B.F. Skinner on Freedom, Dignity, and the Explanation of BehaviorAuthor(s): Robert AudiSource: Behaviorism, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall, 1976), pp. 163-186Published by: Cambridge Center for Behavioral StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27758864 .Accessed: 21/10/2011 13:09

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B.F. Skinner on Freedom, Dignity, and

the Explanation of Behavior

Robert Audi

The University of Nebraska, Lincoln

B.F. Skinner is not only a very important psychologist, he is also a major philosopher of psychology and an influential social philosopher. He has attracted the attention of some philosophers,1 but his work deserves considerably more philosophical scrutiny than it has received. One reason why few philosophers have seriously studied Skinner is that many have not realized the extent to which he has produced a philosophy of

psychology. Another reason is perhaps that some of the philosophers who are acquainted with Skinner's work either underrate its philosophical content or think that Chomsky's (1959) review of Verbal Behavior has said most of what needs to be said about Skinner.21 believe that there remains a great deal to be said about Skinner from a philosophical point of view. In particular, his attack on the doctrines of freedom and dignity needs further

scrutiny; his attack on mentalistic psychology, though it has been ably discussed, should be reconsidered; and the nature of the distinction between behavioristic and mentalistic

psychology, so often taken for granted, needs examination.

My main concern will be with Skinner's recent work, especially Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) and About Behaviorism (1974). These books bring together Skin ner's psychology, his philosophy of psychology, and his social philosophy. The former has also been very influential in and outside psychology, and both are widely used in

college courses. Both books are far more than casual summaries of Skinner's earlier

work, and the presumably intended popular appeal of Beyond Freedom and Dignity must not be allowed to obscure its seriousness as a statement of his ideas.

I shall proceed as follows. Section I will set forth some main elements in Skinner's

psychology, philosophy of psychology, and social philosophy. Section II will examine Skinner's attack on mentalistic psychology; Section III will take up some important parts of his social philosophy; and Section IV will explore the distinction between behavioris tic and mentalistic psychology.

lSee, e.g., Keat (1972) and Scribner (1972). 2The attitude of a good many philosophers toward this paper is similar to that expressed by Norman

Malcolm: "In his brilliant review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, Noam Chomsky shows conclusively, I

think, that Skinner fails to make a case for his belief that 'functional analysis' is able to deal with verbal behavior" (1964). For a detailed rejoinder to Chomsky, see Kenneth MacCorquodale (1970).

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I. Skinner's Attacks on "Autonomous Man" AND MeNTALISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

It will help to begin by characterizing the views that are Skinner's main target in

Beyond Freedom and Dignity. First, there is what he calls the doctrine of autonomous man: "What is being abolished is autonomous man

? the inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity" (1971).3 Connected with the doctrine of autonomous man are two other doctrines highly characteristic of both philosophical and popular thinking in Western Culture. The first is the doctrine of human freedom: "In the traditional views, a person is free. He is autonomous in the sense that his behavior is uncaused. He can therefore be held

responsible for what he does and justly punished if he offends" (1971, p. 17; cf. p. 96). The second doctrine connected with that of autonomous man is the doctrine of human

dignity: We recognize a person's dignity or worth when we give him credit for what he has done. The amount we give is inversely proportional to the conspicuousness of the causes of his behavior. . . . What we may call the literature of dignity is concerned with preserving due credit. It may oppose advances in technology . . . and a basic analysis because it [the analysis] offers an alternative explana tion of behavior for which the individual himself has previously been given credit. (1971, p. 55)

However, it is not just the doctrines of autonomous man, human freedom, and human

dignity that come in for criticism. Skinner also attacks mentalistic psychology in general, by which I mean any psychology which (1) attempts to explain people's behavior, or

indeed any psychological data, in terms of their mental states, events, or processes4 and

(2) is such that the corresponding mental concepts are not definable in terms of, nor

scientifically reducible to, behavioristic concepts, where the latter include the rations of

observable stimuli and responses and other "environmentalist" notions which Skinner

regards as appropriate for use by scientific psychology. Skinner says of mentalistic

psychology that "The conditions of which behavior is a function are also neglected" (1971, p. 10). He also maintains that in response to "Why are you doing that?" construed as a "question about causes,"

The answer is usually a description of feelings: "Because I feel like doing it." Such an answer is often acceptable, but if the verbal community insists on

something elese it may ask, "Why do you feel like doing it?" and the answer

will then be either a reference to other feelings or (at long last) to external

circumstances. . . . Thus, in reply to "Why are you moving your chair?", a

person may say, "The light was bad". . . . The experimental analysis of behavior goes directly to the antecedent causes in the environment. (1974, pp. 29-30, italics mine. See 1971, p. 10, for essentially the same point.)

As one would expect, Skinner also rejects what he considers the mentalist program for social change. He says that "almost everyone attributes human behavior to inten

3My page references are to the Bantam paperback ed. 4Skinner does not identify the mental with the private. He made this clear even in his early work, e.g.,

(1945). See also (1974), esp. pp. 211-218.

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B.F. Skinner on Freedom, Dignity, and the Explanation of Behavior

tions, purposes, aims, and goals" (1971, p. 6), and he suggests that this is one reason

"we have been slow to develop the science from which ... a technology of behavior

might be drawn" (1971, p. 22). We thus get a proliferation of empty proposals for

improving our plight. Italicizing what he considers the pseudo-explanatory terms, Skinner says,

We are told that to control the number of people in the world we need to change attitudes toward children. ... To work for peace we must deal with the will to

power or the paranoid delusions of leaders. ... To solve the problems of the

poor we must inspire self-respect, encourage initiative, and reduce frustration. . . . (1971, p. 7)

Consider the reasons Skinner gives for rejecting mentalistic psychology. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity there seem to be two main reasons, and these are among the crucial reasons for his rejection of mentalistic psychology throughout his work. First, he seems to think that mentalistic explanations are ad hoc and unscientific. He says that4

4 mentalis

tic explanations explain nothing" (1974, p. 224), and argues that "The ease with which mentalistic explanations can be invented on the spot is perhaps the best gauge of how little attention we should pay to them" (1971, p. 152). A second argument against

mentalistic explanations is this: "We say that a person behaves in a given way because he

possesses a philosophy, but we infer the philosophy from the behavior and therefore cannot use it in any satisfactory way as an explanation, at least until it is in turn

explained" (1971, p. 28). Skinner appears to have another objection to mentalistic psychology:

We both strike and feel angry for a common reason, and that reason lies in the environment. In short, the bodily conditions we feel are collateral products of our genetic and environmental histories. They have no explanatory force: they are simply additional facts to be taken into account. (1975, p. 43)

This is reminiscent of the claim in Beyond Freedom and Dignity that "A person does not act because he 'feels angry'; he acts and feels angry for a common reason, not specified'

'

(1971, p. 68). In About Behaviorism Skinner makes roughly the same point in connec tion with someone's conversation changing at the approach of a person who has treated him aversively:

His behavior does not change because he feels anxious; it changes because of the aversive contingencies which generate the condition felt as anxiety. The change in feeling and the change in behavior have a common cause. (1974, pp. 61-62)

The wording of these passages gives the impression that Skinner thinks feeling states and behavior cannot be both effects of the same cause and related as cause to effect. It is not

quite clear that he believes this; but I am not aware of passages in which he disavows the

idea, and in these and other places he seems to reason tacitly from the premise that inner states and the behavior mentalists attribute to them have the same environmental causes, to the conclusion that the behavior is not caused by the inner states.

I shall return to these points. I want first to sketch Skinner's associated view about how social change is to be brought about. One of its striking elements is the emphasis on

technology: What we need is a technology of behavior. We could solve our problems quickly enough if we could adjust the growth of the world's population as precisely as we

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Robert Audi

adjust the course of a spaceship, or improve agriculture and industry with some of the confidence with which we accelerate high energy particles. . . . (1971, p. 3)

He later addresses some questions raised by this view: "for whom is a powerful technology of behavior to be used? Who is to use it? And to what end?" (1971, pp. 96-97). He considers whether we should say, as most scientists do, that these are value

questions and do not belong to science, and that if scientists "are to make value

judgments at all, it is only with the wisdom they share with people in general" (1971, p. 97). Skinner rejects this view. For "How people feel about facts, or what it means to feel

anything, is a question for which a science of behavior should have an answer" (1971, p. 97).

