical behaviorism understands behavior as a reflection of
frequency effects among stimuli, which means that it is a form of
psychological behaviorism.


## 4. Popularity of Behaviorism



Behaviorism of one sort or another was an immensely popular research
program or methodological commitment among students of behavior from
about the third decade of the twentieth century through its middle
decades, at least until the beginnings of the cognitive science
revolution. Cognitive science began to mature roughly from 1960 until
1985 (see Bechtel, Abrahamsen, and Graham 1998, pp. 15-17). In
addition to Ryle and Wittgenstein, philosophers with sympathies for
behaviorism included Carnap (1932-33), Hempel (1949), and Quine
(1960). Quine, for example, took a behaviorist approach to the study
of language. Quine claimed that the notion of psychological or mental
activity has no place in a scientific account of either the origins or
the meaning of speech. To talk in a scientifically disciplined manner
about the meaning of an utterance is to talk about stimuli for the
utterance, its so-called "stimulus meaning". Hempel (1949)
claimed that "all psychological statements that are meaningful
... are translatable into statements that do not involve
psychological concepts," but only concepts for physical behavior
(p. 18).



Among psychologists behaviorism was even more popular than among
philosophers. In addition to Pavlov, Skinner, Thorndike, and Watson,
the list of behaviorists among psychologists included, among others,
E. C. Tolman (1886-1959), C. L. Hull (1884-52), and E. R.
Guthrie (1886-1959). Tolman, for example, wrote that
"everything important in psychology ... can be investigated
in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis
of the determiners of rat behavior at a choice point in a maze"
(1938, p. 34).



Behaviorists created journals, organized societies, and founded
psychology graduate programs reflective of behaviorism. Behaviorists
organized themselves into different types of research clusters, whose
differences stemmed from such factors as varying approaches to
conditioning and experimentation. Some clusters were named as follows:
"the experimental analysis of behavior", "behavior
analysis", "functional analysis", and, of course,
"radical behaviorism". These labels sometimes were
responsible for the titles of behaviorism's leading societies
and journals, including the Society for the Advancement of Behavior
Analysis (SABA), and the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of
Behavior (begun in 1958) as well as the Journal of Applied Behavior
Analysis (begun in 1968).



Behaviorism generated a type of therapy, known as behavior therapy
(see Rimm and Masters 1974; Erwin 1978). It developed behavior
management techniques for autistic children (see Lovaas and Newsom
1976) and token economies for the management of chronic schizophrenics
(see Stahl and Leitenberg 1976). It fueled discussions of how best to
understand the behavior of nonhuman animals and of the relevance of
laboratory study to the natural environmental occurrence of animal
behavior (see Schwartz and Lacey 1982).



Behaviorism stumbled upon various critical difficulties with some of
its commitments. One difficulty is confusion about the effects of
reinforcement on behavior (see Gallistel 1990). In its original sense,
a stimulus such as food is a reinforcer only if its presentation
increases the frequency of a response in a type of associative
conditioning known as operant conditioning. A problem with this
definition is that it defines reinforcers as stimuli that change
behavior. The presentation of food, however, may have no observable
effect on response frequency with respect to food even in cases in
which an animal is food deprived or hungry. Rather, response frequency
can be associated with an animal's ability to identify and
remember temporal or spatial properties of the circumstances in which
a stimulus (say, food) is presented. This and other difficulties
prompted changes in behaviorism's commitments and new directions
of research. One alternative direction has been the study of the role
of short term memory in contributing to reinforcement effects on the
so-called trajectory of behavior (see Killeen 1994).



Another stumbling block, in the case of analytical behaviorism, is the
fact that the behavioral sentences that are intended to offer the
behavioral paraphrases of mental terms almost always use mental terms
themselves (see Chisholm 1957). In the example of my belief that I
have a 2pm dental appointment, one must also speak of my desire to
arrive at 2pm, otherwise the behavior of arriving at 2pm could not
count as believing that I have a 2pm appointment. The term
"desire" is a mental term. Critics of analytical
behaviorism have charged that we can never escape from using mental
terms in the characterization of the meaning of mental terms. This
suggests that mental discourse cannot be displaced by behavioral
discourse. At least it cannot be displaced term-by-term. Perhaps
analytical behaviorists need to paraphrase a whole swarm of mental
terms at once so as to recognize the presumption that the attribution
of any one such mental term presupposes the application of others (see
Rey 1997, p. 154-5).


