Ontological behaviorism: what is it and what is this philosophy based on?

A brief explanation of ontological behaviorism, a way of understanding psychology.

Defining what is meant by ontological behaviorism is not a simple task, since it is a term that serves to understand some philosophical aspects of this way of understanding psychology.

Behaviorism, although it is not properly considered a philosophical current, like any other psychological current, tries to describe how human beings act, resorting in a very limited way to aspects of philosophy.

Let us look at some of the concepts dealt with in ontological behaviorism by means of a simple explanation of this concept.

What is ontological behaviorism?

Trying to describe what ontological behaviorism is all about, or trying to discern the ontological foundations of the science of behavior, understood in its strictest sense and without recourse to internal processes, is not a simple task.

The most radical and classical behaviorism, represented in the figure of John B. Watson and Skinner, argues the following:

1. Psychology is the science of behavior

The most classical behaviorism prefers to avoid entering into the obscure and hardly measurable aspects of the mind, such as the internal psychological processes that lead a person to act in one way or another or, basically, unobservable behavior.

To say that psychology is the science of behavior implies, to the benefit of behaviorism, rejecting it as the science of the mind. It seeks the external, the observable, that which can purely describe the visible behavior of the individual.

2. Behavior should be described without resorting to mental processes.

Behavior, understood under the behaviorist view, should be measured in terms of external behaviors. The individual's behavior must be described and explained without reference to mental events or internal processes..

The sources of behavior are external, i.e., the factors that cause an individual to behave in a certain way come from the external environment, not from the internal environment such as the mind.

3. On the development of psychological theories

If, during the development of a psychological theory, mental terms are used to describe or explain behavior, these terms should be eliminated, or replaced by more behavioral terms..

If replacement is not possible, the mentalistic terms should be described using behaviorist language.

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On free will

In behavioral ontology there is a very crude idea about the concept of free will, or freedom of choice. This freedom usually refers to the fact that the individual can choose, in a totally free way, his or her destiny. Thus, a person can choose the path of good or the path of evil, if one takes a religious-spiritual perspective on the concept of free will.

Many people, defenders of the concept of mind or soul, make a distinction between human freedom and animal conditioning, this being a criticism of the behaviorist model for extrapolating, in a too exaggerated way, the results obtained with animals to the human model.

The pro-mind/souls consider that the human being is capable of rising above his genetic and environmental characteristics, except in cases where the human being is capable of rising above his genetic and environmental characteristics.except in cases of severe psychopathology. The human being is free to overcome the epigenetic conditioning factors and decide his own path in a totally voluntary way.

The behavior of an animal, such as a cat, a dog or any other animal, could not be due to a totally free decision of the animal, it could not fight against environmental and genetic conditioning factors. For example, a cat that is playing with a mouse and then killing and eating it is not really acting freely. It is acting instinctively. Although, putting ourselves in the poor mouse's shoes, we would say that the cat is acting in an evil way, it is not really doing so, it is simply behaving as the world has conditioned it.

But what ontological behaviorism defends is that really, and under a perhaps too exaggerated perspective of behaviorism itself, the concept of good and evil cannot really be applied to human behavior because freedom of choice is, in reality, a mere illusion.. There is no difference between a cat and a human being other than that of simple intellectual complexity.

An example

Let's take the case of a mugger. Socially, his criminal behavior will be considered as something bad, a decision resulting from having chosen the path of evil. However, if we try to look at his individual history and we could know his genetic inheritance, we might see that, really, the world, as it is, the world, as it has done, has forced him to act in this way..

It is obvious that what he is committing is a crime and should be punished for it, in addition to providing him with the necessary resources so that he can be rehabilitated and can function in life without the need to continue committing crimes. However, and putting ourselves in the robber's shoes, is he really robbing because he likes it, because he could decide between one way or the other, but he has decided to do evil?

From the outside, we might think that society has enough resources to prevent a person from committing crimes. However, it may be that, having been raised in a dysfunctional environment with few resources, in addition to having certain intellectual limitations, have forced him to follow the path of crime, losing hope in being able to act in a less socially disruptive way. The harm he has done should not necessarily be seen as synonymous with evil..

The concept of evil is a product of religion, a qualitative way of classifying human behavior. The most purist behaviorism chooses to describe behaviors in terms of stimulus-response, not to give them a value or try to unravel the internal processes that have caused them to occur, since environmental factors are more important.

On thinking

For one of the most famous behaviorists, B. F. Skinner, thought is nothing more than a series of silent whispers, or at least that is how he described it.or at least that is how he described it in his book Analysis of Verbal Behavior ("Analysis of Verbal Behavior"). Human beings give verbal answers when we are asked questions, and we have "silent whispers," i.e., thoughts about that same behavior, behavior which constitutes the act of speech.

Our verbal behavior, when the time is right, makes use of logical analysis, but this does not mean that the mind really has the capacity to act in a fully free way. When we think, our mind is actually conditioned by the acts we have seen and the words we have been told.. The mind would be nothing more than the effect of conditioning factors such as past experiences, what we have heard and all this mixed with the action of neurotransmitters and gene coding.

From the point of view of ontological behaviorism, the human being, in terms of behavior, is no freer than the cat in the previous example or a properly programmed robot. He receives inputs and the supposedly free mind would act logically and consistently, preparing the most appropriate output for the occasion, however free that decision might appear to be.

This way of conceiving the mind, thought and internal processes would be what would cause that, after having been the most powerful current in the sixties and seventies, behaviorism would decline and cognitive visions would take on a greater role.

Although cognitivism has made use of behaviorist techniques, it has claimed the need to know the individual's purpose when carrying out a certain behavior, and to look at all the processes involved in the behavioral process.and to look at all the internal processes that explain why a given behavior occurs. Cognitivist psychologists do not accept behaviorism as a sufficient current since it rejects, at least in its most radical aspect, the existence of the mind or that it should be the object of study.

Bibliographical references:

• Posso-Meza, A. (2018). Ontological and epistemic aspects in the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner. Student Journal of Philosophy. 31, 1-12
• Flanagan O. J. (1980). Skinnerian Metaphysics and the Problem of Operationism. Behaviorism vol. 8 No 1. pp. 1-13.
• O’Donohue, W., & Smith, L. D. (1992). Philosophical and psychological epistemologies in behaviorism and behavior therapy. Behavior Therapy, 23(2), pp. 173–194. Retrieved from http://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7894(05)80380-6.