Supporting this line further, he holds that "Things are good (positively reinforcing) or bad (negatively reinforcing) presumably because of the contingencies of survival under which the species evolved" (1971, p. 99). For our purposes the important claim here is the parenthetical one that the good is in some sense equivalent to the (positively) reinforcing, reiterated later where he says that "the only good things are positive reinforcers; the only bad things are negative reinforcers" (1971, p. 102).

What is the positive aim of Skinner's program? Roughly, ' 'The problem is to design a

world which will be liked not by people as they now are but by those who live in it"

(1971, p. 156). But what happens if people qan like ? be reinforced by

? a culture in

which basic human rights are not respected, say a benevolent dictatorship? This seems to be Skinner's reply:

Life, liberty, and the pursit of happiness are basic rights. But they are the rights of the individual and were listed as such at a time when the literatures of freedom and dignity were concerned with the aggrandizement of the individual. They have only a minor bearing on the survival of a culture. (1971, p. 172, italics

mine) Skinner also tries to ease our worries about the "misuse of a technology of behavior"

( 1971, p. 174). Since controllers will behave in accordance with the laws of behavior, ' ' It

is not the benevolence of the controller but the contingencies under which he controls

benevolently which must be examined" (1971, p. 174). Thus, if conditions are right, he will not abuse his power. Skinner adds that on his view of man we are not just passive observers or victims of what is happening to us: man "is indeed controlled by his

environment, but we must remember that it is an environment largely of his own

making" (1971, p. 205).

II. Examination of Skinner's Attacks on "Autonomous Man" and Mentalistic Psychology

Let us begin this section by considering the issue of autonomous man. If we suppose that by

4 'the autonomous man'

' Skinner means a homunculus inside us whose behavior is

supposed to explain ours, then I certainly agree that there is no such thing. But I know of no serious contemporary psychologist or philosopher who thinks there are homunculi. And to suggest that mentalistic psychology is committed to homunculi is to caricature it. Yet Skinner does suggest this, e.g., in saying that because we are "Unable to understand

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B.F. Skinner on Freedom, Dignity, and the Explanation of Behavior

how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see" (1971, p. II).5 On the other hand, if Skinner uses "autonomous man"

mainly to refer to man as seen by mentalistic psychologists, most humanists, and others with similar leanings, then we should assess his attack on autonomous man by looking at

the specific conceptions of man he criticizes and at his arguments against them. For some

mentalistic conceptions of man I shall later do this. Here I simply want to isolate one

element crucial to Skinner's view of all the various conceptions of autonomous man: the

assumption that his behavior is either (a) not causally determined, or at least (b) not

primarily a function of environmental and genetic variables. There are certainly many humanists and various others who hold (a), and there are

also people who hold (b). But neither mentalistic psychologists nor humanists need hold

(a) or (b). I shall explain in a moment why they are not committed to (a). Section IV will defend the view that neither mentalistic psychologists nor humanists need hold (b). One one point Skinner and those who hold that we do or can have autonomy are agreed: whatever else autonomous man is, he can act freely. But what is freedom in this sense? I know of no one who has seriously maintained that an action's being free just is its being uncaused. It is thus surprising that Skinner talks as if his equation of freedom with one's behavior being uncaused (1971, p. 17; cf. 1974, p. 54) represented a widely held view. He would be right in thinking that many people, including some philosophers, hold that an action is not free unless it is uncaused. But I believe that most philosophers do not hold

this, and there is increasing agreement among philosophers today that an action can be both caused and free. I cannot try to show this now; my point is simply that there is a very powerful tradition going back, I think, at least to Aristotle, behind the view that freedom and causation are compatible and that indeed there can be free action even if the universe is a deterministic system.6 Skinner apparently ignores this. His doing so is unfortunate;

compatibilism is consistent with the most important things he says, and his holding it would reduce the number of his opponents and dispose others of them to read him more

sympathetically. Regarding dignity, Skinner is mistaken in saying that our concept of dignity requires

that we give credit for an action in inverse proportion to the conspicuousness of its causes. Let us first consider this in terms of the (or the most common) ordinary sense of "cause." Suppose that a father runs into a burning house to save his sleeping child.

Surely the causes of his action are quite conspicuous; but do we not believe he still deserves credit for risking his life? Note that the "main" cause

? the fire's threat to his son ? is also "external" to the agent. So if one is inclined, as Skinner is, to say that we tend to give less credit (or none) to actions whose causes we believe are external, one can see from the example that this view is also mistaken. Notice also that if Jones gratuitously

murders Smith, the existential spontaneity of the act has no tendency to evoke our

5Cf. pp. 12-13 and (1974, p. 239). If Skinner does not quite assert that mentalistic psychology is committed to homunculi, he clearly thinks it is committed to constructs devoid of explanatory power, a view

widely held among psychologists. Robert E. Ebel, e.g., considers such constructs as intelligence, motiva

tion, and creativity, when used to explain what they are typically thought to explain, "dryads of the mind"

(1974). 6Hume is one of the most powerful defenders of the compatibility view, and for a contemporary case for

compatibilism see Hobart (1934). This paper represents both sides of the issue. I have developed a positive account of free action on compatibilist lines in (1974).

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approval. The ostensibly uncaused may be execrable, just as the conspicuously caused

may be laudable. I do not think the idea that persons have dignity entails that their actions are

undetermined. The core of the doctrine of human dignity is presumably just the view that

persons have certain rights and should be treated and regarded in ways that observe these

rights. Against this Skinner does not and probably would not argue. And this doctrine of human dignity is not threatened by the progress of psychology as such. For even if

psychology discovers "causes" of our behavior, its progress does not necessarily show ? and it is controversial how much it has even tended to show ? that our normal behavior is caused by factors that undermine human dignity, e.g., by irrational uncon scious desires beyond our control or by manipulation by others.

There is some reason to think, however, that Skinner's main idea about our attribution of credit is better expressed in a later passage. Skinner there refers to Beyond Freedom and Dignity as if merely reiterating the thesis just criticized, and says:

We are more likely to give a person credit for what he does if it is not obvious that it can be attributed to his physical or social environment. . . . The more derivative a work of art, the less creative; the more conspicuous the personal gain, the less heroic an act of sacrifice. To obey a well-enforced law is not to show civic virtue. (1975, p. 47)

Here Skinner uses "attributed to" rather than "causes", though he seems to mean

roughly the same thing. It is not entirely clear what he does mean, but I believe he is entitled to assume that "cause" is well enough understood to be useful, however controversial its correct analysis. He says at one point that though "The term 'cause' is no longer common in sophisticated scientific writing," "it will serve well enough here"

(1971, p. 5). Apparently Skinner uses it as it ordinarily is at least in assuming that when one thing may be said to cause a second, (a) the latter may be said to have occurred because of the former, and (b) saying this may serve as some kind of explanation of the latter.

With this in mind, let us consider Skinner's second formulation of his thesis about our

practice of giving credit. What immediately occurs to one is the apparent assumption, commented on above, that behavior cannot be attributed to environment and certain inner variables. One might argue, however, that the environment could cause the father's believe that he must run into the burning house to save the child, and his desire to save the

child; that these in turn might cause the heroic act; and that?j virtue o/causing these inner variables the physical and social environment might be said also to cause the action. I am not maintaining that there is such a chain, just that there could be. But one may question Skinner's thesis here even apart from the possibility of such a causal chain. His examples are correct. But do they support the thesis? It is true that the more derivative a work of art the less creative. But why is such derivativeness to be attributed to the artist's environ

ment, as opposed to merely requiring a certain kind of social context? A derivative artist must have other artists in his environment; but conceivably the reason he copies one and not another is that he admires him, believes him great, wants to say the same things, etc. It is also generally accepted that the more conspicuous the personal gain, the less heroic the sacrifice. But this is generally accepted only because we assume that when personal gain follows one's act, one believed the act would or might produce the gain. If one did

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not believe the gain would (or might) be produced by the act, surely its doing so unexpectedly would not reduce the heroism of the act. Similarly, if the act is performed in the belief that it will yield gain, this reduces the heroism even if the gain does not follow. So this example suggests that we attribute credit on a different basis than Skinner claims, and indeed sometimes on the basis of inner variables. Similarly for Skinner's third

example. It is generally true that to obey a well-enforced law is not to show civic virtue; but if the agent firmly believes he can with impunity disobey to his advantage, but obeys anyway for moral reasons, this would exhibit civic virtue.

