REALISM

Realism, at it simplest and most general, is the view that entities of a certain type have an objective reality, a
reality that is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc.
Thus, entities (including abstract concepts and universals as well as more concrete objects) have an existence
independent of the act of perception, and independent of their names.

Realists believe that reality exists independent of the human mind. The ultimate reality is the world of physical
objects. The focus is on the body/objects. Truth is objective-what can be observed. Aristotle, a student of Plato
who broke with his mentor's idealist philosophy, is called the father of both Realism and the scientific method.
In this metaphysical view, the aim is to understand objective reality through "the diligent and unsparing scrutiny
of all observable data." Aristotle believed that to understand an object, its ultimate form had to be understood,
which does not change. For example, a rose exists whether or not a person is aware of it. A rose can exist in the
mind without being physically present, but ultimately, the rose shares properties with all other roses and flowers
(its form), although one rose may be red and another peach colored. Aristotle also was the first to teach logic as
a formal discipline in order to be able to reason about physical events and aspects. The exercise of rational
thought is viewed as the ultimate purpose for humankind. The Realist curriculum emphasizes the subject matter
of the physical world, particularly science and mathematics. The teacher organizes and presents content
systematically within a discipline, demonstrating use of criteria in making decisions. Teaching methods focus
on mastery of facts and basic skills through demonstration and recitation. Students must also demonstrate the
ability to think critically and scientifically, using observation and experimentation. Curriculum should be
scientifically approached, standardized, and distinct-discipline based. Character is developed through training in
the rules of conduct.

The term realism comes from the Latin "realists" who is to be really, really real. Realism is a philosophy that
assumes that there is a real external world can be recognized. Therefore, realism holds that sensory perception
and sense objects really exist, regardless of the senses and the mind that it was him because the object can be
investigated, analyzed, studied by science, nature discovered by science and philosophy. Realism in various
forms according to Kattsoff (1996: 126) draw a sharp dividing line between the knowing and the known, and
generally inclined toward materialistic dualism or monism. Materialistic followers say that the soul and the
material completely alike. If so, it would be equally said to be "the soul is the matter" as saying "matter is
spirit." But if people are trying to trace the spirit to the material or the material to the spiritual, depending on
which one is considered primary. When people say "life is a matter" and because the material is not likely to
have the intent, it is also not possible to have the intent soul. On the other hand if the material is the soul, the
universe can be understood as one that had the purpose or can be said to be "teleological".

As a school of philosophy, realism holds that there are five senses and captured the concept in mind that there
are real there. Example: a stumbling stone in the road there is a new experience. Roses fragrance stimulates the
nose is real there is perched on a tree branch the garden flowers.

Realism acknowledge and accept the unity between esensia and existence, the nature and existence of objects
which are captured by five senses and understood by the mind.

According to realism, the purpose of education will be formulated as an effort to develop the potential of
existing and owned by the students to be as optimal as possible.

According to realism, that is the nature of reality that are on the "things" or "objects". So, not something that
escapes or is released from its owner. Therefore, it is natural that the first concern in education is what is on the
learner.

The followers of realism have agreement on the basic principles relating to education. Some basic principles of
educational realism is as follows:
1. Learning to essentially put the attention on the learner as it is.
2. Initiatives in education should emphasize education rather than children.
3. The core of the educational process is the assimilation of the subject matter that has been determined.

Curriculum in organizing and planned with certainty by the teacher. Widely material and social environment,
human beings that determines how he should live.

Some learning principles proposed by Comenius (Sadulloh, 2003) are:

1. Learning should be based on the interests of students. Success in learning is not as imposed from outside, but
rather is a result of personal development.
2. Each subject should have the outline, outline of teaching and learning, syllabus and lesson plans, and already
there at the beginning of learning.
3. At the beginning of the meeting or the beginning of the lesson, the teacher should convey information about
the outlines of learning that students will learn.
4. Classes should be enriched with pictures maps, photographs, works of students and everything which is
related to the teaching and learning activities provided or performed.
5. Learning should take place simultaneously with the previous lesson so that it becomes a unified whole and
keep abreast of knowledge on a continuous basis.
6. Any activities that teachers do with students should be helped to the development of human nature, and the
students pointed to the practical importance of each system value.
7. Lessons in the same subject is for all learners.

The question of the nature and plausibility of realism arises with respect to a large number of subject matters,
including ethics, aesthetics, causation, modality, science, mathematics, semantics, and the everyday world of
macroscopic material objects and their properties. Although it would be possible to accept (or reject) realism
across the board, it is more common for philosophers to be selectively realist or non-realist about various topics:
thus it would be perfectly possible to be a realist about the everyday world of macroscopic objects and their
properties, but a non-realist about aesthetic and moral value. In addition, it is misleading to think that there is a
straightforward and clear-cut choice between being a realist and a non-realist about a particular subject matter.
Rather, one can be more-or-less realist about a particular subject matter. Also, there are many different forms
that realism and non-realism can take.

