Abstract
The place of the concept of response strength in a natural science of behavior has been the subject of much debate. This article reconsiders the concept of response strength for reasons linked to the foundations of a natural science of behavior. The notion of response strength is implicit in many radical behaviorists’ work. Palmer (2009) makes it explicit by applying the response strength concept to three levels: (1) overt behavior, (2) covert behavior, and (3) latent or potential behavior. We argue that the concept of response strength is superfluous in general, and an explication of the notion of giving causal status to nonobservable events like latent behavior or response strength is harmful to a scientific endeavor. Interpreting EEG recordings as indicators of changes in response strength runs the risk of reducing behavior to underlying mechanisms, regardless of whether such suggestions are accompanied by behavioral observations. Many radical behaviorists understand behavior as a discrete unit, inviting conceptual mistakes reflected in the notion of response strength. A molar view is suggested as an alternative that accounts for the temporally extended nature of behavior and avoids the perils of a response-strength based approach.
Highlights
The place of the concept of response strength in a natural science of behavior has been the subject of much debate
Our goal is to address the concept of response strength, where it results from a readiness to include private events in the analysis of behavior
The molar approach assumes that many conceptual mistakes interwoven with the concept of response strength arise from discretizing behavior (Baum, 2002)
Summary
To Palmer (2009) the concept of response strength is, for example, useful for explaining the notion of multiple control as exemplified by the sequential occurrence of two stimuli leading to a different or faster occurring response than the presentation of one of the stimuli alone. Not all characteristics Palmer (2009) assigns to the notion of response strength point to a hypothetical construct This ambiguity weakens what might be the closest things to a disambiguation of the concept of response strength adopted implicitly by most radical behaviorists. If response strength is exclusively a function of the variables that control behavior, no surplus meaning is involved and no predictions of behavior based on anything but the observed controlling variables can be made This resembles MacCorquodale and Meehl’s (1948) definition of intervening variables rather than hypothetical constructs. Neither hypothetical constructs nor intervening variables are in general problematic to explanations of behavior if used in a way that is logically consistent; there should be no ambiguity about ontological assumptions of the response strength concept. The lack of the remaining parts of the explanatory chains in the examples given illustrates one of the risks one runs when including response strength as a part of an explanatory chain, even if not intending to regard response strength as the behavior initiating factor
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