Context and Cognition: Interpreting Complex Behavior

160 Pages·2004·0.439 MB·English

by  Gordon Foxall

Context and Cognition
Foxall
Interpreting Complex Behavior
Context and Cognition
Gordon R. Foxall
Interpreting Complex Behavior
While the general wisdom has it that behaviorism is dead, it not only survives
but is intellectually active in areas such as psychological theory, the analysis of
language and cognition, and behavioral economics. It is a successful, albeit lim-
ited, source of behavioral science. Its chief difficulty arises when its practitioners
look out from their laboratory windows and attempt to explain the complexities of
human behavior that will never be amenable to direct experimental investigation. C
Behavior analysis has failed to establish a methodology of interpretation to deal o
n
fully with such complexity. The message of this essay is that it cannot do so with- t
e
out embracing intentional explanation in the form of an interpretive overlay that x
t
plugs the gaps in its explanations of life beyond the lab. a
n
d
Gordon Foxall is Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University, Wales, UK
C
o
g
n
Chapter 1 Intentional Behavior it
i
o
Chapter 2 Radical Behaviorist Interpretation
n
Chapter 3 The Intentional Stance
Chapter 4 The Contextual Stance
Chapter 5 Intentional Ascription in Practice
Chapter 6 The Personal Level
Chapter 7 Behavioral Continuity
Chapter 8 Equifinality and Delimitation
Chapter 9 Intentional Behaviorism
52995
Gordon R. Foxall
9 781878 978462
Context
ISBN 1-878978-46-2 Press
ii Chapter 1
Txxx iii
Context and Cognition:
Interpreting Complex
Behavior
Gordon R. Foxall
Cardiff University
CONTEXT PRESS
Reno, NV
ii Chapter 1
iv Chapter 1
________________________________________________________________________
Context and Cognition: Interpreting Complex Behavior
Paperback pp. 158
________________________________________________________________________
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Foxall, G. R.
Context and cognition : interpreting complex behavior / Gordon R.
Foxall.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-878978-46-2 (pbk.)
1. Behaviorism (Psychology) I. Title.
BF199.F69 2004
150.19’43—dc22
2003023282
________________________________________________________________________
© 2004 CONTEXT PRESS
933 Gear Street, Reno, NV 89503-2729
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise,
without written permission from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
Txxx v
Table of Contents
Preface......................................................................................... vi
Chapter 1
Intentional Behavior .......................................................... 11
Chapter 2
Radical Behaviorist Interpretation.................................... 27
Chapter 3
The Intentional Stance....................................................... 37
Chapter 4
The Contextual Stance....................................................... 55
Chapter 5
Intentional Ascription in Practice..................................... 73
Chapter 6
The Personal Level............................................................. 87
Chapter 7
Behavioral Continuity....................................................... 101
Chapter 8
Equifinality and Delimitation........................................... 117
Chapter 9
Intentional Behaviorism ................................................... 125
Notes.............................................................................................141
References......................................................................................145
vi Chapter 1
Preface
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
(John Stuart Mill, 1859)
The authority exercised by schools of thought within the social scientific
disciplines often seems a counter-productive consequence of the compartmental-
ization of knowledge, inimical to intellectual vision if only because every way of
seeing is a way of not seeing. It is, nevertheless, what this essay celebrates. For, unlike
religious and political ideologies which can be imposed by force upon their chosen
adherents, scientific ideas naturally evoke their antitheses and do battle with them.
Unless such an idea is powerfully stated, unless the evidence for it is articulated with
vigor, it is unlikely to bring forth the combative reaction upon which intellectual
progress depends. The view that methodologies come and go over time, replacing
one another in a process of paradigmatic conflict and supersession, holds sway over
many social scientists. It is a view reflected in the common but superficial
understanding that behaviorism has given way to cognitivism in psychology and that
there is no going back. However, to the contrary, intellectual progress in social
science relies heavily on the clash of extant theories, paradigms, and methodologies
as well as on the more linear accumulation of knowledge that takes place within
each. The co-existence of competing frameworks of conceptualization and analysis,
far from providing evidence that psychology is a pre-paradigmatic field of inquiry
that is yet to attain the status of mature science, is vitally necessary to the growth
of knowledge. (Cf. Feyerabend, 1975; Kuhn, 1970). Such growth requires, however,
that the adherents of the rival approaches interact, consider their several positions
and methods, and are sufficiently open-minded to appreciate the intellectual
challenges posed by synthesis and integration as opposed to the cozy acceptance of
this or that locally-established world-view. Such interaction aids the process in
which one paradigm impinges on, but never replaces, another, producing new
syntheses, innovative predictions, and more satisfying explanations, none of which
would be forthcoming but for the initial clash.
