Some Public Pespectives on the Problem of Privacy

Abstract

The “radical” in radical behaviorism has its origin in Skinner’s 1945 paper on operationism. Contra “methodological” behaviorism, Skinner treated so-called private events: thinking, imaging, and the like as covert behaviors. Such behaviors then have no special status other than their privacy and thus cannot be said to be essential origins of overt behavior. I review and comment briefly on some of the controversies engendered by Skinner’s views on privacy. In response to Skinnerian radical behaviorism, various independent scholarly communities, all of whom can in some way be considered sympathetic to behaviorism, have taken Skinner’s views to task in different ways. These include Wittgensteinian philosophers, for example, Norman Malcolm, some “molar” behaviorists, for example, Rachlin and Baum, and others not so easily categorized. I attempt to argue that all these assaults, while raising significant issues, have problems of their own. Though Skinner’s views on privacy are thereby left essentially intact, there remain some open questions, particularly in the domain of behavior-brain relations.

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