B.F. Skinner’s Radical Behaviorsim: Logical Positivism or Dialectical Materialism?

Abstract

Looking back upon the historical development of philosophical and scientific discourse in the West, one is tempted to remark—from the viewpointof a current science of human behavior-that it seems the world is in the business of gradually teaching us successively more accurate forms of describing what it is doing. And, in spite of the risk of oversimplification, I want to discuss this historical development as the generation of a triumvirate of verbal practices and explanations within the philosophical and scientific community. These three explanatory "languages," in their order of development, are (1) idealism, and its more recent variation, mentalism; (2) mechanistic materialism, and its contemporaneous moves to avoid slipping back into idealism, logical positivism; and (3) the most recent, and most accurate or "scientific" of these practices, dialectical materialism. It appears with the first two patterns of explanation must occur within a scientific verbal community before the third emerges, for this pattern has prevailed in both the development of science, in general, and the development of the science of behavior, in particular. I will say at the outset that the science of behavior is Skinner's Radical Behaviorism, and that this science should certainly be regarded as a form of dialectical materialism as the term is employed in this discussion. TABLE OF CONTENTS The Genesis of Idealism in Hellenistic Thought The Roman Empire as Mixing Pot The Rise of Science and Mechanistic Materialism Descartes' Entrenchment of Dualism—Plato Revisited Developments Until the Beginnings of American Psychology Psychology in the U.S., or the Genesis of Methodological Behaviorism Theology as Thesis, Darwin as Antithesis, and Freud as Pseudo-Synthesis The Three Arms of "Positivism" The Paradigmatic Revolution in Science Skinner and Private Events The Importance of Skinner to a Post-Transition Society Conclusion & Footnotes