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Understanding Behaviorism is a classic textbook that explains the basis of behavior analysis and its application to human problems in a scholarly but accessible manner. Now in its third edition, the text has been substantially updated to include the latest developments over the last decade in behaviour analysis, evolutionary theory, and cultural evolution theory The only book available that explains behavior analysis and applies it to philosophical and practical problems, written by one of today’s best-known and most highly respected behaviorists Explores ancient concepts such as purpose, language, knowledge, and thought, as well as applying behavioural thinking to contemporary social issues like freedom, democracy, and culture Part of the new evolutionary perspective for understanding individual behavior in general and culture in particular – culminates with practical approaches to improving the lives of all humanity
Watson was the father of behaviorism. His now-revered lectures on the subject defined behaviorism as a natural science that takes the whole field of human adjustment as its own. It is the business of behaviorist psychology to predict and control human activity. The field has as its aim to be able, given the stimulus, to predict the response, or seeing the reaction, to know the stimulus that produced it. Watson argued that psychology is as good as its observations: what the organism does or says in the general environment. Watson identified "laws" of learning, including frequency and recency. Kimble makes it perfectly clear that Watson's behaviorism, while deeply indebted to Ivan Pavlov, went beyond the Russian master in his treatment of cognition, language, and emotion. It becomes clear that Behaviorism is anything but the reductionist caricature it is often made out to be in the critical literature. For that reason alone, the work merits a wide reading. Behaviorism, as was typical of the psychology of the time, offered a wide array of applications all of which can be said to fall on the enlightened side of the ledger. At a time of mixed messages, Watson argued against child beating and abuse, for patterns of enlightened techniques of factory management, and for curing the sick and isolating the small cadre of criminals not subject to correction. And anticipating Thomas Szasz, he argued against a doctrine of strictly mental diseases, and for a close scrutiny of behavioral illness and disturbances. Kimble's brilliant introduction to Watson ends with a challenge to subjectivism to provide evidence that Watson's behaviorism cannot explain human actions without introspective notions of the mind. This genuine classic of social science hi our century remains relevant not just for the conduct of psychological research, but for studies in the philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge.
This volume goes beyond theory and gives the empirical and conceptual tools to conduct an experimental analysis of virtually every substantive topic in human language and cognition, both basic and applied. It challenges behavioral psychology to abandon many of the specific theoretical formulations of its most prominent historical leader in the domain of complex human behavior, especially in human language and cognition, and approach the field from a new direction. It will be of interest to behavior theorists, cognitive psychologists, therapists, and educators.
This ground-breaking book presents a brief history of behaviorism, along with a critical analysis of radical behaviorism, its philosophy and its applications to social issues. This third edition is much expanded and includes a new chapter on experimental method as well as longer sections on the philosophy of behaviorism. It offers experimental and theoretical examples of a new approach to behavioral science. It provides an alternative philosophical and empirical foundation for a psychology that has rather lost its way. The mission of the book is to help steer experimental psychology away from its current undisciplined indulgence in "mental life" toward the core of science, which is an economical description of nature: parsimony, explain much with little. The elementary philosophical distinction between private and public events, even biology, evolution and animal psychology are all ignored by much contemporary cognitive psychology. The failings of radical behaviorism as well as a philosophically defective cognitive psychology point to the need for a new theoretical behaviorism, which can deal with problems such as "consciousness" that have been either ignored, evaded or muddled by existing approaches. This new behaviorism provides a unified framework for the science of behavior that can be applied both to the laboratory and to broader practical issues such as law and punishment, the health-care system, and teaching.
Originally published in 1988, this title explores and contrasts means and ends psychology with conventional psychology – that of stimuli and response. The author develops this comparison by exploring the general nature of psychological phenomena and clarifying many persistent doubts about psychology. She contrasts conventional psychology (stimuli and responses) involving reductionistic, organocentric, and mechanistic metatheory with alternative psychology (means and ends) that is autonomous, contextual, and evolutionary.
What might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature? If inanimate objects such as novels or poems have no mental properties of their own, then why do we talk about them as if they do? Why do we perceive the minds of characters, narrators, and speakers as if they were comparable to our own? In Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind, Joshua Gang offers a radical new approach to these questions, which are among the most challenging philosophical problems faced by literary study today. Recent cognitive criticism has tried to answer these questions by looking for similarities and analogies between literary form and the processes of the brain. In contrast, Gang turns to one of the twentieth century's most infamous psychological doctrines: behaviorism. Beginning in 1913, a range of psychologists and philosophers—including John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Gilbert Ryle—argued that many of the things we talk about as mental phenomena aren't at all interior but rather misunderstood behaviors and physiological processes. Today, behaviorism has relatively little scientific value, but Gang argues for its enormous critical value for thinking about why language is so good at creating illusions of mental life. Turning to behaviorism's own literary history, Gang offers the first sustained examination of the outmoded science's place in twentieth-century literature and criticism. Through innovative readings of figures such as I. A. Richards, the American New Critics, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and J. M. Coetzee, Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind reveals important convergences between modernist writers, experimental psychology, and analytic philosophy of mind—while also giving readers a new framework for thinking about some of literature's most fundamental and exciting questions.
This groundbreaking book presents a brief history of behaviorism, the dominant movement in American psychology in the first half of the 20th Century. It then analyzes and criticizes radical behaviorism, as pioneered by B.F. Skinner, and its philosophy and applications to social issues. This second edition is a completely rewritten and much expanded version of the first edition, published nearly 15 years earlier. It surveys what changes have occurred within behaviorism and whether it has maintained its influence on experimental cognitive psychology or other fields. The mission of the book is to help steer experimental psychology away from its current undisciplined indulgence in "mental life" toward the core of science, which is an economical description of nature. The author argues that parsimony -- the elementary philosophical distinction between private and public events, even biology, evolution and animal psychology -- all are ignored by much contemporary cognitive psychology. The failings of radical behaviorism as well as a philosophically defective cognitive psychology point to the need for a new theoretical behaviorism, which can deal with problems such as "consciousness" that have been either ignored, evaded or muddled by existing approaches. This new behaviorism provides a unified framework for the science of behavior that can be applied both to the laboratory and to broader practical issues such as law and punishment, the health-care system, and teaching.
Conceptual Foundations of Radical Behaviorism is intended for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students in courses within behavior analytic curricula dealing with conceptual foundations and radical behaviorism as a philosophy. Each chapter of the text presents what radical behaviorism says about an important topic in a science of behavior, and then contrasts the radical behaviorist perspective with that of other forms of behaviorism, as well as other forms of psychology.