We might try to preserve Skinner's thesis by being more accurate and speaking not of

causes, but of the crucial determining factors of discriminative stimulus and reinforce ment. We might say something like this: We give credit for an action in inverse

proportion to the obviousness of the discriminative stimulus and reinforcement history which determine it. Thus, the father's action is determined by the discriminative stimulus of the fire, together with his relevant reinforcement history, e.g., his having been reinforced in the past for behavior that has reduced danger to his children. The full

explanation in terms of contingencies of reinforcement is more complicated; but this is

enough to suggest that even if we talk in terms of contingencies of reinforcement, neither the obviousness nor the

4 'externality'

' of the determinants of the behavior is crucial in our

standard practice of assigning credit. Viewed in terms of the suggested contingencies of reinforcement, the father is surely no less worthy of credit, even though it is presumably quite obvious that his rescue is determined by them. Nor need Skinner deny this, I believe. What his position commits him to is at most that//"environment's determining an action precludes inner variables from doing so, then those who, like most people, assign credit heavily on the basis of inner variables, will (or at least should) assign it in inverse

proportion to the apparent externality of the determinants. If joint determination by environmental and inner variables is possible, Skinner is free to take a different and more

complicated view about the assignment of credit. (In another paper, 1974,1 have tried to describe some important elements that should go into such a view.)

Let us now consider some of Skinner's criticisms of mentalistic psychology. I have

already pointed out that mentalistic psychology is not committed to homunculi. I want now to consider some of his more plausible arguments.

Concerning his view that mentalistic explanations are ad hoc and unscientific, what seems his best argument for this rests on the premise that they can be

4 4 invented on the

spot." The premise may well be true, but the conclusion does not follow: even if mentalistic explanations for an action can be invented on the spot, they can be testable and can meet other scientific constraints.7 Skinner does not show that on these crucial counts mentalistic explanations fail. An analogy will help. Suppose the moon suddenly explodes, surprising everyone. Imagine how many physical and astronomical explana tions can be constructed on the spot. Does it follow that they are not scientific? Certainly not. For one thing, we can go on to test them.

That a kind of explanation can be constructed 4 4on the spot" may indicate that the

theory from which it is drawn has wide explanatory scope. Presumably Skinner's own

psychology is rich enough to allow on-the-spot construction of explanations of much

7I have defended this for a special kind of mentalistic explanation in (1973a) and (1972b).

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Robert Audi

unusual behavior. Presumably, where one can attribute the behavior to a want and to a

belief that the behavior would realize the want, one can postulate a reinforcer and a

suitable discriminative stimulus. What distinguishes a prima-facie scientific explanation from an ad hoc "explanation" is, among other important things, testability.

Perhaps Skinner has in mind that even if quite different behavior had occurred it would have been equally easy to "explain" that behavior mentalistically. This is an

important point. But it might apply equally to a Skinnerian theory, and it is not

necessarily a criticism. The data might be accommodated by different Skinnerian

explanations as well as by different mentalistic explanations. The issue is the character of the explanations a theory makes possible; if they are testable, then even if they are wrong this can be found out and adequate explanations of the same kind can perhaps be found. For all Skinner says, this is how it is with some kinds of mentalistic explanations. Let us

see if his second argument is more telling. Skinner's second argument against mentalistic explanations is quite interesting and, I

think, is accepted by many psychologists.8 It is that because we infer mentalistic constructs from behavior we cannot use them to explain that behavior (1971, p. 28). Let us take another analogy. You infer that the grease in the skillet is quite hot, say,

approximately 400? F, because a piece of raw potato you put in sizzles. Now if someone

asks why the potatoes you are putting in sizzle you can explain this in terms of the grease

being quite hot, namely, about 400? F.9 Your explanation is testable; there is even a law

underlying it, a law linking submersion of raw potatoes to sizzling. The example is

homespun; but there are parallels in the technical reaches of physics and chemistry. Skinner might object that we still have not explained the very item of behavior from

which we infer a construct as cause, by appeal to that particular construct, and that is

what the mentalist often does. This objection will not do. Suppose one sees a building

collapse and then hears a loud noise. One might infer that an explosion occurred in the

building. Surely one might now explain why the building collapsed: it was because of an

explosion. One infers the cause from the effect, yet one can as usual explain the effect by

appeal to the cause. We must distinguish the epistemological question of how we come to

know the explaining fact, from the logical question of how it is related to the fact needing

explanation. The logical point here is that the explanation is testable and rests on a law.

And for all Skinner says, I cannot see why the same points should not hold for mentalistic

explanations. At this point Skinner might appeal to his qualification: when we infer the philosophy

from the behavior we cannot explain the latter in terms of the former "at least until it [the

philosophy] is in turn explained. ' '

I assume Skinner is not implying that to explain a thing

by appeal to another we must also explain the latter. For on the assumption that nothing

explains itself (in the relevant sense of ' 'explain"), this would generate a vicious regress:

to explain anything one would have to explain an infinite number of things. I believe

Skinner has in mind that if one can "translate" 'having a philosophy' into appropriate

sSee, e.g., Ebel (1974), esp. p. 486, where he says such things as, "The only evidence we have that a

person is highly motivated is that he works hard. To say that he works hard because he is highly motivated is

completely circular." 9Keat (1972, p. 61) has made essentially the same point, but he does not propose an explanation of it and

does not extend it, as I do, to certain cases in which what explains something is inferred from that very thing.

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terms and in doing so show that to have a philosophy is more than to be disposed to

produce the kind of behavior whose explanation is in question, then citing a philosophy might serve to explain behavior. But if this is his requirement, it is met by the explosion example, and I shall later suggest some reasons why it can be met by certain mentalistic

explanations. I want to conclude this section by considering Skinner's apparent assumption that if

an item of behavior and an inner variable are both determined by our environmental and

genetic histories, then the behavior is not caused by the inner variables. Clearly it is

possible that these histories determine inner variables and the latter determine behavior. This is quite consistent with the former also determining behavior. Indeed, it is quite likely to be the case, on the plausible assumption that determining is a transitive relation,

i.e., for any set of events, a, b, and c, if a determines b and b determines c, then a determines c. All this seems so obvious that I hesitate to attribute to Skinner the

assumption I am attacking. I am inclined to believe he would reject it on reflection but is nevertheless at times influenced by it, at least to the extent that it reduces his motivation to give really sympathetic consideration to the view that inner variables may be links in a

causal chain, rather than either causally impotent by-products of environmental and

genetic variables, or at any rate by-products whose effects cannot explain behavior. Where Skinner perhaps does suppose that inner variables might be links in a causal chain from environment to behavior, he seems to think they are eliminable without loss. That is a possibility we must consider, and I shall take it up in Section IV.

III. Some Elements of Skinner's Social Philosophy

The above criticisms of Skinner's attack on mentalistic psychology bear on his

objections to what he regards as the mentalist program for social change, e.g., a program of achieving change in society by changing attitudes, preferences, etc. I shall not defend

any particular program for social change, but I think Skinner has not shown that changes in mental variables should not be expected to affect behavior. Moreover, he poses what seems a dangerously false contrast between changing behavior by changing the human and physical environment of subjects and changing it by changing (say) their prefer ences. Surely it is possible,for the same events to do both, and a mentalistic psychologist can grant that environment is a large part of what determines preferences. He just insists that they are not "translatable"10 into behavioristic vocabulary, as Skinner would

apparently require if preferences and other mental constructs are to be scientifically respectable.

Presumably, most mentalists would hold that behavior is the last item in a causal

chain reaching back to the subject's environment but having intermediate psychological links that are the more or less immediate causes of behavior. The mentalist need not deny the efficacy of the environmental links; and the behaviorist need not deny the efficacy of

10Skinner is careful, however, not to claim translatability in the sense of provision of "exact behavioral

equivalents" (1974, p. 19), by which he seems to mean "logically equivalent behavioral terms," and W.F.

