---
date: '2024-02-07'
description: how behaviourism explains learning, and why prediction leaves questions about attention, love, and responsibility open.
id: Behavirourism
modified: 2026-10-17 18:19:59 GMT-04:00
seealso:
  - '[[thoughts/functionalism]]'
  - '[[thoughts/hermeneutics]]'
  - '[[thoughts/Attention|attention]]'
tags:
  - philosophy
  - r/psychology
  - pattern
title: Behaviourism
created: '2024-02-07'
published: '2024-02-07'
pageLayout: default
slug: thoughts/Behaviourism
permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/thoughts/Behaviourism.md
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full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt
---
Behaviourism asks what makes an organism act as it does, and how we could test the explanation. My objection begins when an account of behaviour is treated as a complete account of a person. That objection needs a better target than the claim that behaviourists think nobody has feelings.

## framework

There are several claims under the name:

- **Methodological behaviourism** restricts scientific inquiry to publicly observable evidence. Watson’s [1913 manifesto](https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/views.htm) rejects introspection as psychology’s essential method and makes prediction and control its goals. A restriction on evidence does not, by itself, establish that private experience is unreal.
- **Logical behaviourism** concerns the meaning of psychological statements. Hempel’s [early account](https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511815157.015) seeks to translate them into physical descriptions, including behavioural responses. This is a stronger claim than requiring an experiment to have observable results.
- **Skinner’s radical behaviourism** includes private events. His [1945 paper](https://betshy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/c238a-the-operational-analysis-of-psychological-terms-b.f.-skinner.pdf) asks how someone learns to report a toothache when other people cannot feel it. He treats private stimuli as part of nature and examines how a community teaches words for them. Denying a separate mental substance leaves room for thinking and feeling.

This also separates behaviourism from [[thoughts/functionalism]]. Functionalism characterizes mental states through their causal relations to inputs, other states, and actions. A description of what someone tends to do leaves those internal relations unspecified.

## reinforcement

Positive reinforcement (praise, rewards) adds something after a behaviour and makes it more likely to be repeated. Negative reinforcement removes something aversive (the alarm stops when you get up) and also makes the behaviour more likely. Punishment is what makes a behaviour less likely. \[@skinner1953sciencehumanbehavior\]

Praise counts as reinforcement only if it has that effect. The label describes a relation between a consequence and subsequent behaviour; the speaker’s intention to reward someone does not settle it. In operant conditioning, consequences change the probability of behaviour. A simple stimulus $\to$ response formula leaves that learning history out. See [Skinner, chapter V](https://www.bfskinner.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ScienceHumanBehavior.pdf#page=64).

## attention

You can make eye contact, nod, and repeat someone’s words while missing what they are trying to tell you. Those observations give evidence about [[thoughts/Attention|attention]]. Any one of them can also mislead.

Murdoch makes the issue precise through [a mother, M, who dislikes her daughter-in-law, D](https://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/moral-vision.pdf#page=3). M behaves courteously throughout, then questions her own jealousy and snobbery and tries to see D more fairly. Murdoch constructs the case so this change can occur without a change in M’s outward treatment of D. The moral activity lies in revising an unjust picture of another person. \[@murdoch1970sovereignty\]

A radical behaviourist can investigate M’s private activity. Murdoch’s example therefore does not show that Skinner has no place for it. It presses a further question: what makes M’s new way of seeing D more just? Counting courteous acts cannot answer that question when the acts remain unchanged. We need to examine what M has come to understand about D.

## love and commitment

Staying with someone through illness does not refute reinforcement theory. A period without an immediate reward does not establish that every influence supporting an action has disappeared. Calling an abusive relationship an intermittent reinforcement schedule also leaves the explanation unproved. Such an account needs to identify the actions, consequences, and conditions it claims to explain.

My concern with [[/posts/love|love]] is what happens when this causal vocabulary becomes the whole description of a relationship. A promise gives someone a reason to rely on you. An account of how you acquired the habit of keeping promises still leaves the promise’s claim on you to be examined.

> \[!note\] commitment
>
> Love involves choices about how to attend, understand, and care for someone. Treating those choices seriously means giving reasons for them and accepting responsibility for their effects. Their having causes does not make that discussion disappear.

Kierkegaard grounds the duty to love one’s neighbour in the Christian commandment. Describing it as a duty we simply invent for ourselves drops that foundation. \[@kierkegaard1847worksoflove\] His argument concerns love’s obligation beyond changing preference. Whether the obligation is justified is a different question from how a person learns to act on it.

## prediction and understanding

The [[thoughts/Compression|compression]] problem is clearest when the task is specified. A model trained to predict whether someone will answer a message can succeed while telling us little about what the message means to them. Its success is measured against that prediction. Understanding their grief, resentment, or commitment requires further evidence and a different question.

This is a limit on what follows from predictive success. It gives no proof that persons are impossible to model. A richer model might include their reasons, their history, and their own account of the situation. I want those accounts to remain open to correction, including correction by the person being described. See [[thoughts/hermeneutics]].

## determinism and responsibility

Skinner seeks causes for choosing and self-control too. In [chapters XV and XVI of _Science and Human Behavior_](https://www.bfskinner.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ScienceHumanBehavior.pdf#page=232), a person changes conditions that affect their later actions, and that activity itself calls for explanation. This differs from saying people passively receive stimuli or never deliberate.

Invoking choice does not disprove causal determination. Saying that people with different histories respond differently to the same situation does not disprove it either. The histories are already different.

My objection is to using a causal account to dismiss responsibility without further argument. Explaining how someone came to harm another person leaves questions about justification, repair, and what they should do next. Those questions need answers even when we know more about the causes.

## public criteria

See [[thoughts/love#public criteria|love's public criteria]] for the related [[thoughts/Wittgenstein|Wittgensteinian]] discussion. How someone listens, what they remember, and how they respond to a boundary can count as reasons to believe they care. Their conduct matters. Interpreting that conduct requires context, and the interpretation can fail.

Behavioural inquiry earns its place by identifying conditions that change what people do. My resistance is to treating that achievement as permission to stop asking what they mean, what they owe one another, or whether the account describes them fairly.