Radical Behaviorism - Private Events in A Radical Behaviorist Account

Private Events in A Radical Behaviorist Account

Radical behaviorism differs from other forms of behaviorism in that it treats everything we do as behavior, including private events such as thinking and feeling. Unlike John B. Watson's behaviorism, private events are not dismissed as "epiphenomena," but are seen as subject to the same principles of learning and modification as have been discovered to exist for overt behavior. Although private events are not publicly observable behaviors, radical behaviorism accepts that we are each observers of our own private behavior.

Many textbooks, in emphasizing that Skinner held behavior to be the proper subject matter of psychology, fail to clarify Skinner's position and implicitly or even explicitly posit that Skinner ruled out the study of private events as unscientific. This is Watson's position, not Skinner's.

Read more about this topic:  Radical Behaviorism

Famous quotes containing the words private, events, radical and/or account:

    ... it is a commonplace that men like war. For peace, in our society, with the feeling we have then that it is feeble-minded to strive except for one’s own private profit, is a lonely thing and a hazardous business. Over and over men have proved that they prefer the hazards of war with all its suffering. It has its compensations.
    Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)

    Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs, who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest ... of his head.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)

    He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)