Day has cautioned us against regarding what Skinner calls translations "as instances of philosophical reduction . . . it is not easy to conceptualize precisely what it is that Skinner is doing when he makes such

translations" (1972, p. 466).

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the mental links. This contention is quite consistent with the view that "the best way to

change a mental condition may be to change other, more conspicuous aspects of behavior first" (Day, 1969, p. 326). Though there is a close connection between the explanatory power of a kind of variable and its usefulness in controling the kind of phenomena it can

explain, the fact that a kind of variable, e.g., a mentalistic variable, can explain, say, actions, does not entail that directly manipulating mentalistic variables is the best way to

change actions, nor that no other variables can explain both actions and mentalistic variables. Consider such unobservable but explanatory variables as acidity, or magnetic force. We usually use observable operations to manipulate them, and one can predict and to an extent explain phenomena by citing these operations even if we say nothing about

acidity or magnetic force. Heating vinegar in an aluminum pan can explain why it became clean. We need not mention acidity, and a law linking the two phenomena can be formulated without mentioning it. But it is because of the vinegar's acidity that it has the observable effect it does.

Before proceeding to compare behavioristic with mentalistic psychology in detail, however, I want to look at some aspects of what seems to be Skinner's positive program for social change. First of all, I believe he is mistaken in thinking that such value

questions as how and to what end behavior technology is to be used belong to the science of behavior. His reason for thinking this is apparently that "How people feel about facts . . . is a question for a science of human behavior" (1971, p. 97). Granted. But the issue is how we ought to feel (in the sense of what we ought to approve of), and even more

important, what we ought to do. It appears that neither the fact that we do feel we should do something, nor any set of facts about how we feel, entails that we ought to do it. Hitler's behavioral engineering may just have been good enough to get most Nazis tofeel they ought to kill Jews.

Skinner might naturally reply that surely one ought to promote the good, and the good is what is positively reinforcing. So we can find out what we ought to do, as scientifically as we can find out what is positively reinforcing. I imagine this is how Skinner sees it. And the view is attractive, particularly if we do not allow that some reinforcers are

qualitatively better than others. There are, however, serious difficulties with the view that the good is the positively

reinforcing. I am assuming that Skinner need not be saddled with the metaethical thesis that the concept of good is analyzable as equivalent to the positively reinforcing, though he often speaks rather as if this were his view (e.g., in 1971, pp. 99 and 108). His view seems best taken as the more modest and more plausible thesis that as a matter of fact what is positively reinforcing is good (and what is negatively reinforcing is bad), and

conversely. There is a huge literature on views of this sort. I shall not attempt full-scale criticism of Skinner's view here, but I want to point out some objections which are substantial enough to show that even the more modest thesis cannot be assumed without a

great deal of argument. I have already suggested that there seem to be qualitative differences among goods.

Presumably Skinner would hold the analogue of Bentham's view that quantity of

pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry (substituting "reinforcement" for

"pleasure"). A more interesting comparison than that of pushpin with poetry, however, would be between two reinforcers, one a stimulation of the brain that yields no sensation

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and another a stimulation that yields pleasurable sensations and reinforces equally, presumably through causing the pleasurable sensations. Intuitively, the latter seems

better (a greater good). The example is of special interest because it suggests that unless Skinner covertly holds a hedonistic theory of reinforcement, he is not as close to Bentham as he might appear. He could adopt such a theory, and I think he may at times be attracted to it. But to explain reinforcement

? and thereby good ? in terms of creation of pleasure

would complicate his psychology considerably. The thesis that the good is equivalent to the (positively) reinforcing has other

problems. Surely something can be reinforcing without being good. Sadistic behavior, e.g., can presumably be reinforcing. Someone's electrically stimulating our brains in certain ways could be highly reinforcing. It is not clear that it would be good in any sense. And unfortunately, what is good is not always reinforcing; e.g., moral adherence to

principle at the cost of denying onself pleasure is apparently good, but not (by itself) reinforcing.

More important, we can biologically and behaviorally change people so that, within

limits, they find reinforcing what we want them to. This makes Skinner's positive aim

frightening: "to design a world which will be liked not by people as they now are but by those who live in it" (1971, p. 156). In defense of designing such a world Skinner says that "A world that would be liked by contemporary people would perpetuate the status

quo" (156). This does not justify his project, (a) Even assuming the status quo is not bad, it is doubtful that most thoughtful contemporaries like it as it is or want to pejpetuate it.

(b) As this suggests, there are numerous alternatives to the status quo which many contemporaries, even without a change in preferences, would like.

I have already quoted Skinner as apparently regarding the individual rights to life,

liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as in principle negotiable. To be sure, he tries to

project his utopia so that its controllers will be benevolent, and says "It is not the benevolence of the controller but the contingencies under which he benevolently controls which must be examined" (1971, p. 74, italics mine). But his wording makes it clear that he assumes the control will be benevolent. How do we know? Indeed, if benevolence just is the disposition to maximize positive reinforcement, as it would be for Skinner, how

much comfort is the benevolence of his controllers even if they maintain it? It may still exclude liberty, non-conformity, and other values worth preserving, particularly if they are judged inferior to other things in survival value. For "Survival is the only value

according to which a culture is eventually to be judged" (1971, p. 130). I agree that for

many purposes we need a technology of behavior, but surely we also need an ethics of behavior firmly independent of this technology, not grounded in it.

There is a further point which is of great importance here. Even if the good in the most

general sense is equivalent to the positively reinforcing ? or to any other "naturalistic"

variable ? there remains a problem about whether what we ought to do is simply a

function of the good, i.e., determinable by calculating the kind and amount of good to be

expected from the available alternatives. If good is interpreted naturalistically (roughly, in terms of some scientifically "measurable" quantity), then there appears to be a gap between the good and the right. Opponents of utilitarianism have argued that this gap is

unbridgeable, and even a naturalist about the good may hold this. Philosophers, among others, have tended to obscure this further issue about the relation of moral to factual

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Statements by talking of the 4'fact-value gap" as if the issue were just whether good can

be interpreted naturalistically. There is reason to believe that maximization of the good, interpreted naturalistically, cannot meet the requirements of justice, however carefully

we carry out the maximization. (For arguments to this effect, see Frankena (1963), Lyons (1965), and Rawls (1971).)

None of this need be particularly unwelcome to Skinner. To be sure, it is desirable to have an objective and empirical way of identifying what is good, and it might be very desirable to be able to decide what we ought to do by calculating the contributions our

various alternatives would make to the good. But the existence of logic and mathematics shows that a discipline can be objective even if it is not empirical, and most moral

philosophers would argue that normative ethics can be objective. Furthermore, there can

be naturalistic criteria for good, e.g., measurable conditions that are normally sufficient for it, even if it is not equivalent to any naturalistic variable. Still more important, whatever the method we use to decide what we ought to do, we can still use Skinneri an

behavioral techniques of instituting it, rather than the often facile exhortation he ably criticizes in portraying mentalistic programs for social change.

However, I think it is clear that Skinner would not be happy if he were convinced that

good is not equivalent to any naturalistic variable, or that what we ought to do is not

simply a function of the good. We can discern why he would not be happy with this by

noting his reaction to Popper's statement that it is impossible to derive a sentence

expressing a norm from one stating a fact: The conclusion is valid only if indeed it is possible to adopt a norm or its

opposite. Here is autonomous man playing his most awe-inspring role. (1971, p.

108) A philosopher's initial response to this is likely to be that Popper's point concerns a

logical relation between propositions, and what we can or cannot do is irrelevant. That is

correct, but misses what Skinner has in mind. He seems to be suggesting that even to talk as philosophers and mentalistic psychologists do of norms and decisions presupposes that we are free, which for Skinner is inconsistent with the apparent facts about human

behavior, since those facts suggest determinism at least in the realm of human behavior. If freedom is taken in the contracausal sense attributed to mentalistic psychologists, then even to talk of justification as normative ethicists do will suggest the doctrine of autonomous man which Skinner attacks. But I believe that freedom and determinism are

compatible, and if so, talk of justifying or choosing one alternative over another does not

commit one to regarding persons as free in any contracausal sense. I conclude, then, that neither non-naturalism in ethics nor the view that we can freely choose among alterna tives commits one to what Skinner means by "mentalism,

' ' nor indeed to any particular

psychological position, e.g., some behavioristic theory as opposed some mentalistic

theory. Concerning the view of man Skinner wants to convey, we must question his idea that

though we are ' 'controlled by" our environment

? indeed, "all control is exerted by the

environment" (1971, p. 77) ? "it is an environment largely of our own making" (205).

