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ABSTRACT: Methodological behaviorism is a stance on verbal processes and the meaning of "psychological" terms and concepts tha t are deployed in theories and explanations of behavior. According to this stance, all such terms and concepts should be based on observable stimuli and behavior. Over the years, psychologists have interpreted the phrase "based on" in at least three different ways. One interpretation was that psychologists should remain formally silent on causal mental terms, and not speak at all about unobservables. A second interpretation allowed psychologists to appeal indirectly to mediating mental terms, provided the psychologists could logically connect the terms to observables through operational definitions, where those definitions were exhaustive. A third interpretation again allowed psychologists to appeal indirectly to mediating mental terms, provided the psychologists could logically connect the terms to observables through operational definitions. This time, however, the definitions need be only partial instead of exhaustive. We argue the interpretations lead to an incomplete psychology, if not also an institutionalized mentalism, because they fail to recognize private behavioral events. None of the interpretations are consistent with the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner.
Key words: methodological behaviorism, radical behaviorism, operationism, logical positivism, theoretical terms, psychological terms
Methodological Behaviorism as a Radical Behaviorist Views It
Skinner (1964) opened one of his canonical articles with the following paragraph:
Behaviorism, with an accent on the last syllable, is not the scientific study of behavior but a philosophy of science concerned with the subject matter and methods of psychology. If psychology is a science of mental life-of the mind, of conscious experience-then it must develop and defend a special methodology, which it has not yet done successfully. If it is, on the other hand, a science of the behavior of organisms, human or otherwise, then it is part of biology, a natural science for which tested and highly successful methods are available. The basic issue is not the nature of the stuff of which the world is made or whether it is made of one stuff or two but rather the dimensions of the things studied by psychology and the methods relevant to them. (p. 79)
Over the years, the literature of psychology has seen numerous discussions and analyses of the subject matter and methods...