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A Defense of Behaviorism By Paul Desmarais When MIT's Norm Choamsky reviewed his book "Verbal Behavior" B.F. Skinner, as was his habit, ignored the critical review except to say that Choamsky did not understand his ideas. The view that behaviorists believe that individuals are 'glob of clay' does not reflect the true complexity of the behaviorist position. Much of the criticism leveled at behaviorists form this quarter comes from the so called "Twelve Infants" quote by James B. Watson who founded what is now thought of as behavioral psychology. "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years."(Watson, 1930) Two important points must be made about this perspective. One is that the quote is often used as a means of issuing a critique of behaviorism in no small part because the last sentence is often ignored. Second, In light of the last sentence, it is clear that Watson was engaging in hyperbole and knew it. Watson himself states plainly he is overstepping the bounds of his data. He is merely saying that the evidence in support of behaviorism is no less flawed than it is for any of the other “isms” of psychology or philosophy of the time. Based on Skinner's own writings, he was discussing motivation and residual or lasting effects of conditioning. If learning is a response to stimuli, conditioning, operant conditioning to be more precise, is what remains when a single fact or group of facts are no longer remembered. Skinner’s point, one that is consistently misapplied, is that education, that is, the process of gaining knowledge as a learned or conditioned pattern of behavior, is what remains when any single fact, or specific collections of facts or representations has been forgotten. For example, an individual might forget the capital of Idaho, they will not forget how learn the name of the city that is the capital of Idaho. It might be restated that learning could be defined as a pattern of learned behavior inspired by a response to external stimuli is the core of obtaining knowledge, not the knowledge itself. Think of something banal, like going through the drive through at McDonald's. Try ordering something special. A Big Mac, say. Order it plain, and when it arrives it is served the way they usually serve it? It happens to all the time. The guy at McDonalds is conditioned to perform certain tasks and deliver a certain thing based on a stimulus (the order). Some learners are more able to respond to new stimuli faster than others. However, as most behaviorists have shown, learning is a curve, with new knowledge being acquired gradually. Which means that until the McDonald's guy is wrong often enough and has another stimuli (having to redo the orders or getting yelled at by his boss) he'll continue to make errors in responding to out of the ordinary stimuli. Is this the whole picture of learning? No. It isn’t. Skinner knew that. Watson knew it as well. The founders and propagators of behaviorism were not unaware of the complexity of the human mind. Quite the contrary. They simply accepted that there were things about how people learned that were not measurable to a scientifically acceptable level, and were, therefore, not deserving of a place in a scientific discussion. Did Skinner know that learners created meaning? Probably. Based on his writing, almost certainly. Did he care? Yes. Did he write about meaning making as a scientist? No. Because he could not prove it existed objectively. Even the staunchest constructivist would have to admit, by their own theory, what a student takes from any given lesson, regardless of the underlying theory, is dependent on what they arrived at the lesson with. Therefore, a student who is equipped to learn any given bit of knowledge may or may not have the facility to use the information being ‘dumped' into them. The truth is, as behaviorists consistently claimed, it is impossible to know. Any given instruction may be wholly wasted or entirely at the student's disposal, or somewhere in between. A class scholar might be able to recite poetry, for example. However, the ability to recite the poetry does not in any way indicate that she cannot use the information contained in the poetry in the 'real world' any more than it indicates she can. Assuming someone cannot use information is as faulty a presumption as assuming they can. Skinner himself was well aware that there were a great many factors that influenced learning, including social conditions, health, etc. Where cognitivists (then) and constructivists (now) depart is about 'where' not what. Skinner's point was that learning was a response to events, outside stimuli, that could be isolated and controlled. Studied. He argued that mental states and the 'mind' were difficult to observe and impossible to isolate, and therefore, not valid subjects of scientific analysis. Skinner and his fellow behaviorists weren't ignorant of the mind, they simply "refrained from theoretical speculation regarding "private" causes of human action that were (at the time) unmeasurable by objective, scientifically reliable means; and wanted empirical research to be about the effect of external stimuli on behavior." (Overskeid, 2008). Watson, James B. (1930) Behaviorism (Revised Edition). University of Chicago Press Skinner, B.F. (1953) Science and Human Behavior New York: MacMillan Overskeid, Geir (2008) They should have thought about the consequences: the crisis of cognitivism and a second chance for behavior analysis. The Psychological Record Volume 58, Number 1.