I would like to highlight a fascinating account on the evolution of natural science by William Kolbe (1978) in “B.F. Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism”: Logical Positivism or Dialectical Materialism?” The article can be found in three parts: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.
I can recommend reading the whole article, but the chapter that particularly caught my attention is The Paradigmatic Revolution in Science (starting from p. 42). The author argues that in the evolution of science our understanding of the world improves, therefore more and more phenomena can be explained by uncovered relations between events in the physical world. This in turn entrenches the materialistic point of view, as idealistic notions are not needed. Examples of idealistic explanations include teleology (final cause), God, also, much of cognitive psychology which is plagued with idealism where internal states/motivations/purposes/cognitions are provided as explanations for behavior. B.F. Skinner calls these “explanatory fictions” as the alleged explanations have to be explained themselves – we still have to refer to the environmental history of the organism.
Kolbe likens 4 authors that have played a major part in the evolution of modern thought:
If one reflects upon the history of the thinking of our species, as it has been outlined thus far in the article, the dialectic process is dearly in effect.We have been in the process of learning more and more effective ways of describing the world we inhabit. <…> The ignored seeds occurred early in our history, (before Plato) but the effective growth of the movement, in modern times, began with Darwin in the science of biology. Quickly, Karl Marx followed with this thought in economics, sociology and “culturology.” In physics, the move was decisively made by Albert Einstein. Finally, this somewhat unorchestrated revolution in thinking erupted in our own back yard – psychology. Though the real effects of his work have taken decades to develop, B.F. Skinner carried this paradigmatic revolution into psychology in the late 30’s.
The author points out 3 main changes of outlook that these authors championed:
1. Commitment to “rigorous materialism”.
Darwin excised the possibility of Divine action within the evolution of a natural world. Marx violently bridled at any hint of idealism, claiming it was a device of the privileged class aimed at preventing scientific progress, which might threaten their stations and free all people from economic oppression. Einstein redefined “matter”,
”energy”, “space”, and “time”, in order to prevent the Newtonian notions of particle, force, absolute space and time as a one-way river divorced from material processes and the space they define. And, of course, there is Skinner’s complete ban on any form of mentalistic descriptions of behavioral events .
2. Abandonment of Newtonian (not to deny his achievements) “point-center’s of action” explanation in favor of a “field interpretation”. As I understand, this point states that events are to be explained not by innate properties of the object, but by its relations with the environment.
For Darwin, changes in a species involved the selective actions of the environment, For Marx, individual consciousness which might lead to revolutionary action is to be explained by the cultural conditions, which give rise to changes of – or states of – consciousness in individuals. For Einstein, the physical processes which lead us to infer the existence of particles are more directly approached as related series of events occurring within a region of the space-time continuum . For Skinner, obviously, the behavior of individuals must be explained in terms of the effects of the physical and social environments.
3. The importance of history in describing the material process. At least in cases of Darwin and Skinner I like to call this selectionism, elsewhere I found the name “Pragmatic selectionism”.
Darwin stated that a species is, at any moment, a result of a long evolutionary history, preserved in the genetic code, which is passed from generation to generation. Marx founded his descriptions of the development of society squarely upon a history of progression from slavery to feudalism to capitalism (via industrial revolution), then through social revolution to socialism, which finally culminates in a true communism. