Download Selection by Consequences as a Causal Mode

Selection by Consequences
as a Causal Mode
in a Science of Behavior
Jay Moore
UW-Milwaukee
As a causal mode, selection by
consequences was discovered
very late in the history of
science—indeed, less than a
century and a half ago—and it is
still not fully recognized or
understood….
Skinner (1988, p. 15)
The facts for which it is
responsible have been forced
into the causal pattern of classical
mechanics, and many of the
explanatory schemes elaborated
in the process must now be
discarded.
Skinner (1988, p. 15)
I must begin by saying what I take
a science of behavior to be. It is, I
assume, part of biology. The
organism that behaves is the
organism that breathes, digests,
conceives, gestates, and soon.
Skinner (1978, p. 69)
Nothing in biology
makes sense except in
the light of evolution.
Dobzhansky (1974, p. 125)
1859: On the Origin
of Species by Means
of Natural Selection,
or the Preservation of
Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life
1871: The Descent of
Man
1872: The Expression
of the Emotions in
Man and Animals
Selection as a process
Population
• Varying
characteristics
or properties
• Either discrete
or continuous
Differential
interaction with
environment
Differential
transmission and
replication
• Natural
selection
• Sexual
selection
• Either saltatory
or gradual-continuous
• Transmission
to, expression
in future
• Either saltatory
or gradual-continuous
Post-Darwinian comparative psychology
1870s – early 1900s
If morphology,
why not something else?
Mental
continuity
Behavioral
continuity
Anecdotal
anthropomorphism
Post-Darwinian comparative psychology
1870s – early 1900s
G. J. Romanes
(1848-1894)
L. T. Hobhouse
(1864-1929)
C. L. Morgan
(1852-1936)
Extensions to Behavior Analysis and a
Science of Behavior
Phylogenic level
• Lifetime of
species
• Innate
repertoires:
from
respondents
to released
behavior
• Contingencies
of survival
Ontogenic level
• Lifetime of
individual
organism
• Acquired
repertoires
• Contingencies
of
reinforcement
Cultural level
• Lifetime of
group
• Cultural
practices
Implications
• Struggle for existence: Malthus, fitness,
competition/cooperation relative to environment
• Lineage: Descent with modification, emerging from
minimal units
• Not purposeful design or creation; not fixed, a priori
essential types
• Variability within population: Basis for selection, not
nuisance error around fixed, a priori essential types
• Selection as causal mode ≠ antecedent causation
Phylogenic level
•
•
•
•
Species-specific, released behavior
Uncommitted behavior
Susceptibility to reinforcers
Nervous system that changes with
experience; Baldwin effect
• Behavioral genetics, ethology
Ontogenic level
• Reinforcement selects behavior from
uncommitted behavior
• Repertoires emerge from minimal units
• Behavior analysis
We have seen that in certain
respects operant reinforcement
resembles the natural selection
of evolutionary theory. Just as
genetic characteristics which
arise as mutations are selected
or discarded by their
consequences, so novel forms of
behavior are selected or
discarded through
reinforcement.
Skinner (1953, p. 430)
Darwin’s finches
Many
Frequency
Few
Selection by consequences
Many
Frequency
Few
Selection by consequences
Cultural level
• Reinforcement in form of solving
problems selects cultural practices
• Interlocking contingencies,
macrocontingencies, metacontingencies
• Behavior analytically informed social—
cultural anthropology
Progression
Foundations
Speciation
Behavior
Orderly relations
Synthesis
Progression
Speciation
Behavior
Foundations
Orderly relations
Synthesis
Darwin (1859)
Mendel, deVries
(1880s)
J. D. Watson +
F. Crick (1953)
Progression
Foundations
Orderly relations
Synthesis
Speciation
Darwin (1859)
Mendel, deVries
(1880s)
J. D. Watson +
F. Crick (1953)
Behavior
J. B. Watson
(1913)
Skinner (1938)
?
It is the function of a science of
behavior at the present time to
give neurologists their
assignments, as it was the
function of genetics prior to the
discovery of DNA to give modern
geneticists their assignment with
respect to the gene. I look
forward to a comparable
development in behavior, though
I do not expect to see it.