The question of the nature and plausibility of realism is so controversial that no brief account of it will satisfy
all those with a stake in the debates between realists and non-realists. This article offers a broad brush
characterization of realism, and then fills out some of the detail by looking at a few canonical examples of
opposition to realism. The discussion of forms of opposition to realism is far from exhaustive and is designed
only to illustrate a few paradigm examples of the form such opposition can take. Note that the point of this
discussion is not to attack realism, but rather to give a sense of the options available for those who wish to
oppose realism in a given case, and of the problems faced by those main forms of opposition to realism.

There are two general aspects to realism, illustrated by looking at realism about the everyday world of
macroscopic objects and their properties. First, there is a claim about existence. Tables, rocks, the moon, and so
on, all exist, as do the following facts: the table’s being square, the rock’s being made of granite, and the
moon’s being spherical and yellow. The second aspect of realism about the everyday world of macroscopic
objects and their properties concerns independence. The fact that the moon exists and is spherical is
independent of anything anyone happens to say or think about the matter. Likewise, although there is a clear
sense in which the table’s being square is dependent on us (it was designed and constructed by human beings
after all), this is not the type of dependence that the realist wishes to deny. The realist wishes to claim that apart
from the mundane sort of empirical dependence of objects and their properties familiar to us from everyday life,
there is no further (philosophically interesting) sense in which everyday objects and their properties can be said
to be dependent on anyone’s linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, or whatever.
In general, where the distinctive objects of a subject-matter are a, b, c, … , and the distinctive properties are F-
ness, G-ness, H-ness and so on, realism about that subject matter will typically take the form of a claim like the
following:

Generic Realism:
a, b, and c and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as F-ness, G-ness, and H-ness is
(apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent
of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on.
Non-realism can take many forms, depending on whether or not it is the existence or independence dimension
of realism that is questioned or rejected. The forms of non-realism can vary dramatically from subject-matter to
subject-matter, but error-theories, non-cognitivism, instrumentalism, nominalism,relativism, certain styles of
reductionism, and eliminativism typically reject realism by rejecting the existence dimension, while idealism,
subjectivism, and anti-realism typically concede the existence dimension but reject the independence
dimension. Philosophers who subscribe to quietism deny that there can be such a thing as substantial
metaphysical debate between realists and their non-realist opponents (because they either deny that there are
substantial questions about existence or deny that there are substantial questions about independence).

REFERENCES:

 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/
 https://oregonstate.edu/instruct/ed416/PP2.html
 https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_realism.html
 https://www.slideshare.net/jazzmichelepasaribu/realism-philosophy

BEHAVIORISM

Behaviorism was a movement in psychology and philosophy that emphasized the outward behavioral aspects of
thought and dismissed the inward experiential, and sometimes the inner procedural, aspects as well; a
movement harking back to the methodological proposals of John B. Watson, who coined the name. Watson’s
1913 manifesto proposed abandoning Introspectionist attempts to make consciousness a subject of experimental
investigation to focus instead on behavioral manifestations of intelligence. B. F. Skinner later hardened
behaviorist strictures to exclude inner physiological processes along with inward experiences as items of
legitimate psychological concern. Consequently, the successful “cognitive revolution” of the nineteen sixties
styled itself a revolt against behaviorism even though the computational processes cognitivism hypothesized
would be public and objective — not the sort of private subjective processes Watson banned. Consequently
(and ironically), would-be-scientific champions of consciousness now indict cognitivism for its “behavioristic”
neglect of inward experience.

The enduring philosophical interest of behaviorism concerns this methodological challenge to the scientific
bona fides of consciousness (on behalf of empiricism) and, connectedly (in accord with materialism), its
challenge to the supposed metaphysical inwardness, or subjectivity, of thought. Although behaviorism as an
avowed movement may have few remaining advocates, various practices and trends in psychology and
philosophy may still usefully be styled “behavioristic”. As long as experimental rigor in psychology is held to
require “operationalization” of variables, behaviorism’s methodological mark remains. Recent attempts to
revive doctrines of “ontological subjectivity” (Searle 1992) in philosophy and bring “consciousness research”
under the aegis of Cognitive Science (see Horgan 1994) point up the continuing relevance of behaviorism’s
metaphysical and methodological challenges.

