Behaviorism The psychological view that mankind operates more like a machine than a free agent.
It can be traced to figures such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke David Hume, George Berkeley and David Hartley.
Hobbes viewed man as a natural and social creature. And the other aforementioned thinkers stressed the importance of the association of ideas.
In 1739, the so-called ‘British empiricist’ philosopher David Hume wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature:
The qualities, from which…association arises, and by which the mind is after this manner conveyed from one idea to another, are three, viz. resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect (A Treatise of Human Nature London: Collins, 1962 [1739], p. 54).
The scientific study of behaviorism begins with the Russian, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), who conditioned dogs to salivate not just at the sight of food but also at the sound of a bell that preceded feeding.
The American psychologist J. B. Watson (1878-1958) generalized these findings to human beings, emphasizing the importance of recency and frequency. This means that if we have smiled every time we’ve seen a child for the past ten years, we’re very likely to smile if we see one the next day.
The American B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) extended this system to include the idea of positive and negative reinforcement.
Pavlov’s type of learning is usually called classical conditioning, while Skinner’s is called operant conditioning.
Skinner became the chief figure in behaviorism. He argued that past reinforcements determine behavior. We learn to repeat or decline behaviors based on their consequences. This is called the Stimulus-Response-Reinforcement (S-R-R) model.
Skinner also formulated the notion of shaping. By controlling the environmental rewards and punishments for behaviors, one is able to shape behavior. Psychologist also call this behavior modification.
Critics of behaviorism say it’s a soulless, mechanistic view of mankind. Instead of resembling a pleasure-seeking machine, mankind, they say, is a uniquely free being with emotional, conceptual, intuitive and spiritual concerns extending well beyond the narrow confines of immediate rewards and punishments.
Daniel Dennett argues that we are Skinnerian, Popperian and also Darwinian creatures. This means that we learn from stimulus, response and reinforcement but we also have the inner ability to test hypotheses prior to enacting them in the real world.
This challenges Skinner’s anti-mentalism, as does Dennett’s Darwinian component.
For Dennett we act partially in accord with ancestrally acquired knowledge. With language, for instance, many believe that human beings are “hard-wired” or “pre-programmed” to learn languages, providing that we are raised in a suitable environment–e.g. a child parented by wolves in the wild will not be able to speak a language.†
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† Wittgenstein’s notion of a private language might seem to challenge this idea. But Wittgenstein, himself, argues that any kind of representation which is not socially shared cannot truly be language. More recently, the postmodern notion of connotation complicates this claim–i.e. if everyone understands signs differently, are we really communicating?
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