The Comedy of Behaviorism

This is a straw man representation of behaviorism. No behaviorist claims that thinking is a delusion, just that it is hard to measure.

Per, see the SEP entry or Wikipedia entry on Behaviorism. Skinner, in particular, does appear to have espoused that version from what I can make out.

I don't expect there are many Skinnerian behaviorists left nowadays, but the memes are still floating around in fields outside psychology.

Skinner was correct that mind, intentionality, thought, desire, etc, are unscientific. Where behaviorism went wrong was ascribing behavior to conditioning and underplaying the role of biology (although Skinner never denied the importance of biology; unlike Chomsky and the computationalists). I'd accuse computationalism of being "cryptodualism" except that Chomsky's project was explicitly Cartesian and was only non-dualistic in the sense that he believed the laws of physics would have to change to incorporate non-biological computational models of the mind.

If your view is simply that the brain is performing computations and that it makes sense to talk about them in terms of algorithms then that's fine. I have no problem with that. If you're going to argue, as some philosophers do, that this somehow vindicates "the mind" and the posits of folk psychology then you're making a very different argument altogether. Skinner's belief that intentionality is on par with Aristotelian teleological physics is perfectly compatible with the first view. The notion that calling the brain a computer and talking about algorithms naturalizes dualism (i.e., the algorithms are the mind and the brain is the implementation), on the other hand, is pure mysticism.

I don't have the exact quote at hand, but there's a section in LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven that paraphrases something like this: "People say dreams aren't real, but when you've seen as many EEG patterns as I have, you recognize that dreams are real events that have real effects. There's nothing unreal about them."

Psychology had no answer to Skinner's criticisms until 1) behavioral studies were able to show that the time it took for people to answer a question about object identity and rotation was related to the degree of rotation (in a famous experiment Eliezer has previously referenced), establishing that observation of behavior was capable of illuminating interior process, and 2) more-advanced technologies were capable of permitting the observation of interior events not previously accessible.

The notion that calling the brain a computer and talking about algorithms naturalizes dualism (i.e., the algorithms are the mind and the brain is the implementation), on the other hand, is pure mysticism.

poke: Skinner's belief that intentionality is on par with Aristotelian teleological physics is perfectly compatible with the first view.

Whatever views his belief may be compatible with, it is not compatible with reality. That is, it is false. Intentionality is explainable in physical terms. An intention is the reference signal of a control system, and a control system is something that acts so as to maintain a perceptual signal close to its reference signal.

I could expand on that, but not within the confines of a comment on this blog. It might take a few dozen Eliezer-style posts to cover the distance properly.

It might be more useful to examine Wikipedia's article on Radical Behaviorism, which if memory serves does a moderately good job at presenting Skinner's positions.

It also distinguishes his ideas from various others which they are frequently confused with.

This post is indeed a straw-man representation of behaviorism - and so is aptly titled.

Caledonian, interesting. The SEP article on behaviorism seemed to be identifying "radical behaviorism" with the denial of the mental, but perhaps I misinterpreted? In any case I'm inclined to trust Wikipedia here, which indicates that the extreme version of behaviorism should be identified with John B. Watson, an earlier founder.

I do not, however, see any indication that the denial-of-mind version of behaviorism is straw; as far as I can make out, it was seriously advocated.

Q: What does one behaviorist greet another?

A: How am I?

I screwed that up..

The joke goes:

How does one behaviorist greet another?

"How am I doing today?"

the lack of explicit definitions when it comes to emotion doesn't strike me as a very interesting problem. different behaviors will become associated with different brain states depending on environmental conditioning.

See also: Greedy reductionism

Eliezer, it's particularly important to make a distinction, as the SEP and Wikipedia articles do to an extent, between "behaviorism" as a methodological stance in the field of psychology (of which Skinner was an advocate), and "(logical) behaviorism" as a position in the philosophy of mind associated with the logical positivists such as Carnap.