Behaviorism, notoriously, came in various sorts and has been, also notoriously, subject to variant sortings: “the
variety of positions that constitute behaviorism” might even be said to share no common-distinctive property,
but only “a loose family resemblance” (Zuriff 1985: 1) . Views commonly styled “behavioristic” share various
of the following marks:

 allegiance to the “fundamental premise … that psychology is a natural science” and, as such, is “to be
empirically based and … objective” (Zuriff 1985: 1);
 denial of the utility of introspection as a source of scientific data;
 theoretic-explanatory dismissal of inward experiences or states of consciousness introspection
supposedly reveals;
 specifically antidualistic opposition to the “Cartesian theater” picture of the mind as essentially a realm
of such inward experiences;
 more broadly antiessentialist opposition to physicalist or cogntivist portrayals of thought as necessarily
neurophysiological or computational;
 theoretic-explanatory minimization of inner physiological or computational processes intervening
between environmental stimulus and behavioral response;
 mistrust of the would-be scientific character of the concepts of “folk psychology” generally, and of the
would-be causal character of its central “belief-desire” pattern of explanation in particular;
 positive characterization of the mental in terms of intelligent “adaptive” behavioral dispositions or
stimulus-response patterns.

Among these features, not even Zuriff’s “fundamental premise” is shared by all (and only) behaviorists.
Notably, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and followers in the “ordinary language” tradition of analytic
philosophy, while, for the most part, regarding behavioral scientific hopes as vain, hold views that are, in other
respects, strongly behavioristic. Not surprisingly, these thinkers often downplay the “behaviorist” label
themselves to distinguish themselves from their scientific behaviorist cousins. Nevertheless, in philosophical
discussions, they are commonly counted “behaviorists”: both emphasize the external behavioral aspects,
deemphasize inward experiential and inner procedural aspects, and offer broadly behavioral-dispositional
construals of thought.

Three Types of Behaviorism

Methodological behaviorism is a normative theory about the scientific conduct of psychology. It claims that
psychology should concern itself with the behavior of organisms (human and nonhuman animals). Psychology
should not concern itself with mental states or events or with constructing internal information processing
accounts of behavior. According to methodological behaviorism, reference to mental states, such as an animal’s
beliefs or desires, adds nothing to what psychology can and should understand about the sources of behavior.
Mental states are private entities which, given the necessary publicity of science, do not form proper objects of
empirical study. Methodological behaviorism is a dominant theme in the writings of John Watson (1878–1958).

Psychological behaviorism is a research program within psychology. It purports to explain human and animal
behavior in terms of external physical stimuli, responses, learning histories, and (for certain types of behavior)
reinforcements. Psychological behaviorism is present in the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), Edward
Thorndike (1874–1949), as well as Watson. Its fullest and most influential expression is B. F. Skinner’s work
on schedules of reinforcement.

To illustrate, consider a hungry rat in an experimental chamber. If a particular movement, such as pressing a
lever when a light is on, is followed by the presentation of food, then the likelihood of the rat’s pressing the
lever when hungry, again, and the light is on, is increased. Such presentations are reinforcements, such lights
are (discriminative) stimuli, such lever pressings are responses, and such trials or associations are learning
histories.

Analytical or logical behaviorism is a theory within philosophy about the meaning or semantics of mental terms
or concepts. It says that the very idea of a mental state or condition is the idea of a behavioral disposition or
family of behavioral tendencies, evident in how a person behaves in one situation rather than another. When we
attribute a belief, for example, to someone, we are not saying that he or she is in a particular internal state or
condition. Instead, we are characterizing the person in terms of what he or she might do in particular situations
or environmental interactions. Analytical behaviorism may be found in the work of Gilbert Ryle (1900–76) and
the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–51) (if perhaps not without controversy in interpretation, in
Wittgenstein’s case). More recently, the philosopher-psychologist U. T. Place (1924-2000) advocated a brand of
analytical behaviorism restricted to intentional or representational states of mind, such as beliefs, which Place
took to constitute a type, although not the only type, of mentality (see Graham and Valentine 2004). Arguably, a
version of analytical or logical behaviorism may also be found in the work of Daniel Dennett on the ascription
of states of consciousness via a method he calls ‘heterophenomenology’ (Dennett 2005, pp. 25–56). (See also
Melser 2004.)

Watson coined the term “Behaviorism” as a name for his proposal to revolutionize the study of human
psychology in order to put it on a firm experimental footing. In opposition to received philosophical opinion, to
the dominant Introspectionist approach in psychology, and (many said) to common sense, Watson (1913)
advocated a radically different approach. Where received “wisdom” took conscious experience to be the very
stuff of minds and hence the (only) appropriate object of psychological investigation, Watson advocated an
approach that led, scientifically, “to the ignoring of consciousness” and the illegitimacy of “making
consciousness a special object of observation.” He proposed, instead, that psychology should “take as a starting
point, first the observable fact that organisms, man and animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment”
and “secondly, that certain stimuli lead the organisms to make responses.” Whereas Introspectionism had, in
Watson’s estimation, miserably failed in its attempt to make experimental science out of subjective experience,
the laboratories of animal psychologists, such as Pavlov and Thorndike, were already achieving reliably
reproducible results and discovering general explanatory principles. Consequently, Watson — trained as an
“animal man” himself — proposed, “making behavior, not consciousness, the objective point of our attack” as
the key to putting the study of human psychology on a similar scientific footing. Key it proved to be. Watson’s
revolution was a smashing success. Introspectionism languished, behaviorism flourished, and considerable areas
of our understanding of human psychology (particularly with regard to learning) came within the purview of
experimental investigation along broadly behavioristic lines. Notably, also, Watson foreshadows Skinner’s ban
on appeals to inner (central nervous) processes, seeming to share the Skinnerian sentiment “that because so little
is known about the central nervous system, it serves as the last refuge of the soul in psychology” (Zuriff 1985:
80). Watson is, consequently, loath to hypothesize central processes, going so far as to speculate that thought
occurs in the vocal tract, and is — quite literally — subaudible talking to oneself (Watson 1920).

