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

Behavior and Philosophy, 2003 by Ribes-Inesta, Emilio

Malcolm (1971) also criticized Skinner's assumption that ascriptions of mental predicates to oneself and to other persons would be symmetrical in respect to verification. The verification of the utterance "I am excited" is different for the person experiencing excitement and for the one observing that person. Malcolm argues that

If you did not believe that I am excited, I might try to convince you by making you note of how my hands are trembling. But I do not undertake to convince myself that I am excited by such an observation; or if I did, it would be a very untypical case. . . .In the normal case I do not say [I am angry] on the basis of the observation of anything, (p. 83)

Malcolm concluded that when first-person-singular present tense indicative sentences employing mental terms are used to make statements, reports, or descriptions, the speaker does not normally rely on behavioral criteria. Although we apply many mental concepts to other persons on the basis of behavioral criteria (i.e., on the basis of some physical change or utterance), we do not usually apply these concepts to ourselves on this basis.

The Operational Foundation of Classificatory Concepts in Operant Psychology

Skinner participated in a tradition in which operational terms were used not only to describe procedures and effective outcomes but also to account for similar outcomes when such operations were not explicitly developed (e.g., reinforcement history, stimulus control exerted by nonmanipulated properties of the environment, etc.). On the other hand, other terms were used for classificatory purposes and, therefore, to some extent terms intended to identify the functional properties of the events and phenomena included under such classifications.

The terms I will examine deal with the dichotomies between operant and respondent behaviors, contingency-shaped and rule-governed behaviors, public and private events, and verbal and nonverbal behaviors. It is my intention to show that these concepts are also operationally based concepts and that the criterion used for their definition depended exclusively on observational limitations to identify the correlation of a stimulus event with a target response.

I will first examine the distinction between operant and respondent behavior and the underlying distinction between elicited and emitted behavior. Elicited behavior was defined by Skinner (1938) "when it can be shown that a given part of behavior may be induced at will (or according to certain laws [the laws of the reflex]) by a modification in part of the forces affecting the organism. . . .Only one property of the relation is usually invoked in the use of the term-the close coincidence of occurrence of stimulus and response. . ." (p. 9). In turn, in defining emitted behavior, Skinner stated that:

An event may occur without any observed antecedent and still be dealt with adequately in a descriptive science. I do not mean that there are no originating forces in spontaneous behavior but simply that they are not located in the environment. We are not in a position to see them, and we have no need to. This kind of behavior might be said to be emitted by the organism. . . .An operant is an identifiable part of behavior of which it may be said, not that no stimulus can be found that will elicit it (there may be a respondent the response of which has the same topography), but that no correlated stimulus can be detected upon occasions when it is observed to occur. (pp. 20-21)