Behaviorism

First published Fri May 26, 2000; substantive revision Fri Jan 13, 2023

It has sometimes been said that “behave is what organismsdo.” Behaviorism is built on this assumption, and its goal is topromote the scientific study of behavior. The behavior, in particular,of individual organisms. Not of social groups. Not of cultures. But ofpersons and animals.

This entry considers different types of behaviorism and outlinesreasons for and against being a behaviorist. It consider contributionsof behaviorism to the study of behavior. Special attention is given tothe so-called “radical behaviorism” of B. F. Skinner(1904–90). Skinner is given special (not exclusive) attentionbecause he is the behaviorist who has received the most attention fromphilosophers, fellow scientists and the public at large. Generallessons can also be learned from Skinner about the conduct ofbehavioral science in general. The entry describes those lessons.

1. What is Behaviorism?

One has to be careful with “ism” words. They often haveboth loose and strict meanings. And sometimes multiple meanings ofeach type. ‘Behaviorism’ is no exception. Looselyspeaking, behaviorism is an attitude – a way of conceiving ofempirical constraints on psychological state attribution. Strictlyspeaking, behaviorism is a doctrine – a way of doingpsychological or behavioral science itself.

Wilfred Sellars (1912–89), the distinguished philosopher, notedthat a person may qualify as a behaviorist, loosely or attitudinallyspeaking, if they insist on confirming “hypotheses aboutpsychological events in terms of behavioral criteria” (1963, p.22). A behaviorist, so understood, is someone who demands behavioralevidence for any psychological hypothesis. For such a person, there isno knowable difference between two states of mind (beliefs, desires,etc.) unless there is a demonstrable difference in the behaviorassociated with each state. Consider the current belief of a personthat it is raining. If there is no difference in his or her behaviorbetween believing that it is raining and believing that it is notraining, there is no grounds for attributing the one belief ratherthan the other. The attribution is empirically empty or unconstrained.

Arguably, there is nothing truly exciting about behaviorism looselyunderstood. It enthrones behavioral evidence, an arguably inescapablepremise not just in psychological science but in ordinary discourseabout mind and behavior. Just how behavioral evidence should be‘enthroned’ (especially in science) may be debated. Butenthronement itself is not in question.

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

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

Psychology is the science of behavior. Psychology is not thescience of the inner mind – as something other or different frombehavior.
Behavior can be described and explained without making ultimatereference to mental events or to internal psychological processes. Thesources of behavior are external (in the environment), not internal(in the mind, in the head).
In the course of theory development in psychology, if, somehow,mental terms or concepts are deployed in describing or explainingbehavior, then either (a) these terms or concepts should be eliminatedand replaced by behavioral terms or (b) they can and should betranslated or paraphrased into behavioral concepts.

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

Other nomenclature is sometimes used to classify behaviorisms. GeorgesRey (1997, p. 96), for example, classifies behaviorisms asmethodological, analytical, and radical, where “radical”is Rey’s term for what is here classified as psychologicalbehaviorism. The term “radical” is instead reserved forthe psychological behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. Skinner employs theexpression “radical behaviorism” to describe his brand ofbehaviorism or his philosophy of behaviorism (see Skinner 1974, p.18). In the classification scheme used in this entry, radicalbehaviorism 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 scientificconduct of psychology. It claims that psychology should concern itselfwith the behavior of organisms (human and nonhuman animals).Psychology should not concern itself with mental states or events orwith constructing internal information processing accounts ofbehavior. According to methodological behaviorism, reference to mentalstates, such as an animal’s beliefs or desires, adds nothing towhat psychology can and should understand about the sources ofbehavior. Mental states are private entities which, given thenecessary publicity of science, do not form proper objects ofempirical study. Methodological behaviorism is a dominant theme in thewritings of John Watson (1878–1958).

Psychological behaviorism is a research program within psychology. Itpurports to explain human and animal behavior in terms of externalphysical stimuli, responses, learning histories, and (for certaintypes of behavior) reinforcements. Psychological behaviorism ispresent in the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), Edward Thorndike(1874–1949), as well as Watson. Its fullest and most influentialexpression is B. F. Skinner’s work on schedules ofreinforcement.

