two skinners, modern and postmodern, The

Behavior and Philosophy, Fall 1999 by Moxley, Roy A

ABSTRACT: Different accounts of Skinner's work are often in conflict. Some interpretations, for example, regard Skinner as a mechanist. Other interpretations regard Skinner as a selectionist. An alternative interpretation is to see Skinner as employing both views with changes in these views and their proportionate relations over time. To clarify these distinctions, it is helpful to see Skinner's work against the background of similar changes that have been taking place in Western Culture. An extended and overlapping shift in cultural values has occurred from modernism to postmodernism. Some key distinctions in this shift are that modernism emphasizes abstract simplicity, permanent necessity, and absolutely certain sources of truth. Postmodernism emphasizes complex and concrete contexts, probability, and explanations of change in terms of consequences. Skinner shows a similarly extended and overlapping shift over time that results in separate sets of responses which may be regarded as two sides or two selves of Skinner: one an organized collection of responses aligned with modernism, another an organized collection of responses aligned with postmodernism.

Key Words: determinism, mechanism, modernism, necessitarianism, probabilism, postmodernism, selectionism, Skinner

Some interpreters of Skinner, including behavior analysts who speak favorably of his views, have presented his theory as "essentially complete by 1935" (Herrnstein, 1972/1998, p. 73). Such a judgment of any scientist's theoretical work over time may be questioned (cf. Mayr, 1991, p. 111). In Skinner's case, the assumption that his theory was essentially uniform after the 1930s is particularly dubious in that there appear to be two dramatically different ways of interpreting Skinner on this basis. On the one hand, Skinner's views from the 1930s and afterwards are presented as fundamentally necessitarian or mechanistic in the tradition of S-R. psychology. This position is supported when it is claimed that Skinner's operant is based on a fundamental if-then relation of necessity (e.g., Reese, 1986, pp. 170-171) and that radical behaviorism, which Skinner authored (Day, 1980, p. 206), asserts necessitarian determinism (e.g., O'Donohue, Callaghan, & Ruckstuhl, 1998, p. 317). On the other hand, other interpreters find that Skinner abandoned necessitarian S-R psychology in the 1930s for a probabilistic selectionism that remained fundamentally unchanged afterwards (cf Palmer, 1998; Wiener, 1996, p. 168).

An alternative interpretation offered here is that Skinner presented conflicting necessitarian and selectionist views during and after the 1930s and that each of these views changed over an extended period of time. Following Skinner's suggestion, to the extent that these separate views are two integrated and organized systems of responses, they may be considered as two different selves. Skinner (1947) said, "[I]t is quite clear that more than one person, in the sense of an integrated and organized system of responses, exists within one skin" (p. 39). In respect to himself, Skinner (1967/1982) said, "[Walden Two] is pretty obviously a venture in self-therapy, in which I was struggling to reconcile two aspects of my own behavior represented by Burris and Frazier" (p. 26). In his published work, one side of Skinner advocated positions consistent with mechanistic necessity and another side of Skinner advocated positions consistent with probabilistic selection by consequences. The mix of these responses changed over time from proportionately more, and stronger, necessitarian and mechanistic responses to proportionately more, and stronger, probabilistic and selectionist ones. The contrast and changes over time in these two sides of Skinner has a parallel in more extensive changes in Western culture at large.

Although conflicts in Skinner's views such as to suggest two Skinners have been noted (e.g., Malone, 1987), the following makes the additional case that these conflicts appear as more systematically related against the background of the modern-postmodern distinction. This may not account for all the conflicts or delineate all the selves that may be found in Skinner. However, it should make Skinner's views and the variety of their interpretations more understandable.

From Modernism to Postmodernism

From the 17th Century to the 20th Century, modernism emphasized essential natures and timeless, universal certainty with expressions in mechanistic frameworks of necessary relations (cf. Cassirer, 1936/1956; Hacking, 1987; Toulmin, 1990). Chance and uncertainty were synonyms for ignorance. Change was granted only an illusory existence within the constancy of cyclical repetitions or within a fixed world formula of determinism. The characteristics of postmodernism are less easily identified, but a consideration of extended contexts, probabilism, and explanations in terms of consequences will be proposed as illustrating some of them. These changes appear to be interrelated to at least some extent. An explanation in terms of consequences seems naturally to include probabilism and extended contexts, just as inherent simplicity, permanent necessity, and absolutely certain sources of truth seem to go together and are difficult to discuss entirely separately.