Originally posted by wuliheron
Your definition is a bit negative and misleading imo. Skinner, for example, denied the validity of Radical Behaviorism.
Apparently, in your race to find a new label for what I have once called "psychological contextualism", but what we may as well call "externalism" and leave it at that, you have overlooked the fact that "radical behaviorism" is a label that is already in use, a label applied to views of the Skinnerian type.
Philosophers of mind with Quinean sympathies, like Dennett and Davidson (mentioned on this forum not once), are "psychological contextualists", but they are not any kind of behaviorists. Again, it is not behaviorism to suppose that cognition and behavior are intertwined, a supposition that is, of course, common to all the brain sciences. In fact, since behaviorists believe that behavior can be explained without reference to cognition, such a supposition is completely antithetical to behaviorism.
Expressed positively, Behaviorism assumes it is possible to meaningfully explain behavior without reference to cognitive mental processes. This definition does not deny the existence of cognitive processes, but assumes they can be given quantitative rigor and expressed without self-reference.
Now we're getting somewhere. Of course, expressed positively, the way you've just expressed it, Behaviorism is a complete failure. It is a failure because (1) successful behaviorist explanations of behavior are not in fact empty of mentalistic ascription, but simply mask it with a shift in terminology, and because (2) behaviorist explanations that are oblivious to internal stimuli can't account for most of human behavior, anyway. "Quantitative rigor" is, of course, being applied to cognitive processes all the time, in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and so on and so forth. It is not, however, applied to cognitive processes by "radical behaviorists", since behaviorists treat the cognitive architecture of the brain as a black box, and assume that psychology should not bother to figure out how it works. Certainly they are not concerned with bridging any gaps between cognition and behavior.
I am somewhat at a loss as to what all this "self-reference" talk is about. I assume you're referring to the circularity of belief-desire ascription, but then my question must be, "what forum are you from?" I would have thought that in all my pontifications on this topic, I have at the very least gotten across the point that belief/desire psychology and cognitive science are not the same. Cognitivist explanations of internal structures proceed by figuring out what the structures have to be like to do what they do, then by figuring out what
their structures have be like to do what they do, and so on and so forth, decomposing the cognitive architecture of the organism into progressively dumber subsystems until one hits the neural level where there is no further decomposing to be done (not very much, anyway). So cognitivism is as “quantitative” as you like. We
begin by taking out a loan on the cognitive prowess of some system or another in the brain, but we pay it out once we figure out how that system works (i.e. reduce it to smaller and stupider parts). Mind you, this is not an explanation of how the entire organism works, nor is it a description of that organism as a
person (assuming the organism in question is human). It is an explanation of how
the brain works, an explanation that we need to make sense of the organism’s behavior. It’s not
all that you need to make sense of the organism’s behavior. You need environmental context, too. The key point here is that behaviorists ignore internal stimuli and focus solely on external stimuli, some cognitivists ignore external stimuli and focus solely on internal stimuli (and I am critical of them, too),
but you need an account of both if you want to explain behavior.
In passing, I am interested in what you think an “over-arching cognitive theory” is supposed to be, or why you think we need one. I am also interested in which particular “cognitive theories” you think belong in the trash.
Sigmund Freud is considered the father of the cognitive sciences and psychoanalysis is still widely reguarded as a science. However, in the early sixties an independent study showed it has no efficacy whatsoever. How academia can continue to call something a science that has no evidence linking it to reality and is largely self-referential and of dubious worth is beyond me.
It's beyond me, too, but thankfully, most of the academics that consider psychoanalysis some kind of science are to be found in literature departments. Then again, Chomsky is the father of cognitive science (one of them, anyway), not Freud, and I have no idea what psychoanalysis has to do with any of this.