I do not seen how Skinner can have it both ways: if we are controlled in his sense by our

environment, then our later environment is not of our own making in the usual sense, but made by the environmental variables of which our environment-affecting behavior is a

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function. Unless Skinner qualifies something important in his view, it is hard to see how our environment is any more of our making than the furrows of a ploughed field are the

makings of the tractor used to make them.11

IV. Skinnerian and Mentalistic Explanations of Behavior

In this section I want to examine the way Skinner has contrasted behavioristic and mentalistic psychologies. I shall not try to show that one is superior to the other, but only that mentalistic psychologies can be so constructed as to be rival scientific psychologies rather than just social studies posing as science.

We can better understand why Skinner underrates the resources of mentalistic

psychology at its best, and hence wrongly associates it with "autonomous man," if we consider how he conceives the relation of his own psychology, by contrast with mentalis tic psychology, to the natural sciences. He takes a science of behavior to be "part of

biology. The organism that behaves is the organism that breathes, digests, conceives, gestates, and so on. As such, the behaving organism will eventually be explained by the anatomist and physiologist" (1975, p. 42). Moreover,

behavior and the conditions of which it is a function do not occur in close

temporal or spatial proximity, and we must wait for physiology to make the connection. When it does so, it will not invalidate the behavioral account . . .

just as much of chemistry remains useful even though a detailed account of a

single instance may be given at the level of atomic or molecular forces, (p. 43) Roughtly, Skinner's idea is that the immediate causes of behavior are physiological

factors in the organism which are presumably caused, at least in good part, by the kinds of environmental variables which he uses to explain behavior. So even when the

physiologist explains behavior in terms of its immediate causes it will remain a function of its remote, environmental causes. The remote causes operate through intermediaries, but this does not prevent their explaining behavior. However, the mentalist too can claim that ultimately a physiological account of behavior will supplement his. Indeed, since he locates the immediate causes of behavior in the organism, he can claim a closer tie to

physiology than Skinner can. The mentalist can hold that such properties as belief, motivation, and expectancy will ultimately be found to be neurophysiological or at any rate physical, states of the organism.12 Thus, mentalistic psychology could become . . a branch of biology, and certainly mentalism does not entail dualism. That mental terms are not analyzable in, and hence not philosophically reducible to, physical terms, does not entail that the properties expressed by mental terms cannot turn out to be physiological. If these properties are physiological, then at least this part of the vocabulary of psychology is scientifically reducible to that of biology. (For discussion of scientific reduction see

Nagel (1961) and Hempel (1965).)

nFor further discussion of this issue and detailed criticism of Skinner's political thought, see Stillman

(1975). 12For a vigorous and plausible defense of the view that mental properties could be physical properties see

Brandt and Kim (1967), reprinted in O'Connor (1969). This anthology contains important papers on both sides of the issue.

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Given the great prestige of the natural sciences today, a Skinnerian may be inclined to

reply that even if mentalistic psychology can become a branch of biology, Skinnerian

psychology already is, and hence is superior. However, assuming Skinnerian psychology is a branch of biology, it does not follow that it is superior to mentalistic psychology in

explaining and predicting human behavior. That is a separate issue which must be decided largely (though certainly not entirely) by experiments. Prima facie it seems that no one kind of explanation is best for all types of behavior; and though I believe some

species of mentalistic explanation are promising, I share Skinner's distaste for most of those he characterizes as appealing to "feelings and introspectively observed inner states" (1974, p. 248), and I can agree that "what is felt or seen through introspection is

only a small part of what the physiologist will eventually discover. In particular it is not the system which mediates the relation between behavior and the environment discov ered by experimental analysis" (p. 249).13 The want-belief system seems the best mentalistic candidate for this mediating role, and (like most philosophers) I do not

consider wants or beliefs feelings or anything else "felt or seen through introspection." So far as I know, there have not been enough experiments comparing behavioristic

predictions with mentalistic predictions at their best; but here I simply want to suggest a

plausible meta-scientific principle highly relevant to such a comparison: Other things

being equal, if one of two competing theories of a given kind of phenomena attempts to

explain the phenomena in terms of variables that are more nearly immediate causes than

those in terms of which the second theory attempts to explain the phenomena, then the

first theory is preferable. The rationale for this is simply that the further removed the

would-be explanatory variables are from what is to be explained, (a) the more room there

is for intervening variables to prevent predictions based on the former from bearing out, or to bring about the phenomenon to be explained in a way which undermines any

explanation of it in terms of the former, and (b) the greater the chance that the apparent

explanatory success of the variables is derivative from their being indications of other

variables which are the "direct" explanation of the phenomena in question. Skinner does not fully appreciate (a) and (b):

If all linkages are lawful, nothing is lost by neglecting a supposed nonphysical 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. (1974, p. 13)

This reasoning neglects cases in which hunger arises from other causes than food

deprivation, including internal causes. IfIt then brings about eating, the eating will not be

explainable by appeal to deprivation (or length of time without food). This illustrates (a) above. So would a case in which deprivation does not produce hunger, because of a

physiological abnormality (whether natural of induced by drugs); and a prediction, based on the deprivation, that the person will eat, would fail. Skinner's example is also

misleading in that food deprivation produces hunger more reliably than most other

behavior-influencing environmental variables apparently produce the inner variables Skinner would like to bypass in the way suggested. Consider, e.g., the "production" of

i:iFor independent reasons, philosophers, particularly since Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949), have

also rejected the typical claims that feelings and introspectible states, or indeed volitions, are what explain human actions.

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non-bodily desires, such as the desire to hear good music, and of abstract beliefs such as

beliefs of complicated mathematical theorems. Environmental variables do not produce these things in the straight-forward way deprivation produces hunger, if indeed environ

mental variables alone produce such desires and beliefs at all. But however such inner

motivational states as hunger are produced, the above examples suggest that to bypass them in the way Skinner suggests will only conceal the extent to which the success of

environmentalist predictions and explanations depends on the predictive and explanatory power of these variables. This illustrates (b) above, and I shall now develop the point.

It will help to draw an analogy. Suppose we want to explain why a car behaves as it

does, e.g., moves in the direction it does, at a certain speed, etc. From observations of the

driver we can predict quite well what the car will do, given a knowledge of the relevant environmental conditions. However, it is what is going on inside the car that directly determines its behavior, and if something disconnected the accelerator pedal from the

engine or the steering wheel from the wheels, we could not predict the car's behavior from the driver's movements. Nor could we predict this accurately if, when the ac

celerator was pressed, it did not determine how much gasoline went into the cylinders. Similarly for the steering wheel. If we think of the car as an analogue of the organism and the driver's movements as the analogue of behaviorally relevant environmental impacts on, or inputs to, the organism, we can say that the Skinnerian psychologist tries to predict and explain the behavior of the car mainly by systematically correlating the driver's movements with the car's movements. The mentalist, by contrast, predicts and explains the car's behavior mainly in terms of what we might call its functional internal states, chiefly acceleration "sets" and steering "sets." He recognizes that in general the driver's movements accurately predict these sets, but he believes the movements

? the environmental variables ? may be cut off from the inner states and in any case are not direct determinants of the behavior to be explained.

Moreover, the mentalist can say that these sets may be identical with physically characterizable states of the car, e.g., the amount of gaosline burning in the cylinders or

the orientation of the wheels, whereas the Skinnerian can maintain only that the variables he uses for prediction

? the driver's movements ? are systematically correlated with the inner physical states of the car. The analogy here is of course between the behavior

determining physical states of the car and the behavior-determining biological states of the organism.

