On the distinction between private events and the physiology of the organism.

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss the use of the concept of behavior-analytic interpretations for phenomena such as feelings and cognitions. I contrast the idea of an with the relational character of the subject matter of a science of behavior, and argue that defining feelings and cognitions as inner mental or physiological, is incompatible with a behavior-analytic view. I consider some circumstances which bodily conditions may acquire stimulus functions, and contend that they do not equal bodily conditions to stimuli. Finally, I discuss covert responses as responses of the organism as a whole, whose distinctive features lie the restricted participation of the motor apparatus and on relational dimensions of the response. Key-words: stimuli, covert responses, physiology. ********** Skinner (1945) introduced the concept of private events his 1945 paper, which concerned terms. In that context, private events meant and covert responses, with an emphasis on the fact that each speaker possesses a small but important world of stimuli (p. 272-273) which, under certain social contingencies of reinforcement, may come to control verbal responses. Skinner argued that and covert responses share a limited accessibility to public observation, but do not lack physical dimensions. Since Skinner's original statement, the concept of has been employed a variety of circumstances which behavior analysts discuss issues like feelings, emotions, thinking, dreaming, etc. As pointed out by Friman, Hayes, and Wilson (1998), in his landmark paper on the operational analysis of psychological terms, Skinner laid the philosophical and theoretical foundation for a behavioral analysis of (p. 139). What a layman calls an emotion or a feeling (e.g., a feeling of happiness) is a behavioral event or phenomena which may vary along several dimensions. Private events, as well, may be considered a verbal response, emitted by behavior analysts under the control of phenomena which may differ with respect to many important features, including their complexity (Tourinho, 2006a). For instance, an adult's with his/her child performance a play may include: a) a response of crying elicited by conditioned (e.g., the picture of the child on the stage); b) a high rate of greeting responses towards the child; c) self-descriptive verbal responses of under the discriminative control of bodily conditions associated with specific public events; d) responses of cancellation of business appointments under the control of the child requests for family programs, and so on. Individuals our culture may talk of happiness under the control of any one of many different arrangements of relations of these types. Additionally, behavior analysts are inclined to say that whenever we are faced with a feeling of happiness, the concept of may play an important role our analysis of the phenomenon. What is common about all these phenomena--in the presence of which we are inclined to speak of a feeling of happiness, for instance, or of general--is precisely the fact that these are more or less complex sets of behavioral relations of which a and/or a covert response take(s) part. In the present paper, I will not discuss the varying complexity of phenomena described as since the issue has been addressed elsewhere (Tourinho, 2006a), but I intend to provide a closer examination of and covert responses. As I present these remarks, however, it should be clear that, although Skinner sometimes defined as and covert responses, the verbal response private events is often emitted by behavior analysts under the control of phenomena that include more than and/or covert responses. …