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

Analytical or logical behaviorism is a theory within philosophy aboutthe meaning or semantics of mental terms or concepts. It says that thevery idea of a mental state or condition is the idea of a behavioraldisposition or family of behavioral tendencies, evident in how aperson behaves in one situation rather than another. When we attributea belief, for example, to someone, we are not saying that he or she isin a particular internal state or condition. Instead, we arecharacterizing the person in terms of what he or she might do inparticular situations or environmental interactions. Analyticalbehaviorism may be found in the work of Gilbert Ryle (1900–76)and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–51) (if perhapsnot without controversy in interpretation, in Wittgenstein’scase). More recently, the philosopher-psychologist U. T. Place(1924–2000) advocated a brand of analytical behaviorism restricted tointentional or representational states of mind, such as beliefs, whichPlace took to constitute a type, although not the only type, ofmentality (see Graham and Valentine 2004). Arguably, a version ofanalytical or logical behaviorism may also be found in the work ofDaniel Dennett on the ascription of states of consciousness via amethod he calls ‘heterophenomenology’ (Dennett 2005, pp.25–56). (See also Melser 2004.)

3. Roots of Behaviorism

Each of methodological, psychological, and analytical behaviorism hashistorical foundations. Analytical behaviorism traces its historicalroots to the philosophical movement known as Logical Positivism (seeSmith 1986). Logical positivism proposes that the meaning ofstatements used in science must be understood in terms of experimentalconditions or observations that verify their truth. This positivistdoctrine is known as “verificationism.” In psychology,verificationism underpins or grounds analytical behaviorism, namely,the claim that mental concepts refer to behavioral tendencies and somust be translated into behavioral terms.

Analytical behaviorism helps to avoid a metaphysical position known assubstance dualism. Substance dualism is the doctrine that mentalstates take place in a special, non-physical mental substance (theimmaterial mind). By contrast, for analytical behaviorism, the beliefthat 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 mentalsubstance. Believing is a family of tendencies of my body. Inaddition, for an analytical behaviorist, we cannot identify the beliefabout my arrival independently of that arrival or other members ofthis family of tendencies. So, we also cannot treat it as the cause ofthe arrival. Cause and effect are, as Hume taught, conceptuallydistinct existences. Believing that I have a 2pm appointment is notdistinct from my arrival and so cannot be part of the causalfoundations of arrival.

Psychological behaviorism’s historical roots consist, in part,in the classical associationism of the British Empiricists, foremostJohn Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–76). Accordingto classical associationism, intelligent behavior is the product ofassociative learning. As a result of associations or pairings betweenperceptual experiences or stimulations on the one hand, and ideas orthoughts on the other, persons and animals acquire knowledge of theirenvironment and how to act. Associations enable creatures to discoverthe causal structure of the world. Association is most helpfullyviewed 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 asperceptual experiences or stimulations as the first links inassociations, and thoughts or ideas as the second links. Psychologicalbehaviorism, motivated by experimental interests, claims that tounderstand the origins of behavior, reference to stimulations(experiences) should be replaced by reference to stimuli (physicalevents in the environment), and that reference to thoughts or ideasshould be eliminated or displaced in favor of reference to responses(overt behavior, motor movement). Psychological behaviorism isassociationism 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 behaviorismor best understood as behavioral tendencies? Psychologicalbehaviorists regard the practice of talking about one’s ownstates of mind, and of introspectively reporting those states, aspotentially useful data in psychological experiments, but as notpresupposing the metaphysical subjectivity or non-physical presence ofthose states. There are different sorts of causes behind introspectivereports, and psychological behaviorists take these and other elementsof introspection to be amenable to behavioral analysis. (Foradditional discussion, see Section 5 of this entry). (See, forcomparison, Dennett’s method of heterophenomenology; Dennett1991, pp. 72–81)

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

In its historical foundations, methodological behaviorism shares withanalytical behaviorism the influence of positivism. One of the maingoals of positivism was to unify psychology with natural science.Watson wrote that “psychology as a behaviorist views it is apurely objective experimental branch of natural science. Itstheoretical 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 thathas caused the reaction” (1930, p. 11).

Though logically distinct, methodological, psychological, andanalytical behaviorisms are sometimes found in one behaviorism.Skinner’s radical behaviorism combines all three forms ofbehaviorism. It follows analytical strictures (at least loosely) inparaphrasing mental terms behaviorally, when or if they cannot beeliminated from explanatory discourse. In Verbal Behavior (1957) andelsewhere, Skinner tries to show how mental terms can be givenbehavioral interpretations. In About Behaviorism (1974) he says thatwhen mental terminology cannot be eliminated it can be“translated into behavior” (p. 18, Skinner brackets theexpression with his own double quotes).

Radical behaviorism is concerned with the behavior of organisms, notwith internal processing (if treated or described differently fromovert behavior). So, it is a form of methodological behaviorism.Finally, radical behaviorism understands behavior as a reflection offrequency effects among stimuli, which means that it is a form ofpsychological behaviorism.

4. Popularity of Behaviorism

Behaviorism of one sort or another was an immensely popular researchprogram or methodological commitment among students of behavior fromabout the third decade of the twentieth century through its middledecades, at least until the beginnings of the cognitive sciencerevolution. Cognitive science began to mature roughly from 1960 until1985 (see Bechtel, Abrahamsen, and Graham 1998, pp. 15–17). Inaddition to Ryle and Wittgenstein, philosophers with sympathies forbehaviorism included Carnap (1932–33), Hempel (1949), and Quine(1960). Quine, for example, took a behaviorist approach to the studyof language. Quine claimed that the notion of psychological or mentalactivity has no place in a scientific account of either the origins orthe meaning of speech. To talk in a scientifically disciplined mannerabout the meaning of an utterance is to talk about stimuli for theutterance, its so-called “stimulus meaning”. Hempel (1949)claimed that “all psychological statements that are meaningful… are translatable into statements that do not involvepsychological concepts,” but only concepts for physical behavior(p. 18).

Among psychologists behaviorism was even more popular than amongphilosophers. 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 investigatedin essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysisof the determiners of rat behavior at a choice point in a maze”(1938, p. 34).

Behaviorists created journals, organized societies, and foundedpsychology graduate programs reflective of behaviorism. Behavioristsorganized themselves into different types of research clusters, whosedifferences stemmed from such factors as varying approaches toconditioning and experimentation. Some clusters were named as follows:“the experimental analysis of behavior”, “behavioranalysis”, “functional analysis”, and, of course,“radical behaviorism”. These labels sometimes wereresponsible for the titles of behaviorism’s leading societiesand journals, including the Society for the Advancement of BehaviorAnalysis (SABA), and the Journal of the Experimental Analysis ofBehavior (begun in 1958) as well as the Journal of Applied BehaviorAnalysis (begun in 1968).

Behaviorism generated a type of therapy, known as behavior therapy(see Rimm and Masters 1974; Erwin 1978). It developed behaviormanagement techniques for autistic children (see Lovaas and Newsom1976) and token economies for the management of chronic schizophrenics(see Stahl and Leitenberg 1976). It fueled discussions of how best tounderstand the behavior of nonhuman animals and of the relevance oflaboratory study to the natural environmental occurrence of animalbehavior (see Schwartz and Lacey 1982).

Behaviorism stumbled upon various critical difficulties with some ofits commitments. One difficulty is confusion about the effects ofreinforcement on behavior (see Gallistel 1990). In its original sense,a stimulus such as food is a reinforcer only if its presentationincreases the frequency of a response in a type of associativeconditioning known as operant conditioning. A problem with thisdefinition is that it defines reinforcers as stimuli that changebehavior. The presentation of food, however, may have no observableeffect on response frequency with respect to food even in cases inwhich an animal is food deprived or hungry. Rather, response frequencycan be associated with an animal’s ability to identify andremember temporal or spatial properties of the circumstances in whicha stimulus (say, food) is presented. This and other difficultiesprompted changes in behaviorism’s commitments and new directionsof research. One alternative direction has been the study of the roleof short term memory in contributing to reinforcement effects on theso-called trajectory of behavior (see Killeen 1994).

Another stumbling block, in the case of analytical behaviorism, is thefact that the behavioral sentences that are intended to offer thebehavioral paraphrases of mental terms almost always use mental termsthemselves (see Chisholm 1957). In the example of my belief that Ihave a 2pm dental appointment, one must also speak of my desire toarrive at 2pm, otherwise the behavior of arriving at 2pm could notcount as believing that I have a 2pm appointment. The term“desire” is a mental term. Critics of analyticalbehaviorism have charged that we can never escape from using mentalterms in the characterization of the meaning of mental terms. Thissuggests that mental discourse cannot be displaced by behavioraldiscourse. At least it cannot be displaced term-by-term. Perhapsanalytical behaviorists need to paraphrase a whole swarm of mentalterms at once so as to recognize the presumption that the attributionof any one such mental term presupposes the application of others (seeRey 1997, p. 154–5).

5. Why be a Behaviorist

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

The first reason is epistemic or evidential. Warrant or evidence forsaying, at least in the third person case, that an animal or person isin a certain mental state, for example, possesses a certain belief, isgrounded in behavior, understood as observable behavior. Moreover, theconceptual space or step between the claim that behavior warrants theattribution of belief and the claim that believing consists inbehavior itself is a short and in some ways appealing step. If welook, for example, at how people are taught to use mental concepts andterms—terms like “believe”, “desire”,and so on—conditions of use appear inseparably connected withbehavioral tendencies in certain circumstances. If mental stateattribution bears a special connection with behavior, it is temptingto say that mentality just consists in behavioral tendencies.