## 5. Why be a Behaviorist



Why would anyone be a behaviorist? There are three main reasons (see
also Zuriff 1985).



The first reason is epistemic or evidential. Warrant or evidence for
saying, at least in the third person case, that an animal or person is
in a certain mental state, for example, possesses a certain belief, is
grounded in behavior, understood as observable behavior. Moreover, the
conceptual space or step between the claim that behavior warrants the
attribution of belief and the claim that believing consists in
behavior itself is a short and in some ways appealing step. If we
look, for example, at how people are taught to use mental concepts and
terms--terms like "believe", "desire",
and so on--conditions of use appear inseparably connected with
behavioral tendencies in certain circumstances. If mental state
attribution bears a special connection with behavior, it is tempting
to say that mentality just consists in behavioral tendencies.



The second reason can be expressed as follows: One major difference
between mentalistic (mental states in-the-head) and associationist or
conditioning accounts of behavior is that mentalistic accounts tend to
have a strong nativist bent. This is true even though there may be
nothing inherently nativist about mentalistic accounts (see Cowie
1998).



Mentalistic accounts tend to assume, and sometimes even explicitly to
embrace (see Fodor 1981), the hypothesis that the mind possesses at
birth or innately a set of procedures or internally represented
processing rules which are deployed when learning or acquiring new
responses. Behaviorism, by contrast, is anti-nativist. Behaviorism,
therefore, appeals to theorists who deny that there are innate rules
by which organisms learn. To Skinner and Watson organisms learn
without being innately or pre-experientially provided with implicit
procedures by which to learn. Learning does not consist, at least
initially, in rule-governed behavior. Learning is what organisms do in
response to stimuli. For a behaviorist an organism learns, as it were,
from its successes and mistakes. "Rules," says Skinner
(1984a), "are derived from contingencies, which specify
discriminative stimuli, responses, and consequences" (p. 583).
(See also Dennett 1978).



Much contemporary work in cognitive science on the set of models known
as connectionist or parallel distributed processing (PDP) models seems
to share behaviorism's anti-nativism about learning. PDP model
building takes an approach to learning which is response oriented
rather than rule-governed and this is because, like behaviorism, it
has roots in associationism (see Bechtel 1985; compare Graham 1991
with Maloney 1991). Whether PDP models ultimately are or must be
anti-nativist depends upon what counts as native or innate rules
(Bechtel and Abrahamsen 1991, pp. 103-105). 



The third reason for behaviorism's appeal, popular at least
historically, is related to its disdain for reference to inner mental
or mentalistic information processing as explanatory causes of
behavior. The disdain is most vigorously exemplified in the work of
Skinner. Skinner's skepticism about explanatory references to
mental innerness may be described as follows.



Suppose we try to explain the public behavior of a person by
describing how they represent,conceptualize or think about their
situation. Suppose they conceive or think of their situation in a
certain way, not as bare, as filled with items without attributes, but
as things, as trees, as people, as walruses, walls, and wallets.
Suppose, we also say, a person never merely interacts with their
environment; but rather interacts with their environment as they
perceive, see, or represent it. So, for example, thinking of something
as a wallet, a person reaches for it. Perceiving something as a
walrus, they back away from it. Classifying something as a wall, they
don't bump into it. So understood, behavior is endogenously
produced movement, viz. behavior that has its causal origin within the
person who thinks of or represents their situation in a certain
way.



Skinner would object to such claims. He would object not because he
believes that the eye is innocent or that inner or endogenous activity
does not occur. He would object because he believes that behavior must
be explained in terms that do not themselves presuppose the very thing
that is explained. The outside (public) behavior of a person is not
accounted for by referring to the inside (inner processing, cognitive
activity) behavior of the person (say, his or her classifying or
analyzing their environment) if, therein, the behavior of the person
ultimately is unexplained. "The objection," wrote Skinner,
"to inner states is not that they do not exist, but that they
are not relevant in a functional analysis" (Skinner 1953, p.
35). 'Not relevant' means, for Skinner, explanatorily
circular or regressive.



Skinner charges that since mental activity is a form of behavior
(albeit inner), the only non-regressive, non-circular way to explain
behavior is to appeal to something non-behavioral. This non-behavioral
something is environmental stimuli and an organism's
interactions with, and reinforcement from, the environment.



