Psychological Behaviorisms

 1) Methodological Behaviorism: A methodological stricture on how to understand human behavior.  

• Psychology should concern itself only with the external, observable behavior of organisms.
  • The Explanatory Objective of Psychology: Psychology should be concerned primarily with the explanation of external, observable behavior of organisms as opposed to the 'internal' workings of the mind.
  • An Explanatory Constraint: The explanations employed by psychologists should only invoke terms (or "posits" or constructs") that can be defined in terms of observable events in the environment (a.k.a. "stimuli") and observable behavior (responses).  
    • In explaining the behavior of people "consider only those facts which can be objectively observed in the behavior of one person and its relation to his prior environmental history" (Skinner, p.59)

• Why impose these constraints on scientific psychology?

1) Epistemic worries: If mental states are "inner" episodes that are not publicly observable, then there can be no public agreement on when such states occur. But scientific theories should only invoke explanatory entities that are publicly observable. So, mental states are not the sorts of things that should be invoked by scientific psychological theories.

• This is a specific version of "Operationalism" which urged similar restrictions on the theoretical terms in all sciences.
• Worries about the fact that mental states are not publicly observable seemed particularly serious in the light of the excesses of 19th "introspectionist" psychology. Introspectionists attempted to develop theories of the mind by employing a process of introspection. Proponents of methodological behaviorism quite rightly pointed out this strategy had failed to produce any plausible theories and that the theories couldn't be tested by others.

2) The explanatory redundancy of mental states: If there are lawful connections between environmental effects and mental states and between mental states and behavior, then we can ignore what mental states people have and still provide explanations of their behavior:

"If all linkages are lawful, nothing is lost by neglecting a supposed nonphysical (mental) link. Thus, if we know that a child has not eaten for a long time, and if we know that he therefore feels hungry and that because he feels hungry he then eats, then we know that if he has not eaten for a long time, he will eat." (Skinner, p.59)

2.  Substantive Behaviorism:

• The only psychological laws are those that relate environmental events and behavior.

Skinner:  "A person is changed by the contingencies of reinforcement under which he behaves:.  There are no 'iconic representations' in his mind;  there are no 'data structures stored in his memory'; he has no 'cognitive map' of the world in which he has lived.  [There are no images in the sense of private copies.]  He has simply been changed in such a way that stimuli now control particular kinds of : behavior."

• One line of support for this bold claim was "eliminative behaviorism" discussed below.

Eliminative Behaviorism: Some or all) sentences ascribing mental states are meaningless. This claim was urged selectively by critics of psychoanalysis and (other?) quack psychological theories.  It was urged systematically by some advocates of Substantive Behaviorism.

·        The argument from verificationism: If mental states are "inner episodes", then statements about mental states are not verifiable. In which case, they are meaningless.