Carnap's thesis, as expressed in his 1932/33 article "Psychology in Physical Language", was simply that psychology could (ultimately) be reduced to physics -- a proposition I presume you accept, but which used to be controversial, and still is in some quarters. Because neuroscience was not as advanced in the 1930s as it is now, the examples that Carnap gave of "translations" (e.g. "Mr. A is excited" translates into various propositions about his physical behavior, such as jumping up and down yelling, high blood pressure, etc.) have mislead some later readers (such as Hilary Putnam) into thinking that Carnap was saying mental states just consist of observed macroscopic behavior. In truth, however, there is nothing in Carnap's article to suggest that the "behavior" of which mental states are alleged to consist excludes the microscopic behavior of neurons.

I am pleased that you mention that (at present) the human brain is still the best predictor of other humans' behavior, even if we don't understand why (yet). I've always known my intuitions to be very good predictors of what people will do and feel, though it's always been a struggle trying to formalize what I already know into some useful model that could be applied by anyone...

However, I was once told my greatest strength in understanding human behavior was not my intuitions, but my ability to evaluate intuitions as one piece of evidence among others, not assuming they are tyrranically correct (which they are certainly not), and thus improving accuracy... Maybe instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater on human intuitions of empathy, we should practice some sort of semi-statistical evaluation of how certain we feel about a conclusion and update it for other factors. Do you do this already, Eliezer? How?

Methodological behaviorism took private mental events to be off limits but (most) behaviorists still believed they existed. Skinner took introspection and self-knowledge to by types of behavior and explicitly denied the mental. Eliezer's analysis is correct insofar as Skinner denied the mental but the passages about not being able to account for complex behavior are wrong. Skinner took behavior to be a product of environmental conditioning and evolved physiology.

Here's Skinner explaining radical behaviorism in the opening of About Behaviorism:

"Mentalism kept attention away from the external antecedent events which might have explained behavior, by seeming to supply an alternative explanation. Methodological behaviorism did just the reverse; by dealing exclusively with external antecedent events it turned attention away from self-observation and self-knowledge. Radical behaviorism restores some kind of balance. ... It does not call these events unobservable, and it does not dismiss them as subjective. It simply questions the nature of the object observed and the reliability of the observations."

(Note how similar the final sentence is to eliminativists like Chruchland and Dennett who emphasize that introspection is fallible.)

"The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind or mental life but the observer's own body. ... An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out of reach of introspection."

"[W]e can look at those features of behavior which have led people to speak of an act of will, of a sense of purpose, of experience as distinct from reality, of innate or acquired ideas, of memories, meanings, and the personal knowledge of the scientist, and of hundreds of other mentalistic things or events. Some can be 'translated into behavior,' others discarded as unnecessary or meaningless." (Emphasis mine.)

Skinner was essentially an eliminative materialist who relied too heavily on the tools of his time (operant conditioning). He denied that the brain had the structure of folk psychology (what the behaviorists called mentalism) and emphasized conditioning and evolved physiology (he talked about evolution explicitly).

The description of behaviorists does seem a bit cartoonish, but still it's a great post and an interesting thought provoking read. Good to see a commenter of the calibre of Richard Kennaway in the thread, too.

Richard Kennaway,

Whatever views his belief may be compatible with, it is not compatible with reality. That is, it is false. Intentionality is explainable in physical terms. An intention is the reference signal of a control system, and a control system is something that acts so as to maintain a perceptual signal close to its reference signal.

Everybody has a pet theory of intentionality. The problem isn't intentionality but why anybody would want to explain intentionality in the first place. You're either explaining: (a) a part of what you take to be your experience of the world; or (b) a part of our folk psychological explanations of behavior. Either way, you're not doing science to begin with, so it's unlikely you'd stumble upon science along the way.

