Intentional Consequences of Self-Instruction

Abstract

Discrepancies between animal and human responding on standard schedules of reinforcement have been explained by reference to the human capacity for language and consequent formulation of self-instructions. As a result, schedule responding has been causally attributed to private events. However, the operations that individuals are assumed to carry out in the formulation of self-instructions cannot be described other than intentionally and this raises important issues of explanation for an extensional behavioral science. It is argued that radical behaviorism is ultimately dependent upon intentional explanation; moreover, the ascription of causality to the intentional terms on which radical behaviorism is dependent leads to the necessity of incorporating cognitive explanation into operant psychology. Extensions of radical behaviorist explanation beyond accounts of contingency-shaped behavior cannot avoid the use of intentional terms. Radical behaviorism has progressed not only through the accumulation of data but by conceptual reformulations that transformed both its ontological purview and its methodological practice. Its origin as a separate theoretical position within psychology stems from the adoption of a novel theoretical stance that has had pervasive implications for both these concerns: the construal of behavior and its causes and the scientific means of producing data consistent with this view. Skinner's (1938, 1953) delineation of the field he proposed rested importantly on the ontological distinctions he drew between respondent conditioning based on ―involuntary‖ reflexive learning of elicited responses, and operant conditioning in which ―voluntary,‖ emitted behavior comes under the control of its consequences 1 . His unique approach to the analysis of behavior relied on his ability to ―make over the entire field,‖ to persuade other psychologists of

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