The second reason can be expressed as follows: One major differencebetween mentalistic (mental states in-the-head) and associationist orconditioning accounts of behavior is that mentalistic accounts tend tohave a strong nativist bent. This is true even though there may benothing inherently nativist about mentalistic accounts (see Cowie1998).

Mentalistic accounts tend to assume, and sometimes even explicitly toembrace (see Fodor 1981), the hypothesis that the mind possesses atbirth or innately a set of procedures or internally representedprocessing rules which are deployed when learning or acquiring newresponses. Behaviorism, by contrast, is anti-nativist. Behaviorism,therefore, appeals to theorists who deny that there are innate rulesby which organisms learn. To Skinner and Watson organisms learnwithout being innately or pre-experientially provided with implicitprocedures by which to learn. Learning does not consist, at leastinitially, in rule-governed behavior. Learning is what organisms do inresponse 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 specifydiscriminative stimuli, responses, and consequences” (p. 583).(See also Dennett 1978).

Much contemporary work in cognitive science on the set of models knownas connectionist or parallel distributed processing (PDP) models seemsto share behaviorism’s anti-nativism about learning. PDP modelbuilding takes an approach to learning which is response orientedrather than rule-governed and this is because, like behaviorism, ithas roots in associationism (see Bechtel 1985; compare Graham 1991with Maloney 1991). Whether PDP models ultimately are or must beanti-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 leasthistorically, is related to its disdain for reference to inner mentalor mentalistic information processing as explanatory causes ofbehavior. The disdain is most vigorously exemplified in the work ofSkinner. Skinner’s skepticism about explanatory references tomental innerness may be described as follows.

Suppose we try to explain the public behavior of a person bydescribing how they represent,conceptualize or think about theirsituation. Suppose they conceive or think of their situation in acertain way, not as bare, as filled with items without attributes, butas things, as trees, as people, as walruses, walls, and wallets.Suppose, we also say, a person never merely interacts with theirenvironment; but rather interacts with their environment as theyperceive, see, or represent it. So, for example, thinking of somethingas a wallet, a person reaches for it. Perceiving something as awalrus, they back away from it. Classifying something as a wall, theydon’t bump into it. So understood, behavior is endogenouslyproduced movement, viz. behavior that has its causal origin within theperson who thinks of or represents their situation in a certainway.

Skinner would object to such claims. He would object not because hebelieves that the eye is innocent or that inner or endogenous activitydoes not occur. He would object because he believes that behavior mustbe explained in terms that do not themselves presuppose the very thingthat is explained. The outside (public) behavior of a person is notaccounted for by referring to the inside (inner processing, cognitiveactivity) behavior of the person (say, his or her classifying oranalyzing their environment) if, therein, the behavior of the personultimately is unexplained. “The objection,” wrote Skinner,“to inner states is not that they do not exist, but that theyare not relevant in a functional analysis” (Skinner 1953, p.35). ‘Not relevant’ means, for Skinner, explanatorilycircular or regressive.

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

So, the third reason for behaviorism’s appeal is that it triesto avoid (what it claims is) circular, regressive explanations ofbehavior. 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 andthe purported circularity of explanation by reference to innerprocessing are both extreme and scientifically contestable, and thatmany who have self-identified as behaviorists including Guthrie,Tolman, and Hull, or continue to work within the tradition, broadlyunderstood, including Killeen (1987) and Rescorla (1990), takeexception to much that Skinner has said about explanatory referencesto innerness. Also Skinner himself is not always clear about hisaversion to innerness. Skinner’s derisive attitude towardsexplanatory references to mental innerness stems, in part, not justfrom fears of explanatory circularity but from his conviction that ifthe language of psychology is permitted to refer to internalprocessing, this goes some way towards permitting talk of immaterialmental substances, agents endowed with contra-causal free will, andlittle persons (homunculi) within bodies. Each of these Skinner takesto be incompatible with a scientific worldview (see Skinner 1971; seealso Day 1976). Finally, it must be noted that Skinner’saversion to explanatory references to innerness is not an aversion toinner mental states or processes per se. He readily admits thatprivate thoughts and so on exist. Skinner countenances talk of innerevents but only provided that their innerness is treated in the samemanner as public behavior or overt responses. An adequate science ofbehavior, he claims, must describe events taking place within the skinof the organism as part of behavior itself (see Skinner 1976).“So far as I am concerned,” he wrote in 1984 in a specialissue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences devoted to his work,“whatever happens when we inspect a public stimulus is in everyrespect similar to what happens when we introspect a privateone” (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 bedescribed in the same manner as public or overt behavior. But his ideais roughly as follows. Just as we may describe overt behavior or motormovement in terms of concepts like stimulus, response, conditioning,reinforcement, and so on, so we may deploy the very same terms indescribing inner or covert behavior. One thought or line of thoughtmay reinforce another thought. An act of analysis may serve as astimulus for an effort at classification. And so on. Purely‘mentalistic’ activities may be at least roughly parsed interms of behavioral concepts — a topic to be revisited later inthe entry (in the 7th Section).