So, the third reason for behaviorism's appeal is that it tries
to avoid (what it claims is) circular, regressive explanations of
behavior. It aims to refrain from accounting for one type of behavior
(overt) in terms of another type of behavior (covert), all the while,
in some sense, leaving behavior unexplained.



It should be noted that Skinner's views about explanation and
the purported circularity of explanation by reference to inner
processing are both extreme and scientifically contestable, and that
many who have self-identified as behaviorists including Guthrie,
Tolman, and Hull, or continue to work within the tradition, broadly
understood, including Killeen (1987) and Rescorla (1990), take
exception to much that Skinner has said about explanatory references
to innerness. Also Skinner himself is not always clear about his
aversion to innerness. Skinner's derisive attitude towards
explanatory references to mental innerness stems, in part, not just
from fears of explanatory circularity but from his conviction that if
the language of psychology is permitted to refer to internal
processing, this goes some way towards permitting talk of immaterial
mental substances, agents endowed with contra-causal free will, and
little persons (homunculi) within bodies. Each of these Skinner takes
to be incompatible with a scientific worldview (see Skinner 1971; see
also Day 1976). Finally, it must be noted that Skinner's
aversion to explanatory references to innerness is not an aversion to
inner mental states or processes per se. He readily admits that
private thoughts and so on exist. Skinner countenances talk of inner
events but only provided that their innerness is treated in the same
manner as public behavior or overt responses. An adequate science of
behavior, he claims, must describe events taking place within the skin
of the organism as part of behavior itself (see Skinner 1976).
"So far as I am concerned," he wrote in 1984 in a special
issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences devoted to his work,
"whatever happens when we inspect a public stimulus is in every
respect similar to what happens when we introspect a private
one" (Skinner 1984b, p. 575; compare Graham 1984, pp.
558-9).



Skinner does not have much to say about just how inner (covert,
private) behavior (like thinking, classifying, and analyzing) can be
described in the same manner as public or overt behavior. But his idea
is roughly as follows. Just as we may describe overt behavior or motor
movement in terms of concepts like stimulus, response, conditioning,
reinforcement, and so on, so we may deploy the very same terms in
describing inner or covert behavior. One thought or line of thought
may reinforce another thought. An act of analysis may serve as a
stimulus for an effort at classification. And so on. Purely
'mentalistic' activities may be at least roughly parsed in
terms of behavioral concepts -- a topic to be revisited later in
the entry (in the 7th Section). 


## 6. Skinner's Social Worldview



Skinner is the only major figure in the history of behaviorism to
offer a socio-political world view based on his commitment to
behaviorism. Skinner constructed a theory as well as narrative picture
in Walden Two (1948) of what an ideal human society would be like if
designed according to behaviorist principles (see also Skinner 1971).
Skinner's social worldview illustrates his aversions to free
will, to homunculi, and to dualism as well as his positive reasons for
claiming that a person's history of environmental interactions
controls his or her behavior.



One possible feature of human behavior which Skinner deliberately
rejects is that people freely or creatively make their own
environments (see Chomsky 1971, Black 1973). Skinner protests that
"it is in the nature of an experimental analysis of human
behavior that it should strip away the functions previously assigned
to a free or autonomous person and transfer them one by one to the
controlling environment" (1971, p. 198).



Critics have raised several objections to the Skinnerian social
picture. One of the most persuasive, and certainly one of the most
frequent, adverts to Skinner's vision of the ideal human
society. It is a question asked of the fictional founder of Walden
Two, Frazier, by the philosopher Castle. It is the question of what is
the best social or communal mode of existence for a human being.
Frazier's, and therein Skinner's, response to this
question is both too general and incomplete. Frazier/Skinner praises
the values of health, friendship, relaxation, rest, and so forth.
However, these values are hardly the detailed basis of a social
system.



There is a notorious difficulty in social theory of specifying the
appropriate level of detail at which a blueprint for a new and ideal
society must be presented (see Arnold 1990, pp. 4-10). Skinner
identifies the behavioristic principles and learning incentives that
he hopes will reduce systematic injustices in social systems. He also
describes a few practices (concerning child rearing and the like) that
are intended to contribute to human happiness. However, he offers only
the haziest descriptions of the daily lives of Walden Two citizens and
no suggestions for how best to resolve disputes about alternative ways
of life that are prima facie consistent with behaviorist principles
(see Kane 1996, p. 203). He gives little or no serious attention to
the crucial general problem of inter-personal conflict resolution and
to the role of institutional arrangements in resolving conflicts.



In an essay which appeared in The Behavior Analyst (1985), nearly
forty years after the publication of Walden Two, Skinner, in the guise
of Frazier, tried to clarify his characterization of ideal human
circumstances. He wrote that in the ideal human society "people
just naturally do the things they need to do to maintain themselves
... and treat each other well, and they just naturally do a
hundred other things they enjoy doing because they do not have to do
them" (p. 9). However, of course, doing a hundred things humans
enjoy doing means only that Walden Two is vaguely defined, not that
its culturally instituted habits and the character of its institutions
merit emulation.



The incompleteness of Skinner's description of the ideal human
society or life is so widely acknowledged that one might wonder if
actual experiments in Walden Two living could lend useful detail to
his blueprint. More than one such social experiment has been
conducted. Perhaps the most interesting (in part because the community
has evolved away from its Skinnerian roots) is the Twin Oaks Community
in Virginia in the U.S.A., which can be indirectly explored via the
Internet (see Other Internet Resources).


## 7. Why be Anti-Behaviorist



Behaviorism is dismissed by cognitive scientists developing intricate
internal information processing models of cognition. Its laboratory
routines or experimental regimens are neglected by cognitive
ethologists and ecological psychologists convinced that its methods
are irrelevant to studying how animals and persons behave in their
natural and social environment. Its traditional relative indifference
towards neuroscience and deference to environmental contingencies is
rejected by neuroscientists sure that direct study of the brain is the
only way to understand the truly proximate causes of behavior.



But by no means has behaviorism disappeared. Robust elements of
behaviorism survive in both behavior therapy and laboratory-based
animal learning theory (of which more below). In the metaphysics of
mind, too, behavioristic themes survive in the approach to mind known
as Functionalism. Functionalism defines states of mind as states that
play causal-functional roles in animals or systems in which they
occur. Paul Churchland writes of Functionalism as follows: "The
essential or defining feature of any type of mental states is the set
of causal relations it bears to ... bodily behavior" (1984,
p. 36). This functionalist notion is similar to the behaviorist idea
that reference to behavior and to stimulus/response relations enters
centrally and essentially into any account of what it means for a
creature to behave or to be subject, in the scheme of analytical or
logical behaviorism, to the attribution of mental states. 



Fans of the so-called and now widely discussed Extended Mind
Hypothesis (EMH) also share a kinship with behaviorism or at least
with Skinner. The defining hypothesis of EMH is that
"mental" representation is a matter that spills out from
the brain or head into the world and cultural environment (Levy 2007).
Representations are things external to the head or which bear special
individuating relationships with external devices or forms of cultural
activity. Skinner's misgivings about depicting the power of
mental representation as something confined to the head (brain, inner
mind) are at least loosely akin to EMH's shift to depict
representationality as environmentally extended.



Elements, however, are elements. Behaviorism is no longer a dominating
research program. 



Why has the influence of behaviorism declined? The deepest and most
complex reason for behaviorism's decline in influence is its
commitment to the thesis that behavior can be explained without
reference to non-behavioral and inner mental (cognitive,
representational, or interpretative) activity. Behavior, for Skinner,
can be explained just by reference to its "functional"
(Skinner's term) relation to or co-variation with the
environment and to the animal's history of environmental
interaction. Neurophysiological and neurobiological conditions, for
Skinner, sustain or implement these functional or causal relations.
But they do not serve as ultimate or independent sources or
explanations of behavior. Behavior, Skinner (1953) wrote, cannot be
accounted for "while staying wholly inside [an animal];
eventually we must turn to forces operating upon the organism from
without." "Unless there is a weak spot in our causal chain
so that the second [neurological] link is not lawfully determined by
the first [environmental stimuli], or the third [behavior] by the
second, the first and third links must be lawfully related." (p.
35) "Valid information about the second link may throw light on
this relationship but can in no way alter it." (ibid.) It is
"external variables of which behavior is a function."
(ibid.) 



Skinner was no triumphalist about neuroscience. Neuroscience, for him,
more or less just identifies organismic physical processes that
underlie animal/environment interactions. Therein, it rides evidential
or epistemic piggyback on radical behaviorism's prior
description of those interactions. "The organism", he
says, "is not empty, and it cannot adequately be treated simply
as a black box" (1976, p. 233). "Something is done today
which affects the behavior of the organism tomorrow" (p. 233).
Neuroscience describes inside-the-box mechanisms that permit
today's reinforcing stimulus to affect tomorrow's
behavior. The neural box is not empty, but it is unable, except in
cases of malfunction or breakdown, to disengage the animal from past
patterns of behavior that have been reinforced. It cannot exercise
independent or non-environmentally countervailing authority over
behavior.



For many critics of behaviorism it seems obvious that, at a minimum,
the occurrence and character of behavior (especially human behavior)
does not depend primarily upon an individual's reinforcement
history, although that is a factor, but on the fact that the
environment or learning history is represented by an individual and
how (the manner in which) it is represented. The fact that the
environment is represented by me constrains or informs the functional
or causal relations that hold between my behavior and the environment
and may, from an anti-behaviorist perspective, partially disengage my
behavior from its conditioning or reinforcement history. No matter,
for example, how tirelessly and repeatedly I have been reinforced for
pointing to or eating ice cream, such a history is impotent if I just
don't see a potential stimulus as ice cream or represent it to
myself as ice cream or if I desire to hide the fact that something is
ice cream from others. My conditioning history, narrowly understood as
unrepresented by me, is behaviorally less important than the
environment or my learning history as represented or interpreted by
me.



Similarly, for many critics of behaviorism, if representationality
comes between environment and behavior, this implies that Skinner is
too restrictive or limited in his attitude towards the role of brain
mechanisms in producing or controlling behavior. The brain is no mere
passive memory bank of behavior/environment interactions (see Roediger
and Goff 1998). The central nervous system, which otherwise sustains
my reinforcement history, contains systems or neurocomputational
sub-systems that implement or encode whatever representational content
or meaning the environment has for me. It is also an active
interpretation machine or semantic engine, often critically performing
environmentally untethered and behavior controlling tasks. Such talk
of representation or interpretation, however, is a perspective from
which behaviorism--most certainly in Skinner-- wishes and
tries to depart.



One defining aspiration of traditional behaviorism is that it tried to
free psychology from having to theorize about how animals and persons
represent (internally, in the head) their environment. This effort at
freedom was important, historically, because it seemed that
behavior/environment connections are a lot clearer and more manageable
experimentally than internal representations. Unfortunately, for
behaviorism, it's hard to imagine a more restrictive rule for
psychology than one which prohibits hypotheses about representational
storage and processing. Stephen Stich, for example, complains against
Skinner that "we now have an enormous collection of experimental
data which, it would seem, simply cannot be made sense of unless we
postulate something like" information processing mechanisms in
the heads of organisms (1998, p. 649).



A second reason for rejecting behaviorism is that some features of
mentality--some elements, in particular, of the conscious mental
life of persons--have characteristic 'qualia' or
presentationally immediate or phenomenal qualities. To be in pain, for
example, is not merely to produce appropriate pain behavior under the
right environmental circumstances, but it is to experience a
'like-thisness' to the pain (as something dull or sharp,
perhaps). A purely behaviorist creature, a 'zombie', as it
were, may engage in pain behavior, including beneath the skin pain
responses, yet completely lack whatever is qualitatively distinctive
of and proper to pain (its painfulness). (See also Graham 1998, pp.
47-51 and Graham and Horgan 2000. On the scope of the phenomenal
in human mentality, see Graham, Horgan, and Tienson 2009).



The philosopher-psychologist U. T. Place, although otherwise
sympathetic to the application of behaviorist ideas to matters of
mind, argued that phenomenal qualia cannot be analyzed in behaviorist
terms. He claimed that qualia are neither behavior nor dispositions to
behave. "They make themselves felt," he said, "from
the very moment that the experience of whose qualia they are"
comes into existence (2000, p. 191; reprinted in Graham and Valentine
2004). They are instantaneous features of processes or events rather
than dispositions manifested over time. Qualitative mental events
(such as sensations, perceptual experiences, and so on), for Place,
undergird dispositions to behave rather than count as dispositions.
Indeed, it is tempting to postulate that the qualitative aspects of
mentality affect non-qualitative elements of internal processing, and
that they, for example, contribute to arousal, attention, and
receptivity to associative conditioning.



The third reason for rejecting behaviorism is connected with Noam
Chomsky. Chomsky has been one of behaviorism's most successful
and damaging critics. In a review of Skinner's book on verbal
behavior (see above), Chomsky (1959) charged that behaviorist models
of language learning cannot explain various facts about language
acquisition, such as the rapid acquisition of language by young
children, which is sometimes referred to as the phenomenon of
"lexical explosion." A child's linguistic abilities
appear to be radically underdetermined by the evidence of verbal
behavior offered to the child in the short period in which he or she
expresses those abilities. By the age of four or five (normal)
children have an almost limitless capacity to understand and produce
sentences which they have never heard before. Chomsky also argued that
it seems plainly untrue that language learning depends on the
application of detailed reinforcement. A child does not, as an English
speaker in the presence of a house, utter "house"
repeatedly in the presence of reinforcing elders. Language as such
seems to be learned without, in a sense, being explicitly taught or
taught in detail, and behaviorism doesn't offer an account of
how this could be so. Chomsky's own speculations about the
psychological realities underlying language development include the
hypothesis that the rules or principles underlying linguistic behavior
are abstract (applying to all human languages) and innate (part of our
native psychological endowment as human beings). When put to the test
of uttering a grammatical sentence, a person, for Chomsky, has a
virtually infinite number of possible responses available, and the
only way in which to understand this virtually infinite generative
capacity is to suppose that a person possesses a powerful and abstract
innate grammar (underlying whatever competence he or she may have in
one or more particular natural languages).



The problem to which Chomsky refers, which is the problem of
behavioral competence and thus performance outstripping individual
learning histories, goes beyond merely the issue of linguistic
behavior in young children. It appears to be a fundamental fact about
human beings that our behavior and behavioral capacities often surpass
the limitations of individual reinforcement histories. Our history of
reinforcement is often too impoverished to determine uniquely what we
do or how we do it. Much learning, therefore, seems to require
pre-existing or innate representational structures or principled
constraints within which learning occurs. (See also Brewer 1974, but
compare with Bates et al. 1998 and Cowie 1998).



Is the case against behaviorism definitive? Decisive? Paul Meehl noted
decades ago that theories in psychology seem to disappear not under
the force of decisive refutation but rather because researchers lose
interest in their theoretical orientations (Meehl 1978). One
implication of Meehl's thesis is that a once popular
"Ism", not having been decisively refuted, may restore
some of its former prominence if it mutates or transforms itself so as
to incorporate responses to criticisms. What may this mean for
behaviorism? It may mean that some version of the doctrine might
rebound.



Skinner claimed that neural activities subserve or underlie
behavior/environment relations and that the organism's
contribution to these relations does not reduce to neurophysiological
properties. But this does not mean that behaviorism cannot gain useful
alliance with neuroscience. Reference to brain structures
(neurobiology, neurochemistry, and so on) may help in explaining
behavior even if such references do not ultimately displace reference
to environmental contingencies in a behaviorist account.



Such is a lesson of animal modeling in which behaviorist themes still
enjoy currency. Animal models of addiction, habit and instrumental
learning are particularly noteworthy because they bring behavioral
research into closer contact than did traditional psychological
behaviorism with research on the brain mechanisms underlying
reinforcement, especially positive reinforcement (West 2006, pp.
91-108). One result of this contact is the discovery that
sensitized neural systems responsible for heightened reinforcement
value or strength can be dissociated from the hedonic utility or
pleasurable quality of reinforcement (see Robinson and Berridge 2003).
The power of a stimulus to reinforce behavior may be independent of
whether it is a source or cause of pleasure. Focus on brain mechanisms
underlying reinforcement also forms the centerpiece of one of the most
active research programs in current neuroscience, so-called
neuroeconomics, which weds study of the brain's reward systems
with models of valuation and economic decision making (see Montague
and Berns 2002; Nestler and Malenka 2004; Ross et al 2008).
Behaviorism may do well to purchase some of neuroeconomic's
conceptual currency, especially since some advocates of the program
see themselves as behaviorists in spirit if not stereotypical letter
and honor the work of a number of theorists in the behavioristic
tradition of the experimental analysis of behavior, such as George
Ainslie, Richard Herrnstein and Howard Rachlin, on how patterns of
behavior relate to patterns of reward or reinforcement (see Ross et
al. 2008, especially p. 10). One important assumption in
neuroeconomics is that full explanations of organism/environmental
interactions will combine facts about such things as reinforcement
schedules with appeal to neurocomputational modeling and to the
neurochemistry and neurobiology of reinforcement. 



Other potential sources of utility or renewal? The continued
popularity of so-called economic behavior therapy is noteworthy
because it offers a potential domain of testing application for the
regimen of behaviorism. Early versions of behavior therapy sought to
apply restricted results from Skinnerian or Pavlovian conditioning
paradigms to human behavior problems. No minds should be spoken of;
just behavior--stimuli, responses, and reinforcement. Therapy
shapes behavior not thought. Successive generations of behavior
therapy relax those conceptual restrictions. Advocates refer to
themselves as cognitive behavior therapists (e.g. Mahoney 1974;
Meichenbaum 1977). Clients' behavior problems are described by
referring to their beliefs, desires, intentions, memories, and so on.
Even the language of self-reflexive thought and belief (so-called
'meta-cognition') figures in some accounts of behavioral
difficulties and interventions (Wells 2000). One goal of such language
is to encourage clients to monitor and self-reinforce their own
behavior. Self-reinforcement is an essential feature of behavioral
self-control (Rachlin 2000; Ainslie 2001). The monitoring process
may include a number of checking and error detection processes and
correction of behavior in a client's current life circumstances
(West 2006).



It may be wondered whether cognitive behavior therapy is aptly
consistent with behaviorist doctrine. Much depends on how beliefs and
desires are understood. If beliefs and desires are understood as
states that somehow spill out into the environment and are
individuated in terms of their non-mentalistic, behavior-like role in
organism/environment interactions, this would be consistent with
traditional behaviorist doctrine. It would reflect the principle of
logical or analytical behaviorism that if mental terms are to be used
in the description and explanation of behavior, they must be defined
or paraphrased in non-mental behavioral terms. Prospects for
belief/desire individuation in non-mental, environmentally externalist
terms may look doubtful however, especially in cases of conscious
attitudes(see Horgan, Tienson and Graham 2006). But the topic of the
forms and limits of behavior therapy and the range of its plausible
application is open for continued further exploration. 


## 8. Conclusion



In 1977 Willard Day, a behavioral psychologist and founding editor of
the journal Behaviorism (later known as Behavior and Philosophy),
published Skinner's "Why I am not a cognitive
psychologist" (Skinner 1977). Skinner began the paper by stating
that "the variables of which human behavior is a function lie in
the environment" (p. 1). Skinner ended by remarking that
"cognitive constructs give ... a misleading account of
what" is inside a human being (p. 10)



More than a decade earlier, in 1966 Carl Hempel had announced his
defection from behaviorism:



> 
> In order to characterize ... behavioral patterns, propensities,
> or capacities ... we need not only a suitable behavioristic
> vocabulary, but psychological terms as well. (p. 110)
> 



Hempel had come to believe that it is a mistake to imagine that human
behavior can be understood exclusively in non-mental, behavioristic
terms.



Contemporary psychology and philosophy largely share Hempel's
conviction that the explanation of behavior cannot omit invoking a
creature's representation of its world. Psychology must use
psychological terms. Behavior without cognition is blind.
Psychological theorizing without reference to internal cognitive
processing is explanatorily impaired. To say this, of course, is not
to a priori preclude that behaviorism will recover some of its
prominence. Just how to conceive of cognitive processing (even where
to locate it) remains a heated subject of debate (see Melser 2004; see
also Levy 2007, pp. 29-64). But if behaviorism is to recover
some of its prominence, this recovery may require a reformulation of
its doctrines that is attune to developments (like that of
neuroeconomics) in neuroscience as well as in novel therapeutic
orientations.



Skinner's vantage point on or special contribution to
behaviorism mates the science of behavior with the language of
organism/environment interactions. But we humans don't just run
and mate and walk and eat in this or that environment. We think,
classify, analyze, imagine, and theorize. In addition to our outer
behavior, we have highly complex inner lives, wherein we are active,
often imaginatively, in our heads, all the while often remaining as
stuck as posts, as still as stones. Call our inner life
'behavior' if one wants, but this piece of linguistic
stipulation does not mean that the probability or occurrence of inner
events is shaped by the same environmental contingencies as overt
behavior or bodily movements. It does not mean that understanding a
sentence or composing an entry for this encyclopedia consist of the
same general modes of discriminatory responses as learning how to move
one's body in pursuit of a food source. How the Inner
Representational World of mind maps into the Country of Behaviorism
remains the "ism's" still incompletely charted
territory.