Philosophical Aspects of Behaviorism

Description of the Strategy

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 nonbehavioristic 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 things such 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 [Page 435]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. Despite 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 schemas, 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.

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