1.5 Scientific assessment of Skinner

1. no innate knowledge. These three mechanisms are all an animal would need.
2. The second is anti-mentalism. You would explain mental life without mental stuff like desires and goals, but just through principles that linked up stimulus and response.
3. these learning mechanisms will work for any stimulus and any response. And for any animal, the way humans learn is no different in principle from how rats learn, and how monkeys learn, and how pigeons learn

At least to some extent that these three claims are mistaken.

1. there’s a lot of evidence for unlearned knowledge. There was evidence for innate contribution to capacities like learning language, perceiving a physical world, understanding numbers, certain aspects of sexual preference, and so on.

2. Even when it comes to learning, which is the focus of behaviorism, it turns out different animals have different learning mechanisms. The way birds learn birds’ song seems quite different from the way that humans learn the language. The way some animals learn to navigate is just different from the way other animals learn to do this. The way some animals form attachments or develop cooperative behavior is often special to that sort of species of animal. And none of this is that surprising, natural selection will take different creatures on different paths.

3. As for the sort of middle proposal that is unscientific to talk about observables. In some way, this is an understandable reaction to Freud. Who made all sorts of dramatic claims that were unfalsifiable and difficult to pin down and horribly vague. But the truth is that all sciences talk about observables. Biologists talked about genes even before we even knew what one looked like. Physicists talk about string theory.

For psychology, when explaining a complex and intelligent mechanism, it makes sense to appeal to internal representation. One of the objections to behavior is that it’s crazy to deny that we think even if we don’t move that we have dreams, that we have fantasies, that we deliberate over things, and a behaviorist might say that’s fine, but that’s not scientific. But to explain even the most basic of human behaviors, you need to appeal to these internal representations, and true as well for animals.

Animals, for instance, get better and better at learning something even without reinforcement and punishment. There is a rich literature developed by the psychologist Tolman, on what’s called latent learning, which is learning without any sort of feedback. You could imagine yourself looking over a map or making your way through a house, and coming to understand the spatial arrangement without any sort of reinforcement.

The idea that reinforcement, at least in any sort of specific concrete sense, is not plausible. And here’s a nice illustration of an experiment that shows how animals might really do in an interesting sense, have maps in their head. [laboratory rats are more capable of more than trial and error learning].

Let’s step back to a broader question. Does behaviorism in general provide good explanations for human action? Skinner made the case for it in his classic and quite wonderful book, Verbal Behavior. But Verbal Behavior was subject to a book review by the linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky. And this book review became actually the most, I think, important book review in human intellectual history. I think it’s fair to say that Chomsky’s critiques in this book review shattered the foundations of behaviorism.

In his review, he analyzed Skinner’s claims in their own right. In particular, his claim that human behavior is shaped by reinforcement and punishment.

At least when it comes to people, these notions are either flat wrong or so vague as to be unfalsifiable and uninteresting. So Chomsky points out for instance that Skinner raises questions like why do people talk to ourselves or why do we imitate things sometimes or create art? Give bad news to enemies or fantasize without pleasant situations.

• What Skinner says is for each of these, it’s reinforcement. We do this because it’s reinforcing.
• Chomsky’s point is this. It’s either false or empty. It’s not literally true that these things are reinforcing in the sense that you get some sort of food, or pat on the head, or gift, or something that gives you pleasure as soon as you do it.
  • When I talk to myself, I don’t get any prize for it, I just like talking to myself sometimes.
  • When I fantasize, the fantasy itself is its own reward, but there’s no reinforcement.
• Skinner could say that you do get reinforcement, it’s just more abstract, it’s rewarding, and that’s the reinforcement.
• Chomsky’s point here is, when you make reinforcement so abstract, you lose any explanatory power. You just say we like it because we like it.

If Skinner is forced to say that creating art is reinforcing because we like creating art, that just comes down to the claim we create art because we like creating art, which is true, but psychologically uninteresting.

And so it may well be that Skinner’s theory of punishment and reinforcement when made really explicit, in a way we did when we talked about training a pig or something, is a wonderful explanation of animal learning and the training of animals. But it seems to fall short when explaining why humans do what we do.

Move beyond the Chomsky critique. It’s not actually true that our behaviors are the product of the law of effect. Because sometimes, we actually come to insights. If I was stuck in the puzzle box, I wouldn’t flail away and do 100 things. Rather, I would think about it. I’d model it in my head, figure out what works and act upon it.

So where does this leave us? The legacy of behaviorism:

• It has given us a richer understanding of some very important learning mechanisms. There may be much more in our head, there may be innate knowledge, there may be insight, but I can’t imagine anybody doubting that we have the capacity for habituation, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning. And then this can explain certain really important aspects of human thought and human behavior.
• behaviorism and particularly the work of Skinner, has given as powerful tools for training and for teaching for people including children but also for non-verbal creatures, and has been an important contribution to the world in that.
• But it underestimates the scope and power of human mental life.

If the problem of Freud is that his theories were too all-encompassing and too vague and too ungrounded in empirical effect to ultimately become a successful theory of the mind.

The problem with Skinner is that when taken specifically, his theories just fail to explain the richness of human mental life.

We’ll talk about all sorts of things about the mind that the ideas of behaviorism are simply not sufficient to address. Just like Freud, Skinner’s ideas live on. There’s a lot to behaviorism that even now the most nativist, the most cognitive psychologist still has to contend with