6. Skinner’s Social Worldview

Skinner is the only major figure in the history of behaviorism tooffer a socio-political world view based on his commitment tobehaviorism. Skinner constructed a theory as well as narrative picturein Walden Two (1948) of what an ideal human society would be like ifdesigned according to behaviorist principles (see also Skinner 1971).Skinner’s social worldview illustrates his aversions to freewill, to homunculi, and to dualism as well as his positive reasons forclaiming that a person’s history of environmental interactionscontrols his or her behavior.

One possible feature of human behavior which Skinner deliberatelyrejects is that people freely or creatively make their ownenvironments (see Chomsky 1971, Black 1973). Skinner protests that“it is in the nature of an experimental analysis of humanbehavior that it should strip away the functions previously assignedto a free or autonomous person and transfer them one by one to thecontrolling environment” (1971, p. 198).

Critics have raised several objections to the Skinnerian socialpicture. One of the most persuasive, and certainly one of the mostfrequent, adverts to Skinner’s vision of the ideal humansociety. It is a question asked of the fictional founder of WaldenTwo, Frazier, by the philosopher Castle. It is the question of what isthe best social or communal mode of existence for a human being.Frazier’s, and therein Skinner’s, response to thisquestion is both too general and incomplete. Frazier/Skinner praisesthe values of health, friendship, relaxation, rest, and so forth.However, these values are hardly the detailed basis of a socialsystem.

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

In an essay which appeared in The Behavior Analyst (1985), nearlyforty years after the publication of Walden Two, Skinner, in the guiseof Frazier, tried to clarify his characterization of ideal humancircumstances. He wrote that in the ideal human society “peoplejust naturally do the things they need to do to maintain themselves… and treat each other well, and they just naturally do ahundred other things they enjoy doing because they do not have to dothem” (p. 9). However, of course, doing a hundred things humansenjoy doing means only that Walden Two is vaguely defined, not thatits culturally instituted habits and the character of its institutionsmerit emulation.

The incompleteness of Skinner’s description of the ideal humansociety or life is so widely acknowledged that one might wonder ifactual experiments in Walden Two living could lend useful detail tohis blueprint. More than one such social experiment has beenconducted. Perhaps the most interesting (in part because the communityhas evolved away from its Skinnerian roots) is the Twin Oaks Communityin Virginia in the U.S.A., which can be indirectly explored via theInternet (see Other Internet Resources).

7. Why be Anti-Behaviorist

Behaviorism is dismissed by cognitive scientists developing intricateinternal information processing models of cognition. Its laboratoryroutines or experimental regimens are neglected by cognitiveethologists and ecological psychologists convinced that its methodsare irrelevant to studying how animals and persons behave in theirnatural and social environment. Its traditional relative indifferencetowards neuroscience and deference to environmental contingencies isrejected by neuroscientists sure that direct study of the brain is theonly way to understand the truly proximate causes of behavior.

But by no means has behaviorism disappeared. Robust elements ofbehaviorism survive in both behavior therapy and laboratory-basedanimal learning theory (of which more below). In the metaphysics ofmind, too, behavioristic themes survive in the approach to mind knownas Functionalism. Functionalism defines states of mind as states thatplay causal-functional roles in animals or systems in which theyoccur. Paul Churchland writes of Functionalism as follows: “Theessential or defining feature of any type of mental states is the setof causal relations it bears to … bodily behavior” (1984,p. 36). This functionalist notion is similar to the behaviorist ideathat reference to behavior and to stimulus/response relations enterscentrally and essentially into any account of what it means for acreature to behave or to be subject, in the scheme of analytical orlogical behaviorism, to the attribution of mental states.

