Radical Behaviorism - Common Misunderstandings

Common Misunderstandings

Although there are many valid criticisms of Skinner's work, many textbooks and theorists like Noam Chomsky label Skinnerian or radical behaviorism as S–R (stimulus–response, or to use Skinner's term, "respondent"), or Pavlovian psychology, and argue that this limits the approach. Although contemporary psychology rejects many of Skinner's conclusions, his work into operant conditioning which emphasizes the importance of consequences in modifying discriminative responses is useful when combined with current understandings about the uniqueness of evolved human thought over other animals.

Many textbooks argue that radical behaviorism maintains the position that animals (including humans) are passive receivers of conditioning, failing to take into account that:

• operant behavior is titled operant because it operates on the environment
• operant behavior is emitted, not elicited: Animals act on the environment and the environment acts back on them, or
• the consequence of a behavior can itself be a stimulus; one needs not present anything for shaping to take place.

Radical behaviorism is often dismissed as logical positivism. Skinnerians maintain that Skinner was not a logical positivist and recognized the importance of thought as behavior. This position is made quite clear in About Behaviorism. A clearer position for radical behaviorism seems to be the movement known philosophically as American pragmatism.

For a current review and summary of his book Verbal Behavior see the article Verbal Behavior.