Association for Behavior Analysis International

The Association for Behavior Analysis International® (ABAI) is a nonprofit membership organization with the mission to contribute to the well-being of society by developing, enhancing, and supporting the growth and vitality of the science of behavior analysis through research, education, and practice.

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B. F. Skinner and the Metaphysics of Darwinism

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Scientific research can be studied as investigative behavior. That involves inventing problems as well as solving them. It also involves finding better ways to do one's work. That activity has sometimes been called philosophy. Skinner himself said that behaviorism is a philosophy. I would add that the philosophy was part of a scientific research program. Skinner complained that his critics failed to understand his position, which was based on a hard analogy (not a metaphor) between the processes of learning and evolution by natural selection. Right thinking in the one provides clues to right thinking in the other. The advantage of getting rid of teleology in both is fairly straight-forward. Skinner paid less attention to the importance of getting rid of typological (essentialist) thinking about species and other groups of organisms. These have been treated as if they were abstract classes with essences rather than as concrete wholes. Variation has been screened out and persons have been treated as tokens of stereotypes. One result has been a misguided search for universals of human behavior.

 

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