Fans of the so-called and now widely discussed Extended MindHypothesis (EMH) also share a kinship with behaviorism or at leastwith Skinner. The defining hypothesis of EMH is that“mental” representation is a matter that spills out fromthe brain or head into the world and cultural environment (Levy 2007).Representations are things external to the head or which bear specialindividuating relationships with external devices or forms of culturalactivity. Skinner’s misgivings about depicting the power ofmental representation as something confined to the head (brain, innermind) are at least loosely akin to EMH’s shift to depictrepresentationality as environmentally extended.

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

Why has the influence of behaviorism declined? The deepest and mostcomplex reason for behaviorism’s decline in influence is itscommitment to the thesis that behavior can be explained withoutreference 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 theenvironment and to the animal’s history of environmentalinteraction. Neurophysiological and neurobiological conditions, forSkinner, sustain or implement these functional or causal relations.But they do not serve as ultimate or independent sources orexplanations of behavior. Behavior, Skinner (1953) wrote, cannot beaccounted for “while staying wholly inside [an animal];eventually we must turn to forces operating upon the organism fromwithout.” “Unless there is a weak spot in our causal chainso that the second [neurological] link is not lawfully determined bythe first [environmental stimuli], or the third [behavior] by thesecond, the first and third links must be lawfully related.” (p.35) “Valid information about the second link may throw light onthis 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 thatunderlie animal/environment interactions. Therein, it rides evidentialor epistemic piggyback on radical behaviorism’s priordescription of those interactions. “The organism”, hesays, “is not empty, and it cannot adequately be treated simplyas a black box” (1976, p. 233). “Something is done todaywhich affects the behavior of the organism tomorrow” (p. 233).Neuroscience describes inside-the-box mechanisms that permittoday’s reinforcing stimulus to affect tomorrow’sbehavior. The neural box is not empty, but it is unable, except incases of malfunction or breakdown, to disengage the animal from pastpatterns of behavior that have been reinforced. It cannot exerciseindependent or non-environmentally countervailing authority overbehavior.

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 reinforcementhistory, although that is a factor, but on the fact that theenvironment or learning history is represented by an individual andhow (the manner in which) it is represented. The fact that theenvironment is represented by me constrains or informs the functionalor causal relations that hold between my behavior and the environmentand may, from an anti-behaviorist perspective, partially disengage mybehavior from its conditioning or reinforcement history. No matter,for example, how tirelessly and repeatedly I have been reinforced forpointing to or eating ice cream, such a history is impotent if I justdon’t see a potential stimulus as ice cream or represent it tomyself as ice cream or if I desire to hide the fact that something isice cream from others. My conditioning history, narrowly understood asunrepresented by me, is behaviorally less important than theenvironment or my learning history as represented or interpreted byme.

Similarly, for many critics of behaviorism, if representationalitycomes between environment and behavior, this implies that Skinner istoo restrictive or limited in his attitude towards the role of brainmechanisms in producing or controlling behavior. The brain is no merepassive memory bank of behavior/environment interactions (see Roedigerand Goff 1998). The central nervous system, which otherwise sustainsmy reinforcement history, contains systems or neurocomputationalsub-systems that implement or encode whatever representational contentor meaning the environment has for me. It is also an activeinterpretation machine or semantic engine, often critically performingenvironmentally untethered and behavior controlling tasks. Such talkof representation or interpretation, however, is a perspective fromwhich behaviorism—most certainly in Skinner— wishes andtries to depart.

One defining aspiration of traditional behaviorism is that it tried tofree psychology from having to theorize about how animals and personsrepresent (internally, in the head) their environment. This effort atfreedom was important, historically, because it seemed thatbehavior/environment connections are a lot clearer and more manageableexperimentally than internal representations. Unfortunately, forbehaviorism, it’s hard to imagine a more restrictive rule forpsychology than one which prohibits hypotheses about representationalstorage and processing. Stephen Stich, for example, complains againstSkinner that “we now have an enormous collection of experimentaldata which, it would seem, simply cannot be made sense of unless wepostulate something like” information processing mechanisms inthe heads of organisms (1998, p. 649).

A second reason for rejecting behaviorism is that some features ofmentality—some elements, in particular, of the conscious mentallife of persons—have characteristic ‘qualia’ orpresentationally immediate or phenomenal qualities. To be in pain, forexample, is not merely to produce appropriate pain behavior under theright 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 itwere, may engage in pain behavior, including beneath the skin painresponses, yet completely lack whatever is qualitatively distinctiveof and proper to pain (its painfulness). (See also Graham 1998, pp.47–51 and Graham and Horgan 2000. On the scope of the phenomenalin human mentality, see Graham, Horgan, and Tienson 2009).

