Person, behaviour, and contingencies (an aesthetic view of behaviourism)

Abstract

The concept of person is a fundamental one in any psychology worthy of the name, yet it is not among the technical terms of behaviourism. Indeed, behaviourism was reticent, not surprisingly, about the concept of person, given its traditional substantiality and intrapsychic sense. But behaviourism, particularly the Skinnerian variety, has the ideas to develop a perfectly acceptable conception of the person. Notable among these would be the idea of operant subject (author and actor). With regard precisely to the person as subject‐actor of the behaviour, it is worth underlining the affinity of behaviourism with person in its radical (etymological) sense, derived from the theatre (persona = mask = role = behavioural repertoires). In fact, in its original dramaturgical sense, the person gives a face to others and according to socially organized contingencies (scripts, norms, rules). Thus, person is a term correlative to the stage, or, in other words, to contingencies. The present work sets out to develop this affinity between the original sense of person and radical behaviourism. In this line we include the aesthetic view of behaviourism. In order to understand its meaning, we begin by considering art as behaviour, and thus, the person as a work of art (Pérez‐Álvarez & García‐Montes, 2004 ). We advocate a poetic statute of the person, which is none other than the operant constructivist sense that characterizes behaviourism (seen from a new perspective). The most decisive aspect of this reappraisal is that it includes the experience of the self at its deepest level: the skin. Not the world under the skin, as Skinner would say, but on the skin.

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