BEHAVIOR AND ITS CAUSES

STUDIES IN COGNITIVE SYSTEMS

VOLUME 16

EDITOR

James H. Fetzer, University of Minnesota, Duluth

ADVISORY EDITORIAL BOARD

Fred Dretske, Stanford University

Ellery Eells, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Alick Elithom, Royal Free Hospital, London

Jerry Fodor, Rutgers University

Alvin Goldman, University of Arizona

Jaakko Hintikka, Boston University

Frank Keil, Cornell University

William Rapaport, State University of New York at Buffalo

Barry Richards, Imperial College, London

Stephen Stich, Rutgers University

Lucia Vaina, Boston University

Terry Winograd, Stanford University

The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

BEHAVIOR AND ITS CAUSES

Philosophical Foundations of Operant Psychology

by

TERRY L. SMITH

University of the District of Columbia, Washington, DC

Springer-Science+Business Media, B.Y.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-90-481-4393-1 ISBN 978-94-015-8102-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8102-8

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1994. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1994

No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

For Mom and Dad

Behaviorism, as we know it, will eventually die--not because it is a failure but because it is a success. As a critical philosophy of science, it will necessarily change as a science of behavior changes, and the current issues which define behaviorism may be wholly resolved. The basic question is the usefulness of mentalistic concepts. (Skinner, 1969, p. 267)

SERIES PREFACE

This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information, and data-processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental capabilities of other species) to ideas related to artificial intelligence and computer science. While primary emphasis will be placed upon theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological aspects of these problems and domains, empirical, experimental, and methodological studies will also appear from time to time.

While most philosophers and psychologists tend to believe that the rise of cognitive psychology has occurred concomitant with the decline of operant psychology, Terry L. Smith contends that nothing could be further from the truth. He maintains that operant psychology has discovered (and continues to discover) reasonably well-confirmed causal principles of intentional behavior, which go beyond what cognitive psychology can provide, while cognitive psychology, in tum, has the potential to supply analyses (and explanations) that account for them. Smith thus advances a surprising but nonetheless illuminating perspective for appreciating the place of operant conditioning within the discipline of psychology in this rich and fascinating work.

J. H. F.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

SERIES PREFACE

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION / The Anomalous Survival of Operant Psychology

PART ONE / UNDERSTANDING THE PROGRAM OF RESEARCH

CHAPTER ONE / Defining the Operant

CHAPTER TWO / Not a Form of S-R Psychology

CHAPTER THREE / The Functional Nature

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1

13

15

27

of Behavioral Categories 47

PART TWO / CIRCUMVENTING STANDARD CRITICISMS OF THE PROGRAM 65

CHAPTER FOUR / Minor Problems 67

CHAPTER FIVE / Folk Psychology's Critique 83

CHAPTER SIX / Rebutting Folk Psychology's Critique 99

CHAPTER SEVEN / A Sophisticated Rejoinder by Philosophers 119

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PART THREE / WEIGHING THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF RADICAL BEHAVIORISM 135

CHAPTER EIGHT / What Is Radical Behaviorism? 137

CHAPTER NINE / The Scientific Case for Radical Behaviorism 149

CHAPTER TEN / The Analogy with Natural Selection 171

PART FOUR / DISENTANGLING THE PROGRAM FROM RADICAL BEHAVIORISM 187

CHAPTER ELEVEN / Transcending Behaviorism 191

CHAPTER TWELVE / Operant Psychology without Behaviorism 215

REFERENCES 237

INDEX OF NAMES 253

INDEX OF SUBJECTS 257

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PREFACE

In the summer of 1980, I attended Professor Dudley Shapere's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on the philosophy of science. The topic was scientific revolutions. Each participant was to choose a revolution and do a case study of it. Like many other philosophers, I thought psychology had undergone a revolution in the 1960's, so I chose that episode for my case study. I focused upon Noam Chomsky's (1959) critique of B. F. Skinner's (1957) Verbal Behavior.

When I outlined my preliminary analysis for Professor Shapere, it dealt with the issue of whether Chomsky's case against Skinner would have been decisive within a behaviorist epistemology. He listened quietly, nodding in agreement occasionally, then surprised me when I had finished by asking only this question: "What happened to the Skinnerians? "

In truth, I had never thought about it. I had (like just about everyone else) read Kuhn (1970), and so almost reflexively I had interpreted cognitive psychology and behavioral psychology as competing paradigms (see Leahey, 1992, for a discussion of how common, and mistaken, this interpretation is). Cognitive psychology clearly was on the rise, so I inferred that the Skinnerian program must be on the decline. Indeed, I thought it must have just about disappeared by now. Professor Shapere's question, however, implied that this outcome was not a foregone conclusion, so I took the prudent course and replied that I did not know what had happened to the Skinnerians. He suggested this might be worth looking into. That proved to be a fruitful suggestion. What I discovered was that during the 1960's, the Skinnerian program had actually grown at an accelerating rate. This baffled me. How could operant psychology have survived, and even prospered, in the midst of "the cognitive revolution"? My interest soon shifted from the narrow question of whether Chomsky had refuted behaviorism on its own terms to the

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broad puzzle of how the operant program had managed to grow (and grow rapidly) when cognitive psychology was also growing rapidly.