Tolman and Hull were the two most noteworthy figures of the movement’s middle years. Although both
accepted the S-R framework as basic, Tolman and Hull were far more willing than Watson to hypothesize
internal mechanisms or “intervening variables” mediating the S-R connection. In this regard their work may be
considered precursory to cognitivism, and each touches on important philosophical issues besides. Tolman’s
purposive behaviorism attempts to explain goal-directed or purposive behavior, focusing on large, intact,
meaningful behavior patterns or “molar” behavior (e.g., kicking a ball) as opposed to simple muscle movements
or “molecular” behavior (e.g., various flexings of leg muscles); regarding the molecular level as too far
removed from our perceptual capacities and explanatory purposes to provide suitable units for meaningful
behavioral analysis. For Tolman, stimuli play a cognitive role as signals to the organism, leading to the
formation of “cognitive maps” and to “latent learning” in the absence of reinforcement.

Clark Hull undertook the ambitious program of formulating an exhaustive theory of such mechanisms
intervening between stimuli and responses: the theory was to take the form of a hypothetical-deductive system
of basic laws or “postulates” enabling the prediction of behavioral responses (as “output variables”) on the basis
of external stimuli (“input variables”) plus internal states of the organism (“intervening variables”).

Skinner’s self-described “radical behaviorist” approach is radical in its insistence on extending behaviorist
strictures against inward experiential processes to include inner physiological ones as well. The scientific nub of
the approach is a concept of operant conditioning indebted to Thorndike’s “Law of Effect.” Operants (e.g., bar-
presses or key-pecks) are units of behavior an organism (e.g., a rat or pigeon) occasionally emits
“spontaneously” prior to conditioning. In operant conditioning, operants followed by reinforcement (e.g., food
or water) increase in frequency and come under control of discriminative stimuli (e.g., lights or tones) preceding
the response. By increasingly judicious reinforcement of increasingly close approximations, complex behavioral
sequences are shaped. On Skinner’s view, high-level human behavior, such as speech, is the end result of such
shaping. Prolonged absence of reinforcement leads to extinction of the response. Many original and important
Skinnerian findings — e.g., that constantly reinforced responses extinguish more rapidly than intermittently
reinforced responses — concern the effects of differing schedules of reinforcement. Skinner notes the similarity
of operant behavioral conditioning to natural evolutionary selection: in each case apparently forward-looking or
goal-directed developments are explained (away) by a preceding course of environmental “selection” among
randomly varying evolutionary traits or, in the psychological case, behavioral tricks. The purposiveness which
Tolman’s molar behavioral description assumes, radical behaviorism thus claims to explain. Likewise, Skinner
questions the explanatory utility of would-be characterizations of inner processes (such as Hull’s): such
processes, being behavior themselves (though inner), are more in need of explanation themselves, Skinner
holds, than they are fit to explain outward behavior. By “dismissing mental states and processes,” Skinner
maintains, radical behaviorism “directs attention to the … history of the individual and to the current
environment where the real causes of behavior are to be found” (Skinner 1987: 75). On this view, “if the proper
attention is paid to the variables controlling behavior and an appropriate behavioral unit is chosen, orderliness
appears directly in the behavior and the postulated theoretical processes become superfluous” (Zuriff: 88). Thus
understood, Skinner’s complaint about inner processes “is not that they do not exist, but that they are not
relevant” (Skinner 1953) to the prediction, control, and experimental analysis of behavior.