The philosopher-psychologist U. T. Place, although otherwisesympathetic to the application of behaviorist ideas to matters ofmind, argued that phenomenal qualia cannot be analyzed in behavioristterms. He claimed that qualia are neither behavior nor dispositions tobehave. “They make themselves felt,” he said, “fromthe very moment that the experience of whose qualia they are”comes into existence (2000, p. 191; reprinted in Graham and Valentine2004). They are instantaneous features of processes or events ratherthan 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 ofmentality affect non-qualitative elements of internal processing, andthat they, for example, contribute to arousal, attention, andreceptivity to associative conditioning.

The third reason for rejecting behaviorism is connected with NoamChomsky. Chomsky has been one of behaviorism’s most successfuland damaging critics. In a review of Skinner’s book on verbalbehavior (see above), Chomsky (1959) charged that behaviorist modelsof language learning cannot explain various facts about languageacquisition, such as the rapid acquisition of language by youngchildren, which is sometimes referred to as the phenomenon of“lexical explosion.” A child’s linguistic abilitiesappear to be radically underdetermined by the evidence of verbalbehavior offered to the child in the short period in which he or sheexpresses those abilities. By the age of four or five (normal)children have an almost limitless capacity to understand and producesentences which they have never heard before. Chomsky also argued thatit seems plainly untrue that language learning depends on theapplication of detailed reinforcement. A child does not, as an Englishspeaker in the presence of a house, utter “house”repeatedly in the presence of reinforcing elders. Language as suchseems to be learned without, in a sense, being explicitly taught ortaught in detail, and behaviorism doesn’t offer an account ofhow this could be so. Chomsky’s own speculations about thepsychological realities underlying language development include thehypothesis that the rules or principles underlying linguistic behaviorare abstract (applying to all human languages) and innate (part of ournative psychological endowment as human beings). When put to the testof uttering a grammatical sentence, a person, for Chomsky, has avirtually infinite number of possible responses available, and theonly way in which to understand this virtually infinite generativecapacity is to suppose that a person possesses a powerful and abstractinnate grammar (underlying whatever competence he or she may have inone or more particular natural languages).

The problem to which Chomsky refers, which is the problem ofbehavioral competence and thus performance outstripping individuallearning histories, goes beyond merely the issue of linguisticbehavior in young children. It appears to be a fundamental fact abouthuman beings that our behavior and behavioral capacities often surpassthe limitations of individual reinforcement histories. Our history ofreinforcement is often too impoverished to determine uniquely what wedo or how we do it. Much learning, therefore, seems to requirepre-existing or innate representational structures or principledconstraints within which learning occurs. (See also Brewer 1974, butcompare with Bates et al. 1998 and Cowie 1998).

Is the case against behaviorism definitive? Decisive? Paul Meehl noteddecades ago that theories in psychology seem to disappear not underthe force of decisive refutation but rather because researchers loseinterest in their theoretical orientations (Meehl 1978). Oneimplication of Meehl’s thesis is that a once popular“Ism”, not having been decisively refuted, may restoresome of its former prominence if it mutates or transforms itself so asto incorporate responses to criticisms. What may this mean forbehaviorism? It may mean that some version of the doctrine mightrebound.

Skinner claimed that neural activities subserve or underliebehavior/environment relations and that the organism’scontribution to these relations does not reduce to neurophysiologicalproperties. But this does not mean that behaviorism cannot gain usefulalliance with neuroscience. Reference to brain structures(neurobiology, neurochemistry, and so on) may help in explainingbehavior even if such references do not ultimately displace referenceto environmental contingencies in a behaviorist account.

Such is a lesson of animal modeling in which behaviorist themes stillenjoy currency. Animal models of addiction, habit and instrumentallearning are particularly noteworthy because they bring behavioralresearch into closer contact than did traditional psychologicalbehaviorism with research on the brain mechanisms underlyingreinforcement, especially positive reinforcement (West 2006, pp.91–108). One result of this contact is the discovery thatsensitized neural systems responsible for heightened reinforcementvalue or strength can be dissociated from the hedonic utility orpleasurable quality of reinforcement (see Robinson and Berridge 2003).The power of a stimulus to reinforce behavior may be independent ofwhether it is a source or cause of pleasure. Focus on brain mechanismsunderlying reinforcement also forms the centerpiece of one of the mostactive research programs in current neuroscience, so-calledneuroeconomics, which weds study of the brain’s reward systemswith models of valuation and economic decision making (see Montagueand Berns 2002; Nestler and Malenka 2004; Ross et al 2008).Behaviorism may do well to purchase some of neuroeconomic’sconceptual currency, especially since some advocates of the programsee themselves as behaviorists in spirit if not stereotypical letterand honor the work of a number of theorists in the behavioristictradition of the experimental analysis of behavior, such as GeorgeAinslie, Richard Herrnstein and Howard Rachlin, on how patterns ofbehavior relate to patterns of reward or reinforcement (see Ross etal. 2008, especially p. 10). One important assumption inneuroeconomics is that full explanations of organism/environmentalinteractions will combine facts about such things as reinforcementschedules with appeal to neurocomputational modeling and to theneurochemistry and neurobiology of reinforcement.