Secondary sources were giving me contradictory indications on this, so I went looking for primary sources. The closest thing I could find to a denial of mentalism was this by John B. Watson:

With the advent of behaviorism in 1913 the mind-body problem disappeared — not because ostrich-like its devotees hid their heads in the sand but because they would take no account of phenomena which they could not observe. The behaviorist finds no mind in his laboratory — sees it nowhere in his subjects. Would he not be unscientific if he lingered by the wayside and idly speculated upon it; just as unscientific as the biologists would be if they lingered over the contemplation of entelechies, engrams and the like. Their world and the world of the behaviorist are filled with facts — with data which can be accumulated and verified by observation — with phenomena which can be predicted and controlled. If the behaviorists are right in their contention that there is no observable mind-body problem and no observable separate entity called mind — then there can be no such thing as consciousness and its subdivision. Freud's concept borrowed from somatic pathology breaks down. There can be no festering spot in the substratum of the mind — in the unconscious — because there is no mind.

-- John B. Watson, The Unconscious of the Behaviorist

Later on in the same document, when Watson says...

May I stop for just one moment to give the behaviorist's view of what most people mean or at least should mean when they say they are conscious or have consciousness? They mean, in my opinion, that they can carry on some kind of brief sub-vocal talk with "themselves" behind the closed doors of the lips.

...he would seem to be referring to actual small movements of the tongue, according to his earlier work Is Thinking Merely the Action of Language Mechanisms?

I had read this earlier work and thought that, while wrong in its reduction, it was not outright eliminative with respect to thinking - thinking was to be explained in terms of subvocal tongue movements(!) but still explained. However, I get the impression that Watson grew more extreme over time (a common phenomenon).

I am unable to find online the referenced text of his 1930 attack on the mind as an "old wives' tale".

But I don't think that "major behaviorists denied the existence of the mind" is straw.

poke: Your argument applies to any mental phenomena whatsoever, a position which I consider sufficiently silly to not trouble with further. The problem is intentionality, which can be explained as rainbows are explained, not as kobolds are explained away. Operant conditioning is insufficient even for the latter.

Eliezer: I am unable to find online the referenced text of his 1930 attack on the mind as an "old wives' tale".

The text is Watson's book "Behaviorism", to which there is limited access on Google Books. The phrase occurs exactly once, on p.118, but not in close connection with the mind. However, searching the text for "mind" provides ample evidence that he claimed there was no such thing. A few examples:

"X. Talking and thinking. Which, when rightly understood, goes far in breaking down the fiction that there is any such thing as 'mental' life." (Table of contents) "How do you suppose Patou builds a new gown? Has he any "picture in his mind" of what the gown is to look like when it is finished? He has not, or he would not waste his time making it up; he would make a rough sketch of it or he would tell his assistant how to make it." (p.198) "If 'mind' acts on body, then all physical laws are invalid." (p.243, emphasis in the original)

The second quote is particularly interesting, because at that point Watson is face to face with the truth, then turns 180 degrees away from it. A picture in his mind of the finished gown is precisely what the dressmaker has. He intends to perceive a gown of such and such a form, and the actions he takes in making it are chosen to produce that perception. The actions stop when he sees before him the gown that he conceived.

The last quote suggests an explanation, if not a justification, for his position. He could not solve the question "what is mind?", and hit the Ignore button.

No doubt there is also a privileged historical reference as well. Angels? Disembodied souls? Positively medieval. Dualism? A bit dressier, but still discredited. Free will? That's something still being disputed, but the free will of modernists is not the free will bandied about half a millenia ago. That seems to be yet another convenient myth. So how about consciousness and 'internal' states? I could see quite easily a future where the 'consciousness' of the late 22nd century is not the consciousness of today. This is not too far from modern consciousness being a relatively new historical phenomenon ala Jaynes, btw. And points to the difficulty of acquiring evidence that such is the case; the absence of fossilized remains being something of a hindrance.

I agree that this post's introduction to behaviorism is no more than a common mischaracterization. It is the sort of mischaracterization that has spread farther than the original idea, to the point that psychology textbooks (which are more often than not terribly inaccurate) repeat the error and psychology graduates write Wikipedia articles saying that "Behaviorists believe consciousness does not exist".

