All it takes to be a Behaviorist
All it takes to be a Behaviorist is to believe that your questions about psychology can be answered --- Really and Truely answered. When someone asks "Why did he decided to climb the mountain?", all you have to do is believe that the question references no magical or mystical entities. You have to believe that, whatever it means to "decide" the person asking the question observed it, or at least that they could have observed it. As such, the decision can be explained through reference to prior events on multiple time scales, and at multiple levels of analysis, just like any other observable happening.
To be a touch more specific: All it takes to be a Behaviorist is to believe that questions about psychology are properly understood as questions about behavior. Questions about psychology are questions about why one or more people did particular things in a particular set of circumstances. All of them.
Oh, I know what you are thinking, "But what about conditioning (Pavlov, Skinner), or logical derivations of psychological laws (Hull), or dynamic systems (modern Embodied Cognition), etc., etc., etc.?!?"
Those things are great. Lots of discoveries were made by people who happen to also be behaviorists, and lots of general principles about the development and organization of behavior. But nothing about believing that operant conditioning works, for example, necessitates believing the behaviorist approach to psychology is correct. Ditto any of the other propositions individual psychologists have advanced.
The behaviorist position is the logical culmination of the rejection of magical entities and dualisms. Charles Sanders Peirce asserted that you have not had a complete thought until you have considered all the consequences of that thought. Behaviorism is, it is asserted, where you end up if you think clearly in rejecting of a non-physical soul as a force that causes behavior. This way of thinking does not deny that people do mental things, but it denies any attempt to assert that mental entities are a seperate thing, that have an existance outside the context of actions happening in a world. It is, of course, possible for individual to deny the existence of some or all mental entities, but that is a position held separately from their being (or not being) a behaviorist. There are also many ways in which individuals can understand the mapping of questions about psychology onto questions about behavior. Skinner, for example, attempted to map many (but not all) questions about psychology onto questions about the developmental history of the organism.
In addition to trying to clarify and promote Behaviorism, I am a proponent of a particular approach to behaviorism that has its origins in American Philosophy. There is an intellectual trajectory that I believe is behind the early popularity of Behaviorism in the United States, which flows from Charles Sanders Peirce to William James and to the cohort of psychologists whose education was steeped in James's work. Following James's death, those working to advance this trajectory were on the verge of bringing forward something great. Then Watson came along and sidetracked everything. Reading most current histories, it would be easy to think behaviorism arose from Watson like Athena from the head of Zeus, but there is evidence to the contrary. While it is easy now to read into William James anything you might want to see, the connection between James's work and the emerging behavoirism is made clear in the works of Edwin Bissell Holt, who was James's student, colleague, and friend. The influence of this trajectory can be seen in the work of Holt's students, including the "Purposive Behaviorism" of E. C. Tolman and the "Ecological Psychology" James J. Gibson and others. Building off of James's work, Holt tells us that he is pursuing:
In this way of thinking no mental events are denied: Mental events are understood as things people do, not things people have. Mental verbs are embraced, but mental nouns are viewed with suspicion. It makes sense to talk about a person as being conscious of particular aspects of his or her surroundings, but it does not make sense to talk about a person as "having consciousness" or of having certain objects "inside" consciousness. Similarly, it does not make sense to talk about a person having "a memory", stored somewhere like a series of 1s and 0s on a disk. Rather people sometimes have the ability to behave as a reliable function of events in the past. Performing such behaviors is re-membering.“a way of thinking which aims to escape, both in philosophy and in psychology, from the absurdities of subjectivism and any form of psych-physical parallelism… ‘consciousness,’ the metaphysical entity, does not exist; that it is merely the last lingering echo of the primitive ghost-soul. Conscious phenomena of course exist, [James] said, and the problem of cognition exists, but not mental substance…”
An intellectual great-grandchild of Holt is Nicholas Thompson. Nick has spent the past 50 years or more developing what he calls the "Natural Design" perspective. Without going into to much detail, this approach claims that mental terms refer to certain patterns that can exist between arrays of behaviors and arrays of circumstance. I don't know if Nick's system can work for all psychological questions, but do believe it can greatly clarify some psychological questions, and it can help to clarify the relationship between biology and psychology. Given that my original training was in animal behavior, this is a major interest of mine.
In conclusion, much of my current efforts are aimed at 1) elucidating what it means to be a Behaviorist, 2) exploring the trajectory from pragmatism to radical empiricism to radical behaviorism to a variety of mid-20th century movements to modern embodied cognition, and 3) the potential of the Thompson's system to clarify issues in the field.