WHAT IS DEFINED IN OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS? THE CASE OF OPERANT PSYCHOLOGY

Behavior and Philosophy, 2003 by Ribes-Inesta, Emilio

We refer to contingency-shaped behavior alone when we say that an organism behaves in a given way with a given probability because the behavior has been followed by a given kind of consequence in the past. We refer to behavior under the control of prior contingency-specifying stimuli when we say that an organism behaves in a given way because it expects a similar consequence to follow in the future. (1966, p. 243)

The need to distinguish between contingency-shaped and rule-governed behavior originated in two phenomena, both sharing a common feature: a new behavior occurred given an antecedent stimulus without the previous or immediate presentation of a consequence. The first phenomenon had to do with the studies on observational learning and modeling by Bandura and Walters (1963), which showed that new behaviors could be performed in a situation without being followed by consequences, just by exposing the subject to the behavior of a model. The second phenomenon was related to the emergence of new patterns of behavior when a problem-solving situation was presented. Although some of the behaviors involved in solving the problem could be already available in the subject's repertoire, the pattern itself consisted of a new behavior. Because this pattern of behavior had never been directly exposed to consequences, its acquisition had to be explained in terms other than those that accounted for normally contingency-shaped behavior.

The distinction between contingency-shaped and rule-governed behavior resulted from the observational difficulty of identifying the consequence (or reinforcer) that leads to the acquisition of a new response. The observational absence of a conspicuous shaping process and consequences prompted a concept based upon the identification of an antecedent event, most of the time an instruction or a model performing the behavior to be acquired. Because, in operant psychology, an antecedent stimulus becomes functional as a discriminative stimulus only if it has been correlated with reinforcement, Skinner assumed that rules, as discriminative stimuli, reflected the history of reinforcement in presence of available discriminative stimuli, not the history of reinforcement of specific response classes. However, a careful examination of the logic of this distinction shows serious shortcomings (Ribes, 2000). My main argument is that the concepts of contingency-shaped and rule-governed behaviors only reflect the limitations of the observer regarding the "origins" of the behavior under analysis, not the suggested different functional properties of the behaviors distinguished in such a way.

A third classification was that between private and public events (Skinner, 1945/1961). This distinction was examined by Skinner to show that events that were nonobservable "to the other" (private events) could be identified and described under criteria subjected to public agreement, similar to those used in the identification and description of physical, observable events (public events). Private events were those events taking place under the skin. These events were accessible only to the skin-bearer. According to Skinner, private events had the same physical and functional properties as those that occurred outside the body. Emotions, feelings, pain, etc., independently of the terms used to talk about them, could be discriminated accurately when a contingency had been set up to do so by describing or naming them. Skinner, in the interview cited previously (Ribes, 1999a), said that ". . .the bodily states that we can observe and call emotions and feelings and states of mind all exist before we call them that" (p. 326). Skinner thought that the problem regarding private events was that the verbal response identifying a given stimulus by a speaker (as expressed by subjective terms) occurred in the absence of the same stimulus for the verbal community reinforcing the standard semantic use of such verbal response (a "tact" in technical terms). Except for its public unobservability, private events were thought to be there, waiting to be discriminated, named, and described under the reinforcement contingencies of a verbal community.