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

Behavior and Philosophy, 2003 by Ribes-Inesta, Emilio

The core of argumentation by Skinner focused upon two issues, the truth value of observation based on public agreement and the ontological status of private events. This argumentation set the distinction between radical and methodological behaviorisms, a distinction that is questionable, at least in regard to its relevance for an epistemology of the science of behavior (Malcolm, 1971). Skinner claimed five things. First, that the world of events inside the skin, to the extent that is internal to the body is private, is subjective because only the owner of the body has access to what occurs inside him or her. Second, that private events correspond to what are called "mental" events. Third, that private events are physical events and, therefore, can be empirically analyzed with the methods of science despite not being publicly observable. Fourth, that the analysis of private events passes through the analysis of how the verbal community identifies their occurrence and reinforces the individual for properly reporting his or her private events in the form of a discriminated verbal operant (the self-descriptive tact). And, fifth, that private events are not causes of behavior.

Flanagan (1980), examining Skinner's operationism, remarks that "Skinner's behaviorism is not methodologically, but rather is ontologically or metaphysically, motivated. That is, it is motivated primarily by theses about what there is and the way it is, and not by any theses about the way psychologists should use their language. . ." (pp. 1-2). Skinner, in fact, did not refute operationism as an epistemological position. The ontological assertion related to the physicality of psychological events was not relevant to the program of operationism in any of its two versions. Stevens (1963) examined the shared goals of operationism and physicalism in translating psychological terms to a common physical language dealing with concrete operations, but this had to do with the empirical meaning of statements and propositions, not with metaphysical issues regarding the existence or not of different entities.

Regarding private events, Allen (1980) has convincingly shown that Bridgman acknowledged that expressions related to personal experiences were meaningful but insisted that these words and expressions had a special epistemological status; their meaning depended on who employed them. Bridgman commented:

My solution is somewhat similar to that of Skinner in that I also recognize that the introspectional words are in a special class, but my solution differs from his in that instead of discarding these words altogether I retain many of them, but with a restricted meaning-These words are a subclass of the more general class of words the operational meaning of which depends on who it is that is performing the operations. (1959, p. 216)

Bridgman argued that when you have similar concepts corresponding to different operations (e.g., the case of length), their equivalence needs an empirical justification. When this is not possible, as in the case of words based only on introspection (e.g., "pain," "feeling," "consciousness") coinciding with Ryle's (1949) index words, Bridgman thinks that these words are a special subclass of relational words that should only be used in the first person, e.g., it is only I that am conscious, not you that are conscious, because conscious is a word that has been learned to use only in the first person. The meaning of relational words depends on who uses them. According to Ryle, index words indicate to the listener or reader the particular thing, episode, person, place, or moment referred to. "I," somehow, is a direct index word, and in this sense ". . .'I' is not an extra name for an extra being; it indicates when I say or write it, the same individual who can also be addressed by the proper name Gilbert Ryle" (1949, p. 188).