'Methodological' behaviourists often accept the existence of feelings and states of mind, but do not deal with them because they are not public and hence statements about them are not subject to confirmation by more than one person. 'Radical' behaviourists, on the other hand, recognize the role of private events (accessible in varying degrees to self-observation and physiological research), but contend that so-called mental activities are metaphors or explanatory fictions and that behaviour attributed to them can be more effectively explained in other ways. A few examples will be considered here to illustrate the latter position.
Purpose, intention, expectation. Most behaviour is selected by its consequences. For example, we tend to do the things we have successfully done in the past. Although it is the product only of past consequences, behaviour is useful because it may have similar consequences in the future. We refer indirectly to that future when we say that we act with a purpose, intention, or expectation. Such 'states of mind' are not, however, the causes of our behaviour. We do not act because we have a purpose, we act because of past consequences, the very consequences that generate the condition of our bodies which we observe introspectively and call felt purpose. Natural selection raised the same issues. Has life a purpose? Is a given species the result of an intentional design? (See evolution: has it a purpose?) These concepts can be abandoned in both fields when the principle of selection by consequences is understood.
Mental processes. Many aspects of mental life are modelled upon the physical environment. The smell of a rose is said to 'remind us of' or 'bring to mind' the visual appearance of a rose because we associate one with the other. But the odour and the visual properties are associated in the rose. When we have been exposed to two physically associated stimuli, we may subsequently respond to one as we responded to the other, but the environmental association is enough to account for our behaviour. We have no introspective evidence of any internal process of association. Abstraction, concept formation, and many other so-called mental processes are also modelled upon complex arrangements of stimuli, and again the arrangements suffice to explain the behaviour without appeal to mental duplicates.
Sensations, perceptions, and images. Most people believe that when they look at a rose they construct an internal copy, called a sensation or perception, and that later, when they are reminded of a rose, they reconstruct that copy, now called a mental image, and look at it again. They do not observe themselves doing so; they simply see a rose. Under special circumstances, they may, in addition, observe that they are seeing one, but even so there is no evidence, introspective or physiological, of an internal copy. If seeing were simply constructing a copy of the thing seen, we should have to make another copy to see the copy, and then another copy to see that. At some point we must 'see a rose' in some other sense. What that means is not well understood — by anyone. Rather than look for internal representations, we should examine the ways in which a person learns to see things, in both the presence and absence of the things seen.
Reasons and reasoning. Three things must be taken into account in the study of behaviour: the situation in which behaviour occurs, the behaviour itself, and the consequences that follow. The relations among these things can be very complex, and only a careful scientific analysis will then untangle them. For practical purposes, however, we describe many of them with reasonable accuracy. When we give someone advice, for example, we specify a situation ('When you have a headache ...'), an act ('take an aspirin ...'), and (possibly only by implication) a consequence ('and you will feel better').
People profit from advice because by following it they can behave in ways which, without help, they would have to learn through a possibly long exposure to the conditions described. The social environment called a culture offers a vast store of rules, maxims, and governmental and scientific laws describing relations among situations, behaviour, and consequences, which enable people to acquire much more extensive repertoires than would otherwise be possible.
In taking advice or following rules we can be said to behave because of reasons rather than causes, and in what is called reasoning we formulate rules for our own use. Rather than explore a situation and allow our behaviour to be changed directly by it, we analyse the situation and extract a rule which we then follow. We sometimes extract rules from other rules, as in logic and mathematics.
Introspection. The world within a human skin is part of the physical world. It may seem that we should know it better because we are close to it, and we do, indeed, respond to private events with great precision in the normal functioning of our bodies. But knowing about our bodies, in the same sense in which we know about the world around us, depends upon conditions which cannot easily be arranged with respect to a private world. We learn to tell P from Q because other people respond appropriately when we say 'P' or 'Q' when looking at a letter. Unfortunately they cannot respond as precisely when we name or describe a private event (such as those we call feelings or states of mind), because they lack the necessary contact. As a result, we never know our own bodies with any great accuracy. Moreover, we cannot know much about many important parts of them (for example, the physiological processes that mediate the complex behaviour called thinking) because we simply do not have nerves going to relevant places.
Behaviourism criticizes mentalistic explanations of behaviour in this way only to promote a more effective analysis. By dismissing mental states and processes as metaphors or fictions, it directs attention to the genetic and personal histories of the individual and to the current environment, where the real causes of behaviour are to be found. It also clarifies the assignment of the neurosciences, saving the time that would otherwise be wasted in searching for the neurological counterparts of sensations, stored memories, and thought processes. Behaviour is simply part of the biology of the organism and can be integrated with the rest of that field when described in appropriate physical dimensions.
At the same time behaviourism provides an overview which is particularly helpful in the social sciences. The experimental analysis of behaviour has led to an effective technology, applicable to education, psychotherapy, and the design of cultural practices in general, which will be more effective when it is not competing with practices that have had the unwarranted support of mentalistic theories.
(Published 1987)
— B. F. Skinner
- Bibliography
- Skinner, B. F. (1974). About Behaviorism.
