Association for Behavior Analysis International

Consciousness and Private Events

Behaviorism, Values, and Ethics

David Hume argued, Dr. Staddon believes irrefutably, that "ought" cannot be derived from "is." That is, no set of facts, no amount of scientific knowledge, is by itself sufficient to urge us to action. Yet, generations of well-meaning scientists-more and more as the years go by and secular influences grow in the West-seem to have forgotten Hume's words of wisdom. All motivated action depends ultimately on belief or beliefs that cannot be proved by the methods of science.

Logical and Scientific Verbal Behavior: What's Happened to Skinner's "Empirical Epistemology"?

In his seminal paper, "An Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms," B. F. Skinner (1945) offered the revolutionary suggestion that rather than endlessly debating the meanings of psychological terms, psychologists should analyze the variables controlling their occurrence. Skinner's suggestion reflected the essence of his 1957 book, Verbal Behavior, wherein he argued that the behaviors of which language is composed (i.e., speaking and listening) are caused by variables found in the social environment (which he called the verbal community), and that analyzing those variables would lead to understanding the behaviors. Although Skinner formally introduced his radical approach to language in 1945, it has yet to be fully realized. The result is that psychologists, including behavior analysts, still debate the definitions of terms. In the present paper, Dr. Schlinger will review Skinner's functional approach to language and describe ways in which behavior analysts have already applied it to such traditional psychological terms as memory, cognition, intelligence, perception, imagining, and consciousness. He will conclude by encouraging psychologists as well as behavior analysts to apply a functional analytic approach to their own verbal behavior.

Nature has stumbled on the power of permutations in several domains, such as the composition of molecules, the codifying of genes, and the synthesis of proteins. Human behavior is distinctive in that verbal behavior facilitates "directed permutations" of elementary behavioral units analogous to the stringing together of amino acids under the control of RNA codons. The tacting of behavioral atoms following reinforcement, in the presence of an audience with a suitable atomic repertoire, permits the rapid transmission of adaptive behavior throughout a verbal community, and short-circuits the alternative process of shaping. In contrast, problem solving entails the marshaling of supplementary stimuli to generate novel permutations in behavior, only some of which might be captured by contingencies of reinforcement. When reinforced, behavior becomes the source of directed permutations. Such variation, in the first instance, is always blind, but it can become directed variation, as when "strategies" are explicitly inculcated. Knowledge, then, always arises from chance variation, possibly during long periods of time and highly uncertain of success, but once successful becomes rapidly transmitted as directed permutations of behavior. However, in the latter case, we ordinarily speak of "knowledge" only when control of the behavior has transferred to other variables.

What Counts as Behavior?

Abstract: Three categories of behavior analyses can be identified, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Skinner popularized a "molecular" category with his demonstrations of how to manually and powerfully shape new behaviors out of an individual behavior stream. A "molar" category involves a previously shaped activity, often a "free operant," which is assumed to be sufficiently stable so that its average rate or average duration of occurrence can be meaningfully computed, usually in order to study how reinforcement strengthens the stable response or activity. Molar analyses can be conducted independently of any known behavior stream such as when James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein analyzed average national crime rates. This category historically derives in part from Skinner's interpretation of Ernst Mach's philosophy of science. A third category integrates molecular and molar analyses. It automates shaping to create new behavioral patterns with specified quantitative properties and shows how shaping and strengthening processes of reinforcement interact to define and control behavior. It more precisely controls behavior than the first and second categories and thereby sharply restricts "freedom,"which requires abandoning Mach's philosophyand more closely resembles science as commonly understood.

Patterns of Explanation in Behavior Analysis: Models and Theories

A complexity theory is stated as a set of relatively simple rules that operate repeatedly to generate an output. The output, which typically exhibits properties and features that are not immediately derivable from the rules themselves, is then compared to the natural phenomena the theory purports to explain. At least four instances of complexity theory have appeared in behavior analysis. These are Charles P. Shimp's theory of momentary maximizing, John Donahoe and colleagues' theory of neural networks, A. Charles Catantia's theory of the reflex reserve, and Jack McDowell's theory of behavioral evolution. Each theory generates behavior by means of the rules it implements. If the generated behavior is comparable to the behavior of live organisms, then what is one warranted in asserting about the rules that constitute the theory? For example, is it important that they correspond to events and processes in the natural world? What is the nature of a theory that generates output that is consistent with observation, but that consists of rules that do not correspond, or cannot be determined to correspond, to events in the natural world? Answers to these questions may lead to a more or less maintainable distinction between a model and a theory, and to a profitable discussion of the relative value of these two types of account.