Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I. Behaviorism as a version of
Physicalism
II. Implications for Education and
Government
III. Skinner's Theory of Value
Eliminationism
Reductionism
Behaviorism as a Version of
Physicalism
Early version of physicalism:
stimulus response model.
Build a simple, 2-column table:
Operant conditioning
Includes a kind of "memory" of past
experience.
Possibility of positive and negative
reinforcement.
X is a positive reinforcement of
behavior Y if and only if the
association of X with Y makes the
repetition of Y more likely.
Everything is finite
finitely many inputs (conditions to
which the subject is potentially
sensitive)
finitely many internal states
finitely many possible behaviors.
Government
On classical view, individual liberty
is an important goal:
In order to attain happiness, each
individual needs opportunities to
exercise and develop virtue &
practical wisdom.
This necessitates a sphere of
private sovereignty.
Definition:
Good
A positive reinforcer is a
consequence of behavior that
makes the behavior more likely to
recur.
Relativism
Immediate consequence: radical
relativism.
What is good for you may not be
good for me.
What reinforces us depends not
only on genetic endowment, but
also on "training" by environment.
Both vary from person to person.
Optimism?
The best things are those consequences
that most effectively reinforce behavior.
In the long run and for the most part,
the most effective reinforcers must
succeed in reinforcing.
Consequently, most people behave so
as to produce the most effective
reinforcers.
Absurd consequences?
This means that most people enjoy
the best possible life (given
Skinner's definition of the best).
E.g., addicts enjoy the life that is
best for them, since their behavior
is under the control of the most
powerful reinforcers.
Possible confusion
We might think the following:
If natural selection is the ultimate
cause of human morality, then the
survival of the species (or one's
"culture") is the highest moral
value.
Two problems:
1. This depends on a very dubious theory
of group selection.
According to the consensus of biologists,
natural selection does not favor behavior
that benefits the whole species at the
expense of the individual's genes.
So, natural selection would not tend to
give human beings an overriding concern
for the welfare of the species (or of any
other large group, like the culture).
Chaos theory
The physical attributes of the human
body are capable of infinite variation:
vary continuously along a spectrum.
To represent the body as a finite
automaton, we must assume that
states that vary only slightly differ
only slightly in their effects.
This is true only for linear (nonchaotic) systems.
Chomsky's linguistics
Representing human beings as
computers (Turing machines), not
finite automata.
Potentially infinite memories -idealization.
Performance vs. competence.
Equivalent
causation.
Competence: what the mind is
supposed to do.