The following essay is my attempt to solve this puzzle. My approach is philosophical, rather than historical or sociological--i.e., my solution refers to the concepts and theories of the program itself, and not to the "considerations of authority and power" (Kuhn, 1992, p. 8) that constitute the major alternative to philosophical explanation in this domain. I start with a working assumption: Operant psychology is unlikely to have grown in the manner it did without having something important (and essentially correct) to say about behavior. I attempt to fmd out what this something is, and to explicate its relationship to behaviorism and to cognitive psychology. My major conclusions are: (a) that operant psychology has formulated (and continues to formulate) reasonably well confirmed causal principles of intentional behavior (including the intentional behavior of human beings), whereas cognitive psychology has not formulated (and cannot by its very nature formulate) such principles; and (b) that cognitive psychology has the potential to provide (and to some extent already does provide) an analysis of the processes that underlie (and therefore partially explain) the principles mentioned in (a), whereas operant psychology has failed (and seems likely to continue to fail) to do so-­even though Skinner based his philosophy on the thesis that the operant program was destined eventually to succeed in doing so. In other words, operant psychology and cognitive psychology complement one another.

This carries the account about as far as a philosopher can go. What I show is simply that the two programs fit together--or more specifically, that not only do their major assertions not contradict one another, but the explanatory strengths of one are the explanatory weaknesses of the other. I would suggest (although I must leave it to historians to test the idea) that the actual concurrence of the growth of the two programs is due to the fact that they are different aspects of a single process of historical development.

The following analysis is meant to address the concerns of philosophers, cognitive psychologists, and operant psychologists. In order to say something of interest to what is, in the world of philosophical monographs, a rather diverse audience, one must make

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some decisions about when to address whom about what. In general, questions are raised in the order they would arise for a philosopher who is skeptical about the relevance of operant psychology to any significant question about the intentional behavior of a normal adult human being. Actually, this seems to be the opinion held by most professional philosophers, whether they be specialists in the philosophy of psychology or generalists who touch upon Skinnerian psychology only occasionally--perhaps in teaching an introductory philosophy course. It is likely that more than a few cognitive psychologists hold this opinion as well.

These two groups--philosophers and cognitive psychologists--are the primary audience. The secondary audience consists of operant psychologists. I assume the primary audience to be familiar with the basic concepts and principles of cognitive psychology. I do not, however, assume familiarity with the basic concepts and principles of operant psychology. Indeed, I assume the opposite. Therefore, Part I spends a significant amount of time going over ground that will be familiar to operant psychologists. Part II draws some of the philosophical implications of the concepts and principles discussed in Part I. Some, but not all, of this material will be familiar to operant psychologists. I believe they will find it to be consistent with their understanding of their discipline.

In Part III, however, the interpretation of operant concepts and principles becomes more open to challenge by operant psychologists themselves. The objective is to explicate the relationship between radical behaviorism and Skinner's own scientific research. Little progress can be made on this front, however, without using the term radical behaviorism in a manner that is consistent with Skinner's intent. Unfortunately, there is a widespread inclination even among operant psychologists to tolerate a much looser usage than Skinner's. I therefore try to reconstruct what Skinner meant by his coinage. I then use this reconstruction to make sense of Skinner's scientific career, identifying its goals, locating its successes and failures.

Part IV explains why operant psychology needs to abandon (indeed, has already abandoned) radical behaviorism, then locates operant psychology within psychology as a whole. It argues that the major principles of operant psychology have nothing to fear from cognitive

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theory, and indeed, offer psychology's only source of answers to certain important questions. The final sections of the final chapter round off the discussion by asking whether operant theory has any significant ethical or political implications. The answer proffered is "Yes, but not the ones drawn by radical behaviorism."

Terry L. Smith Takoma Park, MD July 4, 1993

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The following material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DIR-89121291, a 1989 Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities (FT-32325), a 1989 and a 1991 Faculty Senate Summer Research Award from the University of the District of Columbia, and a 1989-1990 sabbatical grant from the University of the District of Columbia. The author gratefully acknowledges the support received from these institutions. The Government has certain rights in this material. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the University of the District of Columbia.

I want to express my gratitude to Dudley Shapere, Charlie Catania, Ron Amundson, Jim Joyce, Al Mosley, Jon Ringen, and Fred Dretske for their assistance. Each of them influenced this project for the better. lowe a special debt to Michael Schulman, Jon Ringen, Charlie Catania, Fred Dretske, and a blind reviewer for commenting upon an earlier version of this manuscript. Those comments guided revisions of the NSF report (T. L. Smith, 1991) upon which this book is based.

I acknowledge the B. F. Skinner Foundation for permission to use two figures from Ferster & Skinner (1957), and the American Psychological Association for permission to use a figure from Skinner (1956). I thank Rob Jones for technical assistance with my computing problems, Manon Cleary for permission to use a copy of her oil painting for the cover illustration, Richard Colker for commenting upon and proofing the penultimate draft, and Jim Fetzer for steadily encouraging me across the finish line. Finally, I want to express my warm appreciation to my wife, Nora Blue, who has supported this project in numerous ways even as she launched a career and shared in the care of Russell and Trisha.

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