Methodological behaviorism took private mental events to be off limits but (most) behaviorists still believed they existed. Skinner took introspection and self-knowledge to by types of behavior and explicitly denied the mental. Eliezer’s analysis is correct insofar as Skinner denied the mental but the passages about not being able to account for complex behavior are wrong. Skinner took behavior to be a product of environmental conditioning and evolved physiology.
Here’s Skinner explaining radical behaviorism in the opening of About Behaviorism:
“Mentalism kept attention away from the external antecedent events which might have explained behavior, by seeming to supply an alternative explanation. Methodological behaviorism did just the reverse; by dealing exclusively with external antecedent events it turned attention away from self-observation and self-knowledge. Radical behaviorism restores some kind of balance. … It does not call these events unobservable, and it does not dismiss them as subjective. It simply questions the nature of the object observed and the reliability of the observations.”
(Note how similar the final sentence is to eliminativists like Chruchland and Dennett who emphasize that introspection is fallible.)
“The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind or mental life but the observer’s own body. … An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out of reach of introspection.”
“[W]e can look at those features of behavior which have led people to speak of an act of will, of a sense of purpose, of experience as distinct from reality, of innate or acquired ideas, of memories, meanings, and the personal knowledge of the scientist, and of hundreds of other mentalistic things or events. Some can be ‘translated into behavior,’ others discarded as unnecessary or meaningless.” (Emphasis mine.)
Skinner was essentially an eliminative materialist who relied too heavily on the tools of his time (operant conditioning). He denied that the brain had the structure of folk psychology (what the behaviorists called mentalism) and emphasized conditioning and evolved physiology (he talked about evolution explicitly).
Methodological behaviorism took private mental events to be off limits but (most) behaviorists still believed they existed. Skinner took introspection and self-knowledge to by types of behavior and explicitly denied the mental. Eliezer’s analysis is correct insofar as Skinner denied the mental but the passages about not being able to account for complex behavior are wrong. Skinner took behavior to be a product of environmental conditioning and evolved physiology.
Here’s Skinner explaining radical behaviorism in the opening of About Behaviorism:
“Mentalism kept attention away from the external antecedent events which might have explained behavior, by seeming to supply an alternative explanation. Methodological behaviorism did just the reverse; by dealing exclusively with external antecedent events it turned attention away from self-observation and self-knowledge. Radical behaviorism restores some kind of balance. … It does not call these events unobservable, and it does not dismiss them as subjective. It simply questions the nature of the object observed and the reliability of the observations.”
(Note how similar the final sentence is to eliminativists like Chruchland and Dennett who emphasize that introspection is fallible.)
“The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind or mental life but the observer’s own body. … An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out of reach of introspection.”
“[W]e can look at those features of behavior which have led people to speak of an act of will, of a sense of purpose, of experience as distinct from reality, of innate or acquired ideas, of memories, meanings, and the personal knowledge of the scientist, and of hundreds of other mentalistic things or events. Some can be ‘translated into behavior,’ others discarded as unnecessary or meaningless.” (Emphasis mine.)
Skinner was essentially an eliminative materialist who relied too heavily on the tools of his time (operant conditioning). He denied that the brain had the structure of folk psychology (what the behaviorists called mentalism) and emphasized conditioning and evolved physiology (he talked about evolution explicitly).