The analogy is admittedly quite imperfect. But it is still instructive. It suggests not

only that mentalistic as well as Skinnerian principles may have predictive and explana tory power, but that insofar as assimilation into future bio-behavioral theory is relevant,

mentalistic theories are prima-facie superior. At this point one might appeal to claims Skinner has sometimes made to the effect that such fundamental mentalistic explanatory concepts as belief and desire are in some sense reducible to his own concepts.14 But I believe this is mistaken,15 in part because, as the car analogy brings out, the relevant

?4See, e.g., (1974), pp. 52 and 69. In (1971) Skinner offers as translations (in some sense) such things as

the following: "there is nothing he wants to do or enjoys doing well, he has no feeling of craftsmanship, no

sense of leading a purposeful life, no sense of accomplishment (he is rarely reinforced by doing anything)" (p. 139; cf. p. 162).

15I have cited a number of considerations weighing against the possibility of such a reduction in (1973a) and (1972a).

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internal states are only highly correlated with the external states from which we infer

them; they are not in any sense equivalent to external states. This is one reason we cannot "translate" 'having a philosophy' into behavioristic terms.

Having suggested that mentalistic theories need not be unscientific, I should now like to suggest that one kind of mentalistic theory

? call it an intentionalistic theory ? can be

mapped onto Skinner's theory of behavior in such a way that one wonders whether their

empirical content is not quite close to being equivalent. It will help to approach this intentionalistic theory through a discussion of reinforcement as characterized by Skinner.

Let us look at various of his characterizations, beginning with Science and Human Behavior. He says that

the only defining characteristic of a reinforcing stimulus is that it reinforces. The only way to tell whether or not a given event is reinforcing to a given

organism under given conditions is to make a direct test. We observe the

frequency of a selected response, then make an event contingent upon it and observe any change in frequency. (1953, p. 72-73)

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner is more explicit: When a bit of behavior is followed by a certain kind of consequence, it is more

likely to occur again, and a consequence having this effect is called a reinforcer.

Food, for example, is a reinforcer to a hungry organism; anything the organism does that is followed by the receipt of food is more likely to be done again whenever the organism is hungry. (1971, p. 25)

Similarly, When a bit of behavior has the kind of consequence called reinforcing, it is more

likely to occur again. A positive reinforcer strengthens any behavior that pro duces it. A glass of water is positively reinforcing when we are thirsty, and if we

then drink a glass of water we are more likely to do so again on similar occasions. A negative reinforcer strengthens any behavior that reduces or terminates it:

when we take off a shoe that is pinching, the reduction in pressure is negatively

reinforcing, and we are more likely to do so again when a shoe pinches. ( 1974, p.

46) The idea seems to be roughly this:

Di. Event R is reinforcing for organism 0, with respect to behavior of type ?, at

time t, under conditions C, if and only if, at /, and under C, O 's emitting B (i.e., an item of behavior of type B) produces R, and B's producing R increases the

probability of O's emitting B again under conditions C. If this does not precisely represent Skinner's notion of reinforcement, it is faithful enough to the above passages to enable us to raise some important questions.

To begin with, suppose that O's watering his vegetable garden each day under dry conditions has the (indirect) consequence that he eats healthy vegetables from his garden. His watering's producing this consequence will presumably increase the probability of his again watering under similar conditions. If so, then by Di his eating healthy vegetables is a reinforcer with respect to watering. But suppose O believes (falsely) that

mixing pebbles with the soil around his plants will prevent the soil from hardening into clods. Suppose he does this mixing after each watering and believes (again falsely) that it has as much to do with giving him healthy vegetables as does the watering. Would not his

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eating the healthy vegetables increase the probability of the pebbling behavior, approxi mately as much the watering? And if it did so in this way, would it not be equally a

reinforcer with respect to the pebbling? It appears that it would. But Di is not satisfied by the pebbling, since it does not produce (or even causally contribute to) O's eating the

healthy vegetables. Di thus seems too narrow. Skinner could of course deny that the

pebbling is here reinforced. But his examples suggest that the case would be one of reinforcement. Indeed, Skinner says at one point that

the reinforcing effect of any deferred consequence can be usurped, so to speak, by intervening behavior, which is reinforced even though it has had no part in the

production of the reinforcing event. (1971, p. 115) The pebbling is just this kind of intervening behavior, and if we imagine O somehow

coming to believe that the watering is irrelevant to his getting healthy vegetables, it would appear that the pebbling could "usurp" it. The fault, then, seems to lie with Di rather than with the example.

Let us consider whether Di is also too broad. Suppose that in driving into his garage O runs over a nail, with the consequence that a neighboring teenager gets pleasure from

hearing O curse and grunt while changing a tire. Because O's running over a nail while

driving into his garage produces this consequence, the probability of his doing the same

thing again might be increased. For the teenager might be led to plant nails there on other occasions. Di is thus satisfied, but surely Skinner would not want to sayO's running over a nail while entering O's garage has been reinforced here. For one thing, it has no essential relation to a discriminative stimulus.

These considerations suggest that we might come closer to capturing Skinner's notion with:

D2. /? is reinforcing for O, with respect to B, at t, under conditions C and in the context of discriminative stimulus S, if and only if, at t, O emits B, and ZTs

producing or being followed by R increases the probability of O's emitting B

again under C and in the context of S. We eliminate the driving case by requiring that B be in the context of a discriminative

stimulus, and we accommodate the pebbling case by allowing that R merely follow B

(Skinner himself seems to allow this, e.g., in the passage quoted from (1971, p. 25), in which he says that any response of the hungry organism "followed by the receipt of food is more likely to occur again when the organism is hungry.") But there are other difficulties. First, what is to count as a discriminative stimulus? Presumably it is

something physical that is perceived by O when B is emitted, for instance the tap when B is thirsty. As this suggests, it is often a means to, or in some way causally connected with,

R. Suppose that reaching for the tap is reinforced, in the way Skinner imagines in the

passage just quoted, by drinking. Will this affect the probability that a person who is

thirsty and perceives a tap will reach for it, when he does not take it to be a tap but thinks it

is, say, a decoration or air vent? One is inclined to doubt whether the probability will be

affected; and on the reasonable (empirical) assumption that it is not, D2 will not be satisfied by the thirsty person's reaching for the tap and drinking from it, which is a

paradigm of reinforcement. D2 may also be too broad. Imagine that the driving case is altered in just one way: the person who drives over the nails does see them but takes them to be strips of harmless tin foil. He would now appear to satisfy D2 (the foil serving as a

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discriminative stimulus), yet we would not have a case of his driving over the nails being reinforced.

The trouble, one might say, is that in both examples the behavior is not under the control of a discriminative stimulus. But what does that mean? I should like to suggest that we can understand Skinner's notion of reinforcement quite well if we begin by supposing that a discriminative stimulus, at least as it operates in reinforcement, is,

roughly, something O experiences which evokes (or perhaps produces) in him the belief that by doing B he will (or might) bring about R. We might then construe a reinforcer as

something like this:

D3/? R is a reinforcer for O, with respect to behavior B, if and only if O wants R or would want it if O were to experience it, and R is such that when its following B evokes in O, or is accompanied in O by, the belief that B will (or may) bring about R (or the same kind of thing), the probability of O's doing B is increased.

In (1974), e.g., Skinner introduces the notion of a reinforcer in a way that suggests this (p. 46), and he later says that "op?rant behavior is the very field of purpose and intention. By its nature it is directed toward the future: a person acts in order that

something will happen" (p. 55). As ordinarily conceived, acting in order that* is acting because one wants x and believes that so acting will (or may) realize x.

Notice how much of what Skinner says about reinforcement is explainable by D3.

