REFLECTIONS ON THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF SKINNER RADICAL BEHAVIORISM

In Skinner's radical behaviorist epistemology, knowledge is behavior and valid knowledge is effective behavior. Skinner's science of behavior does not prescribe values or norms of behavioral effectiveness, these being determined by the phylogenetic and cultural history of the species. Thus there are no objective criteria for what is right and what is good, both determinations emerging from the evolutionary process. This analysis fits in with Skinner's eminently justifiable deterministic position regarding the lawfulness and controllability of human behavior. But Skinner's exhortation that human behavior is controlled and that it should be controlled toward a better culture is self-contradictory, because the direction in which human culture will move is already determined by past events. The kind of intervention Skinner proposes toward the designing of cultures requires a break in the causal stream not permitted by his own epistemology. A resolution of the deterministic paradox is suggested in terms of a split-level functioning, in which we can be determinists at the philosophical or as-is level and libertarians at the practical or as-if level.