Skinner stressed prediction and control as his chief explanatory desiderata, and on this score he boasts that
“experimental analysis of behaviour” on radical behaviorist lines “has led to an effective technology, applicable
to education, psychotherapy, and the design of cultural practices in general” (Skinner 1987: 75). Even the most
strident critics of radical behaviorism, I believe, must accord it some recognition in these connections. Behavior
therapy (based on operant principles) has proven effective in treating phobias and addictions; operant shaping is
widely and effectively used in animal training; and behaviorist instructional methods have proven effective —
though they may have become less fashionable — in the field of education. Skinnerian Behaviorism can further
boast of significantly advancing our understanding of stimulus generalization and other important learning-and-
perception related phenomena and effects. Nevertheless, what was delivered was less than advertised. In
particular, Skinner’s attempt to extend the approach to the explanation of high-grade human behavior failed,
making Noam Chomsky’s dismissive (1959) review of Skinner’s book, Verbal Behavior, something of a
watershed. On Chomsky’s diagnosis, not only had Skinner’s attempt at explaining verbal behavior failed, it had
to fail given the insufficiency of the explanatory devices Skinner allowed: linguistic competence (in general)
and language acquisition (in particular), Chomsky argued, can only be explained as expressions of innate
mechanisms — presumably, computational mechanisms. For those in the “behavioral sciences” already chaffing
under the severe methodological constraints Skinnerian orthodoxy imposed, the transition to “cognitive
science” was swift and welcome. By 1985 Zuriff would write, “the received wisdom of today is that
behaviorism has been refuted, its methods have failed, and it has little to offer modern psychology” (Zuriff
1985: 278). Subsequent developments, however, suggest that matters are not that simple.

v. Post-Behaviorist and Neo-behavioristic Currents: Externalism and Connectionism

Several recent developments inside and beside the mainstream of “cognitive science” — though their
proponents have not been keen to style themselves “behaviorists” — appear to be rather behavioristic. Semantic
externalism is the view that “meanings ain’t in the head” (Putnam 1975: 227) but depend, rather, on
environmental factors; especially on sensory and behavioral intercourse with the referents of the referring
thoughts or expressions. If emphasis on the outward or behavioral aspects of thought or intelligence — and
attendant de-emphasis of inward experiential or inner procedural aspects — is the hallmark of behaviorism,
semantic externalism is, on its face, behavioristic (though this is seldom remarked). Emphasis (as by Burge
1979) on social (besides the indexical, or sensory-behavioral) determinants of reference — on what Putnam
called “the linguistic division of labor” — lends this view a distinct Wittgensteinean flavor besides. Such
externalist “causal theories” of reference, although far from unquestioned orthodoxy, are currently among the
leading cognitive scientific contenders. Less orthodox, but even more behavioristic, is the procedural
externalism advocated by Andy Clark (2001), inspired by work in “Situated Cognition, Distributed and
Decentralized Cognition, Real-World Robotics, and Artificial Life” (Clark 2001: abstract); identifying thought
with “complex and iterated processes which continually loop between brain, body, and technological
environment”; according to which the “intelligent process just is the spatially and temporally extended one
which zig-zags between brain, body, and world” (Clark 2001: 132). Perhaps most importantly, the influential
connectionist hypothesis that the brain does parallel processing of distributed representations, rather than serial
processing of localized (language-like) representations, also waxes behavioristic. In parallel systems, typically,
initial programming (comparable to innate mechanisms) is minimal and the systems are “trained-up” to perform
complex tasks over a series of trails, by a process somewhat like operant shaping.

Behaviorism has been criticized from many philosophical and psychological perspectives, and developments in
psychology often have a significant bearing on philosophical issues raised by behaviorism.

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFICULTIES. The technical language that behaviorism

aspired to generate was certainly not ordinary everyday language, for it never lost sight of consciousness, its
complexity, and its manifold contents, purposes, and values. Since the middle of the twentieth century, more
and more philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychotherapists have acknowledged the centrality
of consciousness for their own activities. Consciousness is now seen as being complex, ranging from minimal
awareness devoid of conceptual representation, through symbolic awareness, to self-awareness, while a great
deal of nonconscious data-processing occurs (Gazzaniga et al.).

Consciousness and immediate self-awareness are indispensable for people to understand their uniqueness and
their personal, ethical, professional, and therapeutic relations with each another. Initially, behaviorists aspired to
explain what people do on a simple Pavlovian stimulus–response model; but the terms stimulus, response, and
behavior have been used quite loosely. Muscles, glands, and organs (and who knows what else) react to external
(and, they confessed later, to internal) stimuli; and no conscious processing or activities intervene. This view,
however, proved to be too simple, too ambiguous, and too devoid of comprehensiveness, to be true—which
does not deny that valuable lessons can be learned from the study of behavior.

Gestalt psychologists recognized that empirical stimuli or data are processed internally and holistically, and that
no simple stimulus–response theory could explain how humans perceive continuous motion from discontinuous
and still motion-picture frames. Noam Chomsky argued effectively that psychological conditioning and
associationist learning theory, according to which learning occurs solely through repeated exposures that form
connecting links, are too weak to account for the genetically prestructured dispositions of human infants to learn
human languages—and for the creative and rule-governed ways in which languages are employed. Abraham
Maslow (1971) reported that having a child of his own made behavioristic views of conditioned associationist
learning look so foolish that he could not stomach them anymore. To Maslow, the presence of conscious,
creative processing of information in his own children was too obvious to be denied. Cognitive psychologists
emphasized the indispensability of conscious cognitive or conceptual maps in understanding how people
understand, anticipate the future, plan ahead, and act accordingly. According to evolutionary psychology, the
evolutionary process has prepared and predisposed people to act, feel, think, and choose in certain ways; and
conscious comprehension, insight, information processing, and problem solving have immense significance for
purposive and voluntary activity, adaptation, and survival.