Behaviorism is a methodology, not a hypothesis. It is the methodology that attempts to explain behavior without recourse to internal mental states. The basis for this approach is that internal mental states can only be inferred from behavior in the first place, so that they offer no additional predictive power. That said, it may turn out that a certain class of behaviors tend to lump together, and there would be no problem in labelling these "angry behaviors" or "vengeful behaviors" and describing an organism as "angry" when it exhibits angry behaviors. A behaviorist will not hypothesize that there is an internal angry feeling corresponding to this angry state. He will not hypothesize that there is not an internal angry feeling corresponding to this angry state. He will not hypothesize about internal feelings at all, because he has no way of testing his hypothesis if he does.

It may be that modern neuroscience makes certain "internal explanations" testable after all. This does not make behaviorism a bad methodology! It works quite well if you don't happen to have an MRI scanner on hand. It works a lot better than ascribing a subject's lashing out to "rage" and, when asking how you know he's enraged, saying, "Because he's lashing out."

Ian, Watson specifically said:

"If the behaviorists are right in their contention that there is no observable mind-body problem and no observable separate entity called mind — then there can be no such thing as consciousness and its subdivision. Freud's concept borrowed from somatic pathology breaks down. There can be no festering spot in the substratum of the mind — in the unconscious — because there is no mind."

I do not see how this can reasonably be interpreted as a methodological prohibition against talking about minds. Watson would have it that Freud's theories about mental disease are prohibited of being correct, because there is nothing there to be diseased.

The redefinition of folk concepts or archaic philosophical coinages so that they denote things that are real (per our current understanding) is a fun game. 'God exists' is true, for example, if God is (say) the whole of reality. 'We have free will' is true, for example, if free will is reasons-responsiveness. 'The mind exists' is true, for example, if minds are what brains do.

I'm sure 'intentionality' exists too. In some sense.

I think this post contains too little context about why we should care. Is the behaviorist doctrine sillier than other scientists' descriptions of their methodologies? Did it damage their research? I imagine that it played a bigger role in status games than most descriptions of methodology, but a lot of inappropriate things play such roles. Maybe this one had more collateral damage than usual, but I see no reason to conclude that.

If you push most scientists, they will start reciting Popper, but this recitation has very little to do with what they actually do. I think it would be better if they could verbally describe what they're doing and verbally reason about it, but I think most discussions (eg, this post) of what scientists do and should do are too trusting of the verbalizations. What they need is more behaviorism.

Richard Kennaway, the denial of visualization predates behaviorism, FWIW. see, eg, the pro-visualization F Galton, Statistics of mental imagery, Mind 5 (1880) 301-18, jstor

Watson is simply expressing materialistic monism:

All psychology except behaviourism is dualistic. That is to say we have both a mind (soul) and a body. - John Watson, Behaviourism, page 4.

Eliezer, I think you've given ample proof that Watson has written some things as cartoonish as your OP suggests. I don't think this has been shown to be generalizable across all of the behaviorist scientists of his era. Ian Maxwell's description of Behaviorists sounds like a reasonable way for science to be done pre-MRI's, etc. But your criticism, in you OP, of Watson's approach (or at least his rhetoric) hits the bulls eye and is a perfect contribution to the mission of this blog.

"If 'mind' acts on body, then all physical laws are invalid." [...] The last quote suggests an explanation, if not a justification, for his position. He could not solve the question "what is mind?", and hit the Ignore button.

Again, this seems to be simply an expression of materialism. What Watson was saying was that there's no mystical mental essence that intervenes in violation of physical laws to control the body. Just so.

When Watson says "mind" we should usually translate that as "spirit" or "soul" - if we actually want to understand what he meant. 'Mind', 'consciousness' and 'soul' were all words from the dualistic psychology he was trying to administer a death blow to. The point he was making was that that stuff isn't real, it's all actually down to physiology.

Tim, that wouldn't argue against Freud.

Tom Tyler: The point [Watson] was making was that that stuff isn't real, it's all actually down to physiology

Eliezer: Tim, that wouldn't argue against Freud.

