Behaviorism is often referred to as a 'methodology' (in the words of one of its most well-known proponents, B.F. Skinner) of psychology, in the sense that it proceeds out of a sense of immense dissatisfaction with what Skinner and others perceived as the primordial state of the "science of human affairs." One of its fundamental observations is that traditional psychology relies too eavily on mentalistic explanations of behavior (that is, the language of feeling, inner psychology), and that this mode of thinking tends to be very circular. An excellent example used by Skinner in his lecture entitled "Behaviorism at Fifty" describes a T.V. commercial in which pain is depicted as little electronic signals running up an arm to a little man who pulls a lever signaling pain. Skinner called the little man with the lever the "inner man," the epitome of explanatory fictions which he called mental way stations.
Burhuss Frederic Skinner
Any acount of behaviorism can't ignore Skinner as one of the most influential writers on the subject. His book Beyond Freedom and Dignity is a flagship for behavioristic thinking, and one of the most interesting expressions of its psychological methodology. In the opening chapter, he attacks Greek theories of human behavior as not containing even the "seeds" of progress in that particular science. Skinner systematically rejects the claims that "human behavior is particularly difficult" or that "there is something about human behavior which makes scientific analysis, and hence an effective technology, impossible" on the grounds that there has simply been no organized effort to develop tools of analysis of "commensurate complexity" such as have been developed in the fields of biology or physics.
Skinner asserts that misguided treatment of causes sustain the tradition of mentalistic explanation. As he sees it, the persistence of the terminology of "wills, impulses, feelings, purposes, and other fragmentary attributes of an indwelling agent" is due to an overdue emphasis on the processes of provocation and response in organisms. That is, it is the habit of most people, and even of certain psychologists, to examine an event and the effect it causes in the subject (a reflex) while ignoring "what the environment does to an organism not only before but after it responds."
This all leads up to Skinner's theory/tool of "operant conditioning" which he says may prove to be a technology "commensurate with our problems." The process at its most basic level is simply the beginning of a system of arranging the environment in a particular way so that particular actions bring about certain consequences, thus either reinforcing or creating an aversion for the behavior. By developing more complex systems in this vein, Skinner believes psychology as a science will slowly replace all of the current 'myths' of the functions of human behavior (called "explanatory fictions by Skinner) with defined laws of prediction and control. This is the technology of behavior which Skinner gives as his goal.
Radical and Moderate Forms
Skinner wasn't the only behaviorist, however, and many of his contemporaries take issue with his analysis. Norman Malcom's lecture "Behaviorism as a Philosophy of Psychology," especially, is an excellent critique of Skinner's thought as radical bahaviorism. Malcom focuses on a potential fallacy of radical bahaviorism regarding first-person utterances which he regards as the "Achilles heel of behaviorism." As a radical behaviorist, Skinner believes that all psychology is reducible to observe causal relationships, that is, relationships comprised of observable variables. Given this radical methodology, Skinner maintains the position which Malcom calls the "natural temptation" of behavioristic philosophers: that "first-person psychological sentences have the same 'content', or the same verification, as the corresponding third-person sentences." As Malcom appoints out, this is obviously not true. He uses the example of a man searching for his glasses to show that the acting subject in no way concludes from verifiable data that he or she is performing a given action, he or she simply knows. As an observer I might survey details of a scene in which a man is rummaging about a desk where I know he usually keeps his glasses, and notice that he is indeed at that moment without those glasses, in order to conclude that he is searching. But that man does no such thing, or as Malcom comments, he would be regarded as crazy. From this Malcom concludes that "we have no ground at all for believing that either intentions or announcements of intention are under the 'control' of anything," a belief which Skinner as a radical behaviorist and a determinist must adhere to.
Malcom's detraction is useful, I think, to avoid a fearful ramification of radical behaviorism: the objectification of the human person. Behaviorism as a philosophy of psychology simply ignores the possibility of a greater spontaneous human freedom for the purposes of clarified psychological study, whereas Skinner's radical bahaviorism empirically denies the existence of an inner psychology. It points clearly to a modern compromise which ought to be achieved among the technologists and the moralists. A technology of behavior will prove to be, I believe, an invaluable tool for the conception and creation of newer and better social institutions. At the same time, however, a sort of optimistic faith in the power of the creativity of the individual consciousness will be nearly as invaluable, to protect against the sort of nihilism that arose nearly contemporaneously with the scientific revolution, and which so much of 19th and 20th century philosophy has struggled against.
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skongshoj says re behaviorism: Q: What does one behaviorist say to another after sex? A: It was great for you, how was it for me?