But a clash of ideas is not a war. The intellectual is an arena in which no one
need be hurt by friendly fire, and there need be no other kind. An essay is an attempt,
neither a treatise nor a manifesto. In so designating what follows, I draw attention
to the tentativeness of knowledge and argument. Holding our views tenaciously is
essential to the fruitful interaction of our cherished theories with others’, but it is
not the point of the exercise. A hundred years from now even our devoutest disciples,
if we had them, would smile at our present schemes: perhaps we have something
to learn from them.
And so, to the point.
Whilst the general wisdom has it that behaviorism is dead, it not only survives
but is intellectually active in areas such as psychological theory, the analysis of
Txxx vii
language and cognition, and behavioral economics. It is a successful, albeit limited,
source of behavioral science. Its chief difficulty arises when its practitioners look out
from their laboratory windows and attempt to explain the complexities of human
behavior that will never be amenable to direct experimental investigation. Behavior
analysis has failed to establish a methodology of interpretation to deal fully with
such complexity. The message of this essay is that it cannot do so without embracing
intentional explanation in the form of an interpretive overlay that plugs the gaps in
its explanations of life beyond the lab.
The science of which behaviorism is the philosophy has produced not only a
unique experimental analysis of behavior but also an array of applications to social
and economic practice, and a basis of interpretation from which complex activities
such as those involved in human economic behavior can be accurately predicted.
It would be a travesty if the general wisdom prevailed to the extent of eclipsing these
accomplishments. But the gaps remain: radical behaviorist interpretation is unable
to deal with the personal level of explanation (at which an individual knows what
pain is without being able to analyze it further, a level on which physiological
accounts of pain cannot operate), or with the problem of why behavior persists in
the absence of the immediate rewarding consequences that form the central plank
in behaviorism’s explanatory scheme, or with the need to delimit the range of
consequences that can reliably account for complex behavior. The attribution to
individuals of desires and beliefs (“intentional ascription”) can perform these
functions in the absence of which behavioral interpretation both founders and
flounders. But the resulting methodology, which has the potential to unify aspects
of behaviorism and cognitive psychology, is subtle and not without irony.
There seems on the surface little hope of compromise between psychologists
who are willing to attribute mental functioning to both humans and nonhumans,
and those for whom behavior is always the result of non-cognitive learning and
environmental history. Nevertheless, despite the tendency of behaviorists and
cognitivists to misunderstand and disparage one another when in truth neither of
their systems of thought is complete without the other, it is possible to find a new
resting place for the debate in which they currently assume opposing positions. The
differences between their methodologies, which revolve around the meanings they
attribute to the term intentional behavior, have also the potential to unite them. The
paradox is that the brand of behaviorism which is the central theme of the book,
Skinner’s radical behaviorism, appears fundamentally antithetical to the approach
which can rescue it, Dennett’s “intentional stance.”
To those behaviorists who define thinking, deciding, believing and other
cognitive activities as behaviors, albeit private, that are ontologically similar and
subject to the same causal factors as public behaviors, intentional behavior is no
more or less than the behavior that these events constitute. Hence Skinner (1974)
portrays thinking, knowing, believing, and the like simply as “covert behavior.” This
is of course an a priori assumption necessary to sustain a particular philosophy of
psychology as it seeks to broaden its range of application from the experimental
laboratory to the interpretation of everyday behavior, and it is not subject to direct
viii Chapter 1
empirical evaluation. The other meaning of intentional behavior is behavior that can
be explained fully only in terms of the ascription of intentional content, particularly
desiring and believing. It is not that this behavior is caused by cognitive events in some
mechanistic fashion: rather that understanding and perhaps predicting the behavior
requires the ascription to it of cognitive content or intentionality. In this vein,
Dennett (1978, p. 271) defines an intentional system, which might be a person, an
animal or a machine such as a chess-playing computer, as one “whose behavior can
be (at least sometimes) explained and predicted by relying on ascriptions to the
system of beliefs and desires (and other intentionally characterized features) — what
I will call intentions here, meaning to include hopes, fears, intentions, perceptions,
expectations, etc.”
