> Furthermore, Max is correct when he states that this "culture" which
> Skinner refers to could just as easily be a brutal dictatorship as a
> democracy, there being little if anything to distinguish between the two
> options, or to make one preferable to the other. In order to do so, you
> need to invoke some sort of belief in intrinsic human qualities (needs,
> desires, etc.), which are more compatible with one sort of social
> arrangement and at odds with another. For instance, if you believe people
> have a natural desire to participate in decisions which impact their lives,
> then you would prefer a democratic state to an authoritarian system. But
> these innate human characteristics are precisely what Skinner rejects when
> he claims behavior is bases _solely_ upon the rewards and punishments
> provided by the surrounding environment.
All this is very much on target.
But, of course, it was rather remote from Skinner's actual research concerns. Ironically, what really spelled the downfall of classical Skinnerian behaviorism was the innate characteristics of rats.
It's been 20 years since the course I took which covered this, but I beleive the key researcher's name was Garcia. He got interested in the ways that a rat's biology interfered with the universalist tennants of Skinner's philosophy, and developed a really amazing series of experiments that were framed in the classic Skinnerian fashion, except that they dealt with differential effects of stimulus -- smell vs. sight to begin with, then with further refinements, including, I believe, developmental variables, comparing rats at different stages of development, for their initial learning, retraining, etc.
All this may seem relatively minor, since Garcia was still dealing with conditioned learning in rats, but what it did was build a bridge from the Skinnerian conditioning practice to the whole wide world of (general, not just human) developmental psychology. In effect, this reduced the role of conditioning from the be-all and end-all to that of a minor aspect of means.
Still, there's a number of Skinner's findings that are worth remembering. Chief among these is that punishment doesn't work. It took a while for Skinner to come to this conclusion, but he eventually became quite clear. Punishment simply interfered with behavior. It disrupted the behavior you didn't want, but it disrupted ALL behavior and made it quite difficult to learn the behavior you did want.
Yet another line of reasoning that converges with Neil Postman's obervation (in the intro to *Amusing Ourselves To Death*) that Huxley's *Brave New World*, rather than Orwell's *1984*, had pointed to the greater threat.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
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