Intentional explanations and radical behaviorism: A reply to Lacey

Behavior and Philosophy, Spring 1998 by Leigland, Sam

In a recent review of two books on contemporary behavioral psychology, Lacey (1996) began with a brief critical overview of "behaviorism" in general and "radical behaviorism" in particular. The purpose of this commentary is to respond to these two sections of Lacey's review, rather than to respond specifically to Lacey's reviews of the books by Staddon and by Rachlin. Lacey's (1996) comments regarding radical behaviorism were clearly intended to serve as brief summaries of more extensive arguments published elsewhere (e. g., Lacey & Schwartz, 1987), as noted in his review. The nature of the summary arguments presented by Lacey (1996) in his review and in his more extensive treatments (e. g., Lacey & Schwartz, 1987) have prompted the present summary comments in reply. It is hoped that this might constitute a small step in furthering increased communication between philosophers and psychologists. Generally speaking, Lacey sees scientific psychology in general, and "behaviorism" in particular, as a productive, if seriously limited, enterprise. Lacey outlines several types of philosophical problems which are intended to illustrate these limitations, since scientific psychology (and thus behavioral psychology) is apparently incapable of dealing effectively with these problems in the sense of "explaining" them (whether philosophy has ever adequately solved or explained any of these problems or issues is not addressed in the review).

Of particular interest to this commentary is Skinner's radical behaviorism and the line of "intentionalist" criticisms which Lacey has sought to bring against it. The most significant problem in Lacey's attempts to do so is that Lacey shares with most philosophical critics of Skinner the practice of heaping a variety of unnecessary philosophical assumptions onto Skinner's position, assumptions Skinner himself had never adopted, and then holding him responsible for inadequate treatment of the "issues" derived therefrom. Skinner's radical behaviorism is a systematic position for the development of a particular version of psychological science, and as such, it does not engage issues of traditional philosophy on the traditional playing fields, so to speak, but rather using different terms, different criteria of explanation, different rules of engagement. In this sense, Skinner's work shares with the later work of Wittgenstein (e. g., Day, 1969) and the pragmatic philosophy of Richard Rorty (e. g., 1991; Leigland, in press), for example, the characteristic of attacking traditional philosophical problems from nontraditional angles-angles that are inescapably historical, cultural, and linguistic (rather than, say, foundational, metaphysical, or rationalistic).

The Intentionalist Criticism

Lacey's "intentional criticism" of Skinner's radical behaviorism may be the most frequently employed criticism of Skinner's work by philosophers (e. g., Dennett, 1978; Flanagan, 1991; cf. Baum & Heath, 1992; Leigland, 1996b). The alleged problem concerns the widespread use and understandability of the "intentional scheme" (or, talk involving intentional idioms) by "human agents" (or, people) when explaining behavior. The criticism normally takes the following form: that is, that Skinner's science forbids the use of intentional idioms as part of the vocabulary of the science, yet an understanding of the former is required and necessary if the latter is to be understood. One version of the criticism has been summarized by Flanagan (1991) in the following way:

The true behavioral laws Skinner comes up with in situations such as the operant experimental laboratory make sense precisely because there are true mentalistic laws which underlie them. That the animal pecks or paws at rate x in the presence of stimulus s on schedule r makes sense because we know that any organism at 80 percent of normal weight is hungry and desires food. (Flanagan, 1991, pp. 96-97; emphasis added)

Lacey's argument is similar to Flanagan's in that both propose that intentional talk involving wants and beliefs in the everyday explanation of behavior must be reckoned with by any version of scientific psychology, since such intentional talk must be taken as a presupposition which provides the "grounding" of any scientific explanation, and without which the scientific explanation could not be understood. A problem confronting any version of scientific psychology, then, is how to explain, replace, or reduce such intentional explanations within the systematic framework of the science. Lacey summarizes the problem in the following way:

. . . we cannot talk intelligibly about the practices engaged in within our research program-at least at present-except with the categories grounded in the supposition involving intentional terms and concepts]. [The intentionalist) claim comes from the fact that all of us, in the course of learning our first language, routinely pick up and use without difficulty the descriptive and explanatory capabilities that presuppose intentional categories. (Lacey, 1996, p. 63)