It's hard to see how any philosophy of mind (whether physicalist, dualist, or idealist) could directly argue against Freud, whose important claims were about psychology itself, not what psychology reduces to.

(Correction: "Tom Tyler" above is a typo for "Tim Tyler")

Watson - on Freudian vitalism:

I am convinced of the truth of Freud's work, but as I teach the Freudian movement to my classes I drop out the crude vitalistic and psychological terminology, and stick to what I believe to be the biological factors involved in his theories (Freud himself admits the possibility of this).

Here was part of the problem:

Perhaps more than any other area of science, psychology has been rich in vitalist concepts, particularly through the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud was a student of the notable anti-vitalist Hermann von Helmholtz, and initially struggled to express his concepts in strictly neurological terms. Abandoning this effort as fruitless, he became famous for his theory that behaviour is determined by an unconscious mind, of which the waking mind is unaware. In 1923, in The Ego and the Id, he developed the concept of "psychic energy" as the energy by which the work of the personality is performed.

Watson used 'mind' in the same way that the people who talk about the mind surviving the death of the body use it.

There's no such thing. The computational properties of the brain could be duplicated (generally speaking) in another system, but they would no more survive the destruction of the brain than the seventy-miles-an-hour survives a car crash.

There are many, many reasons to reject Freud. To the degree that Watson and Skinner were trying to make psychology a science, their positions were incompatible with Freud's, who considered his work to be a form of art and despised attempts to make his psychoanalysis part of medicine.

Caledonian, you make some good posts, but here I think your lates post fall in the category of anti-knowledge. I recommend trying to stay away from heroic narratives and morality plays (Watson, Skinner GOOD, Freud BAD) and easy targets, like those that express the wish-fulfilling belief that the mind mystically survives the death of the body.

Whether the mind does survive the death of the body in a sufficiently large universe/multiverse (with multiple "exact" iterations of us) is a more complicated question, in that black box/"magic" area of why our internal narrative sense of personal identity apparently survives over a punctuated swath of timespace configurations, in a changing variety of material compositions/blobs of amplitude probability distribution in the first place.

I jotted it off messy, but I think the point remains that although in principle our existence as minds may be perfectly normal since it's part of reality, it seems pretty damn weird compared to our evolved intuitions.

that the mind mystically survives the death of the body.

(Watson, Skinner GOOD, Freud BAD)

"All psychology except behaviourism is dualistic."

May I recommend "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" by John Dewey (1896). Very underrated:

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/dewey03.htm

I think those trying to prohibit bad methodology easily fall into talking about it as being by its nature always useless. that people naturally do that doesn't damn their position entirely.

Q the Enchanter: The redefinition of folk concepts or archaic philosophical coinages so that they denote things that are real (per our current understanding) is a fun game.

So is the game of reinterpreting words from the past to reconcile them with their historical successors. One might as well search Newton for special relativity, as search Watson for later developments in behaviourism. The procedure, if practised more seriously than as an entertaining game, is what religious innovators are forced to, to demonstrate that they are saying nothing that cannot already be found in the holy books -- rightly interpreted.

Eliezer, to steal one of your phrases: You know, you're right.

That said, I was already quite willing to call Watson mistaken. He was mistaken about other things---in particular, he latched onto classical conditioning and treated it as the One Simple Principle That Can Explain All Behavior---so it's not terrifically surprising. One gets the impression that he was primarily interested in making a name for himself.

Amusingly, Skinner gets most of the flak for the sort of ridiculosity that Watson espoused, even though he explicitly stated in his monographs that internal mental life exists (in particular, he stated that it is a type of behavior, not an explanation for behavior).

Skinner's general orientation was Bayesian. He constantly updated his beliefs when confronted with new evidence until his death.

Eliezer_Yudkowsky (EY) said (above):

Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn't anthropomorphize people?" -- Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner

• As far as I've I can tell, this never happened.
• Perhaps your understanding of "anthropomorphic" is too narrow?