Other potential sources of utility or renewal? The continuedpopularity of so-called economic behavior therapy is noteworthybecause it offers a potential domain of testing application for theregimen of behaviorism. Early versions of behavior therapy sought toapply restricted results from Skinnerian or Pavlovian conditioningparadigms to human behavior problems. No minds should be spoken of;just behavior—stimuli, responses, and reinforcement. Therapyshapes behavior not thought. Successive generations of behaviortherapy relax those conceptual restrictions. Advocates refer tothemselves as cognitive behavior therapists (e.g. Mahoney 1974;Meichenbaum 1977). Clients’ behavior problems are described byreferring 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 behavioraldifficulties and interventions (Wells 2000). One goal of such languageis to encourage clients to monitor and self-reinforce their ownbehavior. Self-reinforcement is an essential feature of behavioralself-control (Rachlin 2000; Ainslie 2001). The monitoring processmay include a number of checking and error detection processes andcorrection of behavior in a client’s current life circumstances(West 2006).

It may be wondered whether cognitive behavior therapy is aptlyconsistent with behaviorist doctrine. Much depends on how beliefs anddesires are understood. If beliefs and desires are understood asstates that somehow spill out into the environment and areindividuated in terms of their non-mentalistic, behavior-like role inorganism/environment interactions, this would be consistent withtraditional behaviorist doctrine. It would reflect the principle oflogical or analytical behaviorism that if mental terms are to be usedin the description and explanation of behavior, they must be definedor paraphrased in non-mental behavioral terms. Prospects forbelief/desire individuation in non-mental, environmentally externalistterms may look doubtful however, especially in cases of consciousattitudes(see Horgan, Tienson and Graham 2006). But the topic of theforms and limits of behavior therapy and the range of its plausibleapplication is open for continued further exploration.

8. Conclusion

In 1977 Willard Day, a behavioral psychologist and founding editor ofthe journal Behaviorism (later known as Behavior and Philosophy),published Skinner’s “Why I am not a cognitivepsychologist” (Skinner 1977). Skinner began the paper by statingthat “the variables of which human behavior is a function lie inthe environment” (p. 1). Skinner ended by remarking that“cognitive constructs give … a misleading account ofwhat” is inside a human being (p. 10)

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

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

Hempel had come to believe that it is a mistake to imagine that humanbehavior can be understood exclusively in non-mental, behavioristicterms.

Contemporary psychology and philosophy largely share Hempel’sconviction that the explanation of behavior cannot omit invoking acreature’s representation of its world. Psychology must usepsychological terms. Behavior without cognition is blind.Psychological theorizing without reference to internal cognitiveprocessing is explanatorily impaired. To say this, of course, is notto a priori preclude that behaviorism will recover some of itsprominence. Just how to conceive of cognitive processing (even whereto locate it) remains a heated subject of debate (see Melser 2004; seealso Levy 2007, pp. 29–64). But if behaviorism is to recoversome of its prominence, this recovery may require a reformulation ofits doctrines that is attune to developments (like that ofneuroeconomics) in neuroscience as well as in novel therapeuticorientations.

Skinner’s vantage point on or special contribution tobehaviorism mates the science of behavior with the language oforganism/environment interactions. But we humans don’t just runand mate and walk and eat in this or that environment. We think,classify, analyze, imagine, and theorize. In addition to our outerbehavior, we have highly complex inner lives, wherein we are active,often imaginatively, in our heads, all the while often remaining asstuck as posts, as still as stones. Call our inner life‘behavior’ if one wants, but this piece of linguisticstipulation does not mean that the probability or occurrence of innerevents is shaped by the same environmental contingencies as overtbehavior or bodily movements. It does not mean that understanding asentence or composing an entry for this encyclopedia consist of thesame general modes of discriminatory responses as learning how to moveone’s body in pursuit of a food source. How the InnerRepresentational World of mind maps into the Country of Behaviorismremains the “ism’s” still incompletely chartedterritory.

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