The teleological (consciously purposive) and the intentional (consciously focused on an object) features of
much psychological discourse cannot be accounted for by a purely descriptive language that completely
eliminates teleology, intentionality, and all "final causes." Purposive acts, like trying to persuade psychologists
that behavior is the only proper subject matter of psychology, cannot be redescribed as nonpurposive behaviors
without losing essential meaning. Denying the existence of consciousness, purpose, or intentionality is refuted
by that very act, which is a conscious, purposive, and intentional event.

Behaviorists are asked why they adopt and espouse behaviorism, why they want psychology to be strictly
sensory and empirical, and why they want to control the behavior of others. They repudiate conscious
rationality, and with it the possibility of justifying any beliefs on rational or scientific grounds. To
behavioralists, all that people are and do is a product of stimulus control, which means that behaviorists are
behaviorists only because they have been conditioned to be, not because the preponderance of evidence
supports the theory.

Stipulating that psychological processes and events are identical with behavioral processes and events is self-
contradictory, some critics argue, for two different things cannot be metaphysically identical. Responding that
the psychological and the behavioral are only one thing, not two, begs the question. Critics also suspect that the
identity of the mental and the behavioral (or the mental and the neurophysiological in central-state materialism)
is established by decree, not by observation or scientific method. Watsonian behaviorists solve the problem of
other minds by stating that no problem exists because there are no minds at all, while for Skinner's behaviorism,
minds do not matter.

First-person self-knowledge based on direct introspective experience has been a great obstacle to the acceptance
of behaviorism. To be sure, introspection is not always reliable and is often confused; but direct self-awareness
is often quite clear and trustworthy. Individuals are not always mistaken about what they think, how they feel,
or what they select. Critics of behaviorism contend that individuals know many things about themselves before,
not after, they receive overt expression. For example, authors solve many conceptual problems before they
express their ideas in writing. There can be thought without speech (silent thought) and speech without thought
(e.g., a parrot's speech). Most people can tell whether they are feeling well or ill before looking into the mirror
in the morning or bouncing their countenances off the countenances of others. Further, one can deceive others
about one's mental states and processes by playing public roles that do not match one's private self-awareness.
A person might be in great pain and yet sit passively and unresponsively in a dentist's chair. Short- and long-
range plans are made without a purpose being overtly expressed, and a person can change his or her mind about
many things with no one ever knowing.

Nonbehaviorists are convinced that people frequently know many things about their psychological states and
processes that are not identical with, and find no expression in, overt behavior. Further, attempts to establish the
identity or correlation of mentalistic concepts with behaviors must rely initially upon the self-reports of
individual experimental subjects, as well as upon ordinary language with its imbedded folk psychology. When
the brain regions and events are examined through brain scanners, they are not labeled as "thinking, "
"remembering, " "hearing, " or "seeing a rainbow." Once the initial connections are made, an immense amount
of information can be derived about the intimate associations of consciousness functions with brain regions and
electrochemical activities through neuroimaging, electroencephalograms, brain stimulation, and studies of
genetics, or brain disorders and injuries, as well as by experimenting on individual subjects, both animal and
human (Gazzaniga et al.).

Behaviorism, Ethical Theory, and Bioethics

Other objections to behaviorism arise from its incompatibility with concepts and beliefs that are presupposed in
most ethical theories, people's common moral life, and the practice of bioethics. This suggests a choice: either to
give up behaviorism or abandon much that ethics takes with utmost seriousness, such as consciousness, pleasure
and pain, agency or autonomy, freedom, and human dignity, just as Skinner advocated.

CONSCIOUSNESS. Ethics asks questions about right and wrong, and about good and evil. The notions of
intrinsic goodness (that which is desirable or valuable in itself or for its own sake) and intrinsic evil (that which
is undesirable and to be avoided for its own sake) are of central importance to ethical theory. In teleological
theories of right and wrong, right acts result in intrinsic goodness, while wrong acts fail to do so or produce
intrinsic evil. Doing good and avoiding or preventing evil are momentous moral duties even in deontological
theories (except for Immanuel Kant's). Doing one's duty usually, if not always, involves understanding and
acting in accord with moral ideals and rules—none of which even exist, according to metaphysical behaviorism.
Ethicists may disagree about answers to questions like "What acts are right or wrong?" or "What things are
good or evil?" There is, however, agreement that no moral obligations and no intrinsic good or evil would exist
in a world without consciousness. Moral right and wrong and intrinsic good and evil exist only in and for
conscious active beings.