First, the class of reinforcers is appropriately openended. Just about anything can be

wanted; certainly anything that can reinforce can be. Second, it is an empirical (and I think objective) question what a person wants. (MacCorquodale has emphasized the

importance of both of these properties of reinforcers, and criticizes Chomsky for 4 'complaining because reinforcers can only be postdicted from the fact of reinforcement,

since they cannot be 'characterized' in terms of any universal, independently knowable correlated property, such as drive-reducing power" (1970, p. 87).) Third, it is an

important part of the concept of wanting that if one comes to believe doing something will

bring about what is wanted one tends to do this (I have argued for this in (1973a).) We thus have a close analogue of the effect of reinforcement on response probability. Fourth,

D3 makes it easy to see why Skinner finds it so natural to use the examples he does; for

thirst, hunger, pressure on one's foot, and the like all strongly imply wants. Fifth, we can

apparently pick out the stimuli which control a kind of behavior, from among the huge number often in the subject's perceptual field at the time of behavior, if we select on the basis of what evokes or produces a suitable belief, one to the effect that the behavior in

question will (or may) produce the thing wanted. Sixth, we can easily pick out what behavior gets reinforced among the many behaviors followed by, or apparently bringing about, a known or hypothesized reinforcer: it is that set of behaviors which O believes will (or may) bring about the reinforcer (or bring about something similar). Thus, even if a person has a temporary limp prior to picking his beautiful tomatoes, we presumably should not expect his limping to be reinforced by his picking them; D3 makes it easy to

explain why we should not expect this: he does not believe the limping makes any contribution to his picking the tomatoes. Seventh, the more likely O believes it is that a behavior will bring about something he wants, and the more he wants it, the more likely the behavior is to occur, other things equal. This is the analogue of the fact that some reinforcers reinforce more than others for certain organisms, and that the effect of

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reinforcement on the probability of response is in part a function of the effectiveness of

the relevant discriminative stimuli. Finally, D3 should help us if we do not know what successor or apparent consequence of a kind of behavior is reinforcing it or has done so. It will be something O believes the behavior does (or may) bring about. Thus, suppose we are puzzled about why a person waters house plants with warm water and we cannot

discern what among the apparent consequences of this is reinforcing the behavior. If we

learn that he believes this pleases his wife, who thinks house plants are chilled by cold

water, we may reasonably hypothesize that pleasing her is the reinforcer. In the light of Skinner's recent work, I am inclined to think he would not receive this

way of conceiving reinforcement with unmixed hostility, particularly if it is emphasized that we have objective bases for attributing beliefs and wants to a person quite indepen dently of his introspective reports. But Skinner would probably want to argue that

nothing is gained by conceiving reinforcement along the lines of D3 and that his

conception of reinforcement casts more light on the intentionalistic approach I am

sketching than it throws on his conception. It is in good part in this connection that Skinner's effort to translate talk of beliefs and wants into behavioristic vocabulary becomes important. Let us explore this briefly. He says that

We build "belief" when we increase the probability of action by reinforcing behavior. When we build a person's confidence that a floor will hold him by inducing him to walk on it . . . the change which occurs as a person "learns to trust a floor" by walking on it is the characteristic effect of reinforcement.

(1971, pp. 88-89) Notice also his reply to the view that in op?rant conditioning "People must believe that what they are doing has some chance of obtaining what they want or avoiding something to which they are averse" (1974, p. 70). Skinner says:

But the chances are in the contingencies. The relevance of beliefs to other

conditions, such as wants and needs, can be easily stated: to say that "desires enter into the causation of beliefs" is simply to say that the probability of behavior with which a belief is associated depends not only upon reinforcement but upon a state of deprivation or aversive stimulation. (1974, p. 70)

Part of the idea here is expressed in the following example: The significant fact is that a person who needs or wants food is particularly likely to be reinforced by food and that he is particularly likely to engage in any behavior which has been previously reinforced by food. (1974, p. 49)

Consider first Skinner's idea that "We build 'belief when we increase the probabil ity of action by reinforcing behavior." I agree that this is one way to build belief, but Skinner talks as if finding out what behavior is reinforced is quite independent of

determining what the organism believes about the relation of his behavior to the reinforcement. In discussing Di and D21 argued that this does not in general appear to be so: more often than not in the case of human behavior it seems that it is clear what behavior is reinforced because it is clear what, in the context, the person believes about the relation of the behavior to the reinforcer. This is one reason why we generally do not have to wait to see if the frequency of the behavior is increased to be warranted in

believing it has been reinforced. In the floor case Skinner discusses above he seems to be

imagining anxiety about whether the floor will hold one (1971, pp. 88-89), and presum

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ably the reinforcer is the reduction of this anxiety by walking on the floor without

incident. But note that the aversive state, which is supposed to be understood mainly as

something which increases the likelihood of appropriate reinforcement, itself apparently needs to be understood in terms of belief: the person is not merely anxious; his anxiety

surely involves the belief that the floor may not hold him. Can his walking on it reduce his

anxiety if he does not come to believe at least that it is more likely that the floor will hold

him? And suppose he knows he is walking on it but believes that at the moment it is

artificially supported from below? My point, again, is not that reinforcement does not

build belief, but that this does not imply that we can analyze or in any sense translate

"belief" into reinforcement vocabulary. Let me also suggest that reinforcement is not the only way belief is produced. Skinner

himself says that "a person's belief that a floor will hold him depends upon his past

experience. If he has walked across it without incident many times, he will do so again

readily" (1971, p. 88). The suggestion appears to be that experience may by itself build

belief. Indeed, it is crucial to our ordinary concept of belief that perceptual experience

produces belief; e.g., if someone perceives that a bridge is able to hold a car, he comes to

believe it is able to hold one. The principle that many beliefs of a person may be reliably inferred from his perceptual environment is of great help in giving us an objective way of

determining some of the beliefs we need to assign to a person in order to understand his

behavior. (I have discussed this further in (1972a).) We should also examine Skinner's reply to the view that "people must believe that

what they are doing has some chance of obtaining what they want. ' ' The substance of his

reply seems to be that we can sum up the relation of beliefs to other psychological conditions such as wants by noting that "to say that 'desires enter into the causation of

beliefs' is simply to say that the probability of behavior with which a belief is associated

depends not only upon reinforcement but upon a state of deprivation or aversive

stimulation" (1974, p. 70). First, we should note that the central claim of the inten

tionalistic approach to behavior is not that desires enter into the causation of beliefs, but

that intentional behavior is explainable in terms of suitable sets of wants and beliefs, e.g., a want for something and a belief that doing a certain thing will bring this about. This

thesis accommodates intentions and a number of other mentalistic notions analyzable in

terms of wants and beliefs. (That intentions are so analyzable I have argued in "Intend

ing' ' ( 1973b). For discussion of intentions as putative causes of behavior see Day ( 1976)

and Ryan (1970).) Second, it is important to see that here again Skinner is replying to an

intentionalist criticism by appealing to reinforcement, in the context of deprivation or

aversive stimulation, as what explains the probability of a given kind of behavior. But

surely our reflections about his floor example show at least that he needs an argument to

show that the effect of reinforcement on behavior, or even the identification of reinforc

ers, can be understood without reliance on the concept of belief. I am aware of no

adequate argument to this effect in Skinner's work. If no adequate argument to this effect can be built out of Skinnerian materials, then there is a strong presumption in favor of

something like D3 as expressing what Skinner has in mind in speaking of reinforcement.

For as I have suggested, in all his examples of reinforcement it looks as though the subject (a) wants the thing that reinforces (or comes to want it upon experiencing it), (b) believes,

with respect to the behavior which is reinforced, that it will (or may) bring about the

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reinforcer (or bring about something similar), and (c) would not be more likely to

perform this behavior again if it were not for this belief and want.

In closing this section, I want to pursue further the possibility that even if something like D3 is correct the most that follows is that Skinner is offering a technical translation of some antecedently useful rough notions

? a perfectly reasonable thing for a scientist to do. After all, it might be argued, whatever constraints we put on the correctness of a

translation, the relation is symmetrical and entails equivalence: if a is a translation of ?, then b is a translation of a \ and a and b are equivalent, the kind of equivalence depending on the strength of the constraints on correctness. Now if, say, D3, is correct, that just shows that any behavior which is explainable intentionalistically is also explainable in Skinnerian terms. But this conclusion does not follow. For though D3 is a general definition of "reinforcement," i.e., defines itforall its uses, it is notageneral definition of "believe" or "want." Indeed, it gives neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for their application. I have already suggested that beliefs may arise independently of reinforcers. Wants may also, e.g., when they are produced by bodily needs. Skinner seems to think that his behavioristic vocabulary does provide translations, in some sense, of "want," and "believe," and other intentionalistic terms, forali the contexts in which

they might help in understanding behavior; but for reasons given above (among others) I

very much doubt this. (See Hempel (1966) and Chisholm (1958) for some discussion of why no such translations seem possible.)