EY said (above):

Behaviorism was the doctrine that it was unscientific for a psychologist to ascribe emotions, beliefs, thoughts, to a human being.

This is the basic myth. Skinner fought very hard to demonstrate that this was a gross mischaracterization of behaviorism.

EY said (above):

But for the behaviorists to react to the sins of Freudian psychoanalysis and substance dualism, by saying that the subject matter of empathic inference did not exist... Which behaviorist? Where? When?

Added: I found it difficult to track down primary source material online, but behaviorism-as-denial-of-mental does not seem to be a straw depiction. I was able to track down at least one major behaviorist (J.B. Watson, founder of behaviorism) saying outright "There is no mind."

This should make plain why Watson was never behaviorist poster boy material. I wouldn't even call him a "major" behaviorist.

On the hypothesis that the subject becomes angry, and wants to hurt the other person, we might predict that the subject will > take any of many possible avenues to revenge - a kick, a trip, a bite, a phone call two months later that leads the confederate's wife and girlfriend to the same hotel... All of these I can predict by saying, "The subject is angry, and wants revenge."

Is it not fake causality to show a variety of different outcomes, all for the exact same reason?

Or perhaps is the point that saying 'angry' increases the probability of certain responses to other?

Let's naturalise some of your epistemology. Why do you think empathetic inference is a useful term. It sounds dumb and it models empathy as a conscious computational process rather than the human psychological process that is a-priori to formal logic.

Skinner was no kind of extremist. His beef with Psychoanalysis and the like boiled down to a distaste for hypothetical and untestable entities like ego, id, oral fixations, Oedipal complexes, etc. His basic idea was, 'Rather than entertaining notions about invisible, inaccessible figments, why don't we focus on what we CAN observe.'

The man never disavowed thoughts or mental processes. He wrote a long time ago that someday, neurological science would likely render most of his work obsolete. But not all of it. He also wrote, rightly, that we had yet an enormous amount to learn about behavioral conditioning that we'll only ever learn through long, slow slogging.

Watson said crazy things. Doesn't matter at all. I've heard (mostly younger) behaviorists occasionally parrot the sentiment. Young people like radical proclamations. Irrelevant.

Relevant, is the enormous contribution to society that has been made by Behavioral Analysts. Consider just the field of Autism. Millions of kids. The only effective methodology? ABA. It's a far cry from perfect, but the difference is can make, can floor you if you care.

[Note: 50% of the autistic have no means of communication, verbal or otherwise. There goes 'talk therapy'. CBT? Wouln't mean a thing. Nor change their state or neurological diaorder. And good luck using algorithmic or empathic models to 'understand' their thoughts or feelings. The gap is great, and has taken years off the lives of many a heartbroken parent.]

Meaning, that was me for some years. Also 'at risk' youth. Which is possibly even more gut wrenching and disspiriting than the other. But, what progress I was able to fascilitate would never have been possible without my 'comedic' training.

Attend a conference or two. Visit a school or 3 using (mainly) ABA to teach autistic kids. Spend enough time in such places, and you'll wonder long on just how sure you are about 'inner states' 'causing' your actions outside the invisible, pervasive pervue of conditioning over a lifetime. I'm a very emotional, reactive, impulsive kind of guy. But I didn't have to be, necessarily. Where does conditioning become epigenetics? How does it go towards the development of say, structures of the mid-brain?

And once damage is done, how strange is it that meditation can somewhat mitigate 'hair trigger' responses to certain 'threat/like' stimuli? To the extent meditation makes me feel good, how much of this process is about conditioning? How much a biological mystery? How much 'cognitive' amelioration?

I don't pretend to know. I doubt they can be unvaveled.

Behaviorism is bigger today than it ever was, by an order of magnitude. To me, it's honest, hard, gritty, and useful. I ignore the egos, the promoters, the media hounds, and so help me, any work of fiction featuring an autistic kid; the compulsion to stop a train with my face will doubtless overtake me.

May you be kicking a moderate degree of ass in whatever field you've wandered into. If it's AI of some variety, then that's just too cool.

Peace