Almost all the philosophers who have considered the question agree that ethics would have no point in a world
devoid of conscious beings. Yet Watsonian metaphysical behaviorism gives us just such a world—one in which
all behavior is caused by external or environmental stimuli and no behavior is caused by inner conscious mental
states and processes. Skinner's radical behaviorism may allow that some activities are spontaneous rather than
environmentally caused, but these behaviors are repeated only if their consequences are positively reinforcing.
(He doesn't use the terms pleasurable or enjoyable. ) When Skinner admits the existence of inner mental states
and processes, he denies their causal efficacy in explaining behavior and providing reasons for action, as well as
their relevance to the science of psychology. They are always the effects of stimuli, never the causes of
behavior; they exist only epiphenomenally, that is, as ineffective appearances. Scientific psychology can
disregard them, for scientifically knowing, controlling, and predicting behavior do not require them.

Some behaviorists retain the notion of consciousness and redefine it in purely behavioral terms—as overt
wakeful behavior, for example, as opposed to sleep behavior. Most ethicists, however, are convinced that ethics
is concerned with wakefulness itself, as directly experienced by conscious subjects, not merely with wakeful
behavior and muscle jerks as experienced by external observers.

Medical professionals are concerned primarily with wakeful consciousness itself, not solely with its public or
overt expressions. They often prescribe analgesics or other pain management strategies for suffering patients.
During invasive medical procedures, general anesthesia is administered, not to circumvent external pain
behaviors, but to prevent conscious pain. After a lapse of consciousness, a patient's return to awareness is
eagerly awaited. Lost consciousness is the tragedy of comatose patients, while death involves the irreversible
loss of embodied consciousness and its necessary physiological conditions. The seriousness of these medical
interests seems to be quite incompatible with a concern only for overt behavior.

PLEASURES AND PAINS. Philosophical ethicists are keenly interested in consciously experienced pleasures
and pains, and medical professionals give considerable attention to conscious pains, if not also to pleasures.
Most ethicists believe that pointless pains (those that are not necessary for the achievement of goals knowingly
and freely accepted) are to be avoided if possible; and most recognize that happiness, conceived of as a surplus
of conscious pleasures over pains for extended periods of time, is one of the great goods of life (if not the only
good, as hedonists maintain). Medical professionals accept the duties of relieving pain and not inflicting
unnecessary conscious pain as serious professional obligations. Patients want relief from real pains, not merely
the suppression or elimination of pain behaviors. Pleasures usually means "conscious inner qualities of feeling
that persons or other sentient beings normally wish to cultivate and sustain for their own sake, " and pains
means "conscious inner qualities of feeling that persons or other sentient beings normally wish to avoid and
eliminate for their own sake" (Edwards, pp. 74, 92–96).

Although pain behaviors are indispensable for describing or communicating inner sufferings to others, most
ethicists and bioethicists do not believe that overt pain behaviors, completely divorced from conscious
suffering, are intrinsically bad, or that they are duty bound to relieve and not induce pain behaviors as such.
Reflex responses to pain stimuli may be evoked from irreversibly comatose patients with only brain-stem, but
no upper-brain, functioning, yet no one believes that these patients are thereby subjected to intrinsic evil, or that
moral duties are being violated or shirked. No one, not even behaviorists, really believes that happiness consists
merely of overt expressions of pleasure. Neither pain behavior nor pleasure behavior is of significance to ethics
unless they indicate inner conscious pains or pleasures themselves.
Skinner maintains that only positive and negative reinforcers, not conscious pleasures and pains, are relevant to
a correct theory of good and evil. Good things are nothing but external positive reinforcers, and bad things are
nothing more than external negative reinforcers. Secondarily, those stimuli, responses, or consequences that
promote cultural survival may be good things, and those that threaten cultural survival may be evil things. The
words good and bad may also be used to reinforce other behaviors, positively or negatively. Positive reinforcers
are stimuli that strengthen the behaviors that produce them, and negative reinforcers are stimuli that reduce or
terminate the behaviors that produce them. Just why some stimuli reinforce positively and others negatively is
obscure for behaviorists. They cannot maintain that consciously experienced pleasures or pains are the
mechanisms that induce or inhibit behaviors. According to Skinner, identifying values with reinforcers results in
a purely descriptive, empirical, and scientific ethics that overcomes the "is-ought" gap that plagued traditional
ethical theory.

A few philosophers accept Skinner's behaviorist ethics (Hocutt), but most are unconvinced. Most hold that G. E.
Moore's "open question" ("Granted that x possesses some descriptive property, but is x good?") is not a
senseless or self-answering question, not even when the x is a positive reinforcer. Skinner's position might
avoid this objection, however, if construed as an answer to Moore's second question of ethics, "What things are
good?" rather than to his first question, "What is the meaning of 'good'?"