If such a translation should be available, however, then just because translation entails equivalence, Skinner would have to grant that at least in predictive power and

presumably in explanatory power, the parts of the intentionalist theory translatable into his vocabulary were equal to the equivalent parts of his vocabulary. Two interesting questions would then arise: (a) whether all of the predictively and explanatorily signifi cant vocabulary of one framework is translatable into the other, and (b) if not, how the

non-translatable parts of either or both vocabularies are to be evaluated: comparatively if each has a part not translatable into the other, and on general criteria of explanatory and

predictive power if only one vocabulary has a part not translatable into the other. Suppose that for the sake of argument we assume that all the Skinnerian vocabulary is translatable into the intentionalistic vocabulary, but not conversely. It is extremely important to see

that this would not imply that the former has no explanatory power. For if even a few

intentional terms in some of their important uses are translatable into Skinnerian vocabu

lary, then whatever explanatory power those terms have in those uses will presumably attach to the counterpart Skinnerian terms as well (I say "presumably" because I am not

assuming that the translations are quite equivalent in meaning, and it is difficult to judge the importance of the differences there would be). This would be quite significant. It

might well explain not only the apparent success of Skinner's own attempts to accommo

date purposive phenomena (e.g., in 1974, Ch. 4), but also that of some efforts to explain concepts belonging to "cognitive" psychology in Skinnerian terms, e.g., that of

Chandra (1976). If Skinner's notion of reinforcement is nothing more than D3 expresses, it is also nothing less.

Let me emphasize that I am not contending that D3 does express what Skinner means

by "reinforcer." But it often looks as if the explanatory and predictive power of

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reinforcers as he conceives them depends on viewing them this way,16 and certainly his notion of reinforcement needs clarification. My concern with clarifying the notion is more than conceptual, however. I should very much like to see a sound argument to show that competent Skinnerians and competent intentionalists will differ substantially in their

predictions of behavior where they work from the same observations. Second, if there are

differences, it would be of great interest to have some experiments designed to test the

predictive power of the notion of a reinforcer where the predictions made are not the same ones we would make if we construe reinforcers in the mentalistic way suggested by

03.

If I have succeeded in showing that there is this kind of experimental issue between Skinnerian and intentionalistic theories, that would be significant. For we can then see how to compare the two kinds of theories in a scientifically respectable way, and it will be clear that mentalistic principles can be tested experimentally. There are of course other criteria than predictive power for evaluating a scientific theory, nor is explanatory power merely a matter of predictive power. But clearly predictive power is one count on which

virtually all scientists ?

including Skinner ? are willing to judge theories of human

behavior.

V. Conclusion

Let me summarize briefly. First, I believe that Skinner says nothing which shows that persons are not very often

free in the important sense crucial for moral responsibility and human dignity, or that the

progress of psychology or any other science is necessarily a threat to human freedom or

dignity. If I have been right, neither the truth of determinism, nor human actions' being caused, nor even their being "traceable to" environmental variables, entails that we do not act freely or bear no moral responsibility for our actions.

Second, Skinner does not show that an empirically responsible mentalistic psychol ogy is impossible, or even unavailable today. He talks as if what (I should like to think) is

really a difference between approaches within scientific psychology were a difference between scientific and unscientific psychology. I appreciate his robust sense of reality, though it apparently contributes unduly to his suspicion of unobservable constructions such as motives, preferences, and beliefs. And I share Skinner's insistence that scientific

explanations and hypotheses be experimentally testable. But physics and chemistry rely crucially on unobservables, after all; and surely some mentalistic hypotheses and expla nations can be tested.

Regarding Skinner's social philosophy, if we may take his main social ideal to be to

design a world which will be liked not by people as they now are, but by those who live in

it, then the ideal does not command rational approval. It is put forward with too sweeping a faith in technology as

? given the conditions under which the controller "benevolently

controls' ' ? an adequate safeguard of liberty. I believe it is largely because Skinner does

not distinguish moral and evaluative questions from scientific ones, that he naturally thinks scientific progress by itself will solve our moral problems and give us the right

16For some arguments to the effect that "Skinner is a 'hidden' teleologist," see Rychlak (1973).

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values. He is not alone in thinking this, but it is surprising that his acute cynicism does not more profoundly affect his futuristic vision. One would expect him to give more attention to guarding our moral rights, which I feel sure he would affirm. We should bear in mind, however, that Skinner's psychology and philosophy of psychology are logically inde

pendent of his social philosophy,17 so that criticisms of the latter are not necessarily criticisms of the former.

Fourth, I have argued that some of what Skinner says about reinforcement and

op?rant behavior suggests that an intentionalistic conception of the explanation of action underlies his notions of both, and that the behavioral predictions a good Skinneri an would make might in general be the same ones a good intentionalist would make. If Skinnerian and mentalistic theories can be as close in empirical content as this implies, then a most interesting reconciliation and co-operation are possible. One of the aims of this paper has been.to clarify the issues sufficiently to facilitate discussion of behavioris tic and mentalistic theories and to show a need for comparing them in respect of empirical content.

On the positive side, I agree with Skinner that environment is of great importance in

determining behavior, that there is a temptation to construct ad hoc mentalistic explana tions, that we should

' 'question the causal role of what is felt or introspectively observed

within the skin" (1974, p. 225), that testability is a necessary condition for a scientifi

cally acceptable explanation, and that many of the criticisms Skinner replies to in About Behaviorism are quite mistaken.18 I believe, with Skinner, that "To argue that 'minds

kill, not guns' may be simply to insist that we shall not control assassins by making guns unavailable" (1974, p. 165); insofar as mentalism is used to support such facile

pronouncements, it is rightly opposed. And if mentalistic variables used to explain behavior are so treated as to have "the appeal of the arcane, the occult, the hermetic . . .

of an apparently inexplicable power, in a world which seems to be beyond the senses and the reach of reason" (1974, p. 162), then I want none of them.

It may yet seem that I want to see psychology go backwards. My suggestion that Skinner's explanatory resources may be nearly equivalent to those of an intentionalistic

theory might appear to imply that psychologists would be better off to abandon be havioristic methods. But nothing I have said about Skinner implies anything specific about the methods appropriate in psychology. Moreover, I doubt that an intentionalistic

theory of the kind I have in mind (and have elsewhere described in some detail, e.g., (1972b) and (1973a)) has been tested or even fully formulated by mentalistic

psychologists, nor have philosophers provided much conceptual clarification of this

approach until rather recently. There may thus be nothing very definite to go back to. My hope is that some psychologists

? mentalistic as well as behavioristic ? will be interested in comparing the predictive power of a well-formulated intentionalistic theory

with that of Skinnerian principles. If there is no difference, that will support the view that

17Scribner (1972) has developed this point. 18It is worth pointing out that none of the criticisms I have brought against Skinner is precisely equivalent

to any of the twenty points he cites, in the introduction to (1974), as either mistaken or resulting from

misunderstanding of his views. Nor would I unqualifiedly endorse any of these, though some of my criticisms are certainly similar to some of those Skinner cites. I do not believe, however, that his replies to any of the latter undermine any of my criticisms.

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Skinner's notion of reinforcement is something like the one suggested in Section IV. If Skinnerian principles are predictively superior, then a scientifically legitimate mentalism would have been put to a serious test and could be rejected by Skinnerians for better reasons than the vacuity of the relatively crude versions of mentalism they criticize. If the intentionalistic theory should be more successful, then Skinnerians and other be haviorists would at least want to reassess some of their ideas. But however it might turn

out, there would surely be better understanding on both sides.19

19For helpful criticism of an earlier version of this paper I am grateful to W.F. Day and Daniel Bernstein.

REFERENCES Audi, R. The concept of believing. The Personalist, 1972, 53, 43-62. (a) Audi, R. On the conception and measurement of attitudes in contemporary Anglo-American psychology.

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 1972,2, 173-203. (b) Audi, R. The concept of wanting. Philosophical Studies, 1973, 24, 1-21. (a) Audi, R. Intending. Journal of Philosophy, 1973, 70, 387-403. (b) Audi, R. Moral responsibility, freedom, and compulsion. American Philosophical Quarterly, 1974, //,

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Brandt, R.B. & Kim, J. The