Whilst this essay is generally concerned to clarify the relationship between
these understandings of intentional behavior, it is largely concerned with the authors
mentioned and their explanatory systems: that is, with radical behaviorism, a
philosophy of psychology that invokes the first definition, in relation to Dennett’s
intentionally-based approach which provides a basis for the currently far more
dominant social cognitive psychology. Differentiating the meanings of these
portrayals of intentional behavior and appreciating their place in diverse styles of
scientific discourse is prerequisite to understanding the symbiotic association
between behavior analysis and cognitivism. The methodology of Skinner’s paradigm
is constructed on what we may call the contextual stance, the view that behavior is
predictable in so far as it is assumed to be environmentally determined; specifically, in so far as
it is under the control of a learning history that represents the reinforcing and punishing
consequences of similar behavior previously enacted in settings similar to that currently
encountered. In evaluating the exploitation of this methodological perspective in
practice, it is essential to recall that modern behavior analysis, no longer confined
to the rat and pigeon psychology that prevailed during the heyday of behaviorism,
nowadays treats subject areas that lie at the very heart of cognitive psychology,
among them thinking, decision making and language. Its proponents claim that
radical behaviorism is sufficient to deal with these phenomena, indeed with all
human and animal behavior, on its own terms. That means without resort to
“mentalistic” concepts such as beliefs, attitudes and intentions which are the very
stuff of modern information processing views of behavioral causation. Such views,
which predominate in contemporary cognitive psychology, encapsulate an alto-
gether different, indeed incommensurable, stance. The intentional stance (Dennett,
1978, 1983, 1987a) claims that the behavior of systems such as people and computers can
be predicted from the desires and beliefs, and other intentional, idioms, that can be rationally
attributed to them.
We shall return to both stances. For now it is enough to state the major question
raised in this essay: whether the conceptual independence of behavior analysis can
be maintained without its practitioners’ adopting the countervailing stance in order
to predict and explain complex human behavior. This extends the success criterion
of behavioral science beyond mere prediction and control/influence into the realm
Txxx ix
of explanation and understanding. Putting prediction on the pedestal goes too far.
As the physicist, David Deutsch (1977, p. 6) puts it, “Prediction is not the purpose
of science, it is part of the characteristic method of science.” Prediction without
understanding the nature of the world is in any case a highly limited goal of science
and the elevation of prediction to occupy the sole position of importance in science
may be antithetical to progress. As he further says, “Whereas an incorrect prediction
automatically renders the underlying explanation unsatisfactory, a correct predic-
tion says nothing at all about the underlying explanation. Shoddy explanations that
yield correct predictions are two a penny…” (p. 65). A catholicity of vision that has
not generally characterized behavior theory must become part of the scientific
purview of its adherents. Recognition that the psychological theory it provides is
unlikely to be of universal and exclusive application, that it has bounds that are
defined by its competitors, and that the exploration of those bounds can expedite
the growth of knowledge, is essential to intellectual progress.
I thank Dermot Barnes-Holmes, Dawn Burton, Jean Foxall, Michael Kirton,
Leonard Minkes, Jorge Oliveira-Castro, and John O’Shaughnessy for their com-
ments. The book has some of its origins in a presentation to the annual conference
of the Association for Behavior Analysis in New Orleans in 2001. I am grateful for
encouragement received on that occasion, particularly from Norman Somach. Of
course, the usual disclaimer applies. The essay is critical, within the spirit of
academic discourse, of several behaviorist approaches to the interpretation of
complex human behavior. My criticism of these theories is solely for their not
accomplishing that for which they were never intended: a level of behavioral
explanation over and above description, prediction and control. Nor is my criticism
in any way ad hominem: the authors of these theories are after all the proverbial giants
on whose shoulders the rest of us stand, even if we necessarily see things a little
differently from that viewpoint.
Gordon Foxall
Penarth
September 2003