Skinner's theory contains no purely empirical or descriptive method for resolving value conflicts. Suffering
patients may beg stoic physicians for pain medication, who might refuse to give it because they believe that
patients should be allowed, or even required, to suffer for their own good in order to strengthen their characters
and powers of resolution. This value conflict is not eliminated by the behaviorist's explanation that these
patients find pain-relieving behavior to be positively reinforcing, while the stoic physicians find it to be
negatively reinforcing. Whether any other theory of the good can resolve value conflicts is another matter, but
other theories generally do not claim to offer purely descriptive solutions to internal normative value problems.
A behaviorist's recommendation to give pain medication because doing so has adaptation and survival value
would be a prescriptive, not a descriptive, resolution.

Skinner often prescribes norms. He cannot resolve value disagreements about "good" and "ought" merely by
describing what is positively reinforcing to individuals or to their communities of value, which are groups of
individuals who find similar things to be reinforcing. The behaviorist's contention that psychology should be a
strictly descriptive behavioral science does not describe the beliefs and practices of most professional
psychologists and psychotherapists. It is a value prescription that, if analyzed in Skinner's own terms, means
merely that he and the few psychologists who agree with him find it positively reinforcing to practice
psychology behavioristically. Most psychologists and philosophers have not been so conditioned, and they
cannot accept the narrow strictures that behaviorism places on psychological inquiry and practice. Skinner's
program, which purports to eliminate purposes and prescriptive norms, can be advanced only purposively and
as a prescriptive norm.

AGENCY, FREEDOM, AND DIGNITY. Most philosophical ethicists are rationally persuaded that moral
obligation and responsibility presuppose internal, autonomous, rational agency, self-control, and choice, and
that the denial of the existence or efficacy of informed conscious choice in bringing about moral action is
fundamentally incompatible with morality. Ethicists may disagree about whether autonomous moral choice is
compatible with rigid metaphysical determinism. Some maintain that autonomous moral choice must be
creative and spontaneous, while others hold that conscious choice is sufficient for moral autonomy, even if it is
strictly caused by a desire to do right (or wrong). However, ethicists seldom doubt that consciousness, agency,
and self-control are essential for of morality.

Informed voluntary consent is a cardinal ethical principle in modern bioethics. This principle affirms that no
diagnostic, therapeutic, or experimental medical procedures should be performed on patients unless they have
consciously, knowingly, and voluntarily consented to them. The principle affirms that the rational agency or
autonomy of patients—the capacity of conscious patients to make informed choices for themselves—is of
paramount importance in the medical setting. When behaviorism affirms that all behaviors result from external
or environmental stimuli, it denies the reality, or at least the efficacy, of inner mental processes and activities,
including inner understanding and decisions.

Behaviorism affirms that people are controlled entirely by their environment, which includes other clever
people trained to know how to condition them. People never control themselves or their circumstances through
their conscious knowledge or efforts. Although stimulus controls can be self-administered, the "prediction and
control of behavior" at which behaviorism aims is primarily meant for other people. But who controls the
controllers? Where do they get, and how do they justify, the norms they impose on others by psychological
manipulation?

Skinner sometimes writes as if inner conscious ideas, ideals, purposes, feelings, and choices simply do not exist
(Blanshard and Skinner). At other times he makes an epiphenomenal (causally ineffective) place for inner
activities like self-control, choice, agency, or autonomy. He recognizes that freedom of action is important
because it allows individuals to avoid aversive or negatively reinforcing stimuli, but he can make no place for
conscious moral agency.

In Skinner's view, human dignity consists of behaviors that cultivate the positive reinforcement of praise or
credit from others for behaving well, or as others want them to behave. By contrast, most ethicists agree that
human dignity involves conscious self-awareness, self-control, and rational persuasion. They abhor
manipulative techniques that bypass these qualities, and they approve of educative and persuasive techniques
that develop and appeal to them.

Escaping aversive stimuli and cultivating social credit have their proper place, but most moral philosophers
would balk at Skinner's behavioral reduction of freedom and dignity to solicitous activity. Behavioral freedom
means little without inner personal autonomy, and human dignity, however difficult to define, is something that
persons constantly have as conscious persons; and it makes all people equals. Dignity is not just something that
people possess during those rare moments when others credit them for behaving as they see fit.

Thus, behaviorism is incompatible with the ideal of informed voluntary consent as it functions in applied
bioethics, as well as with many fundamental principles of ethics. In sum, it seems that one must give up either
behaviorism or ethics and bioethics.

REFERENCES:
 https://www.iep.utm.edu/behavior/
 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/
 https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/behaviorism-ii-
philosophical-issues