Skinner (1988, p. 60)
History: Behaviorism vs Mentalism
• Structuralism, functionalism: Introspection of mental
life
• Rise of classical behaviorism: S – R
• Can’t adequately explain flexibility of behavior in
terms of observable S – R relations
• Invoke unobservable O to mediate relation between S
and R
• Rise of mediational neobehaviorism: S – O – R
• Operational definitions of O made it all acceptable
History: Behaviorism vs Mentalism
• Mediation: An external stimulus triggers internal act,
state, mechanism, process, that in turn triggers
observable behavior; behavior a function of mediator;
not reducible to discriminative control
• Antecedent causation: Explanation in terms of prior,
temporally contiguous cause
• Theories/Explanations: Specifying the operating
characteristics of the O mediator on the evidence of
observable data
• From Tolman, Hull, to present day
From Tolman (1938)
S
=>
O
=>
R
A theory, as I shall conceive it, is a
set of ‘intervening variables.’
These to-be-inserted intervening
variables are ‘constructs’ which
we, the theorists, evolve as a
useful way of breaking down into
more manageable form the
original complete … function.
Tolman (1938, p. 9)
In addition to the stimulus, I had
called the conditions of which
reflex strength was a function
“third variables,” but Tolman
called them “intervening.” That
may have been the point [i.e.,
during the 1930s] at which the
experimental analysis of
behavior parted company from
what would become cognitive
psychology.
Skinner (1989, p. 109)
History: Behaviorism vs Mentalism
• Commitment to S – O – R antecedent causation
• O mediators as proxies for mental causes
• Mentalism: causal explanation in terms of mental
act, state, mechanism, process
• Methodological behaviorism: Restricting theories
and explanations to publicly observable variables,
• but using operationally defined hypothetical
constructs to admit mental variables and
circumvent restriction
• Theories and explanations in traditional
psychology appeal to O variables from some other
domain, at some other level of observation,
measured if at all in different dimensions
• Institutionalized mentalism
Summary and Conclusions: Scientific epistemology
Many current debates about theories and explanations
can be set aside in favor of analyses in terms of
• contingencies of survival,
• contingencies of reinforcement, and
• selection by consequences
I came to behaviorism, as I have
said, because of its bearing on
epistemology, and I have not
been disappointed.
Skinner (1978, p. 124)
[E]xperimental psychology is
properly and inevitably
committed to the construction of
a theory of behavior. A theory is
essential to the scientific
understanding of behavior as a
subject matter.
Skinner (1972, p. 302)
Summary and Conclusions: Scientific epistemology
• Effective theory/explanation: A statement about
organizations of facts; an abstract and formal
representation of the data reduced to a minimal
number of terms; concern with functional relations
• Ineffective theory/explanation: A statement about
observed facts that appeal to causal acts, states,
mechanisms, processes taking place in some other
domain, at some other level of observation, described
in different terms, and measured, if at all, in different
dimensions
• Cognitive theory/explanation =
• Antecedent causation of O mediators =
• ineffective theory/explanation
Linguistic
practices
Mental theories &
explanations
Social-cultural:
“Folk psychology”
Inappropriate
metaphors
Sources of control over
mental theories & explanations
Cognitive science is the creation
science of psychology, as it
struggles to maintain the position
of a mind or self.
Skinner (1990, p. 1209)
Summary and Conclusions: Scientific epistemology
Cognitive theories
• Insufficient control by tact relation
• Control instead by intraverbal, echoic, textual
relations
• Results in control by social reinforcement:
conformity, obeying authority
Summary and Conclusions: Scientific epistemology
An effective theory/explanation will deal with selection
and contingencies at the levels of phylogeny, ontogeny,
and the culture,
rather than
Supposed antecedent and mediating states or processes
from a mental or cognitive domain.
There is grandeur in this view of
life, with its several powers,
having been originally breathed
into a few forms or into one; and
that, whilst this planet has gone
cycling on according to the fixed
law of gravity, from so simple a
beginning endless forms [of
behavior] most beautiful and
most wonderful have been, and
are being, [selected].
cf. Darwin (1859, p. 490)
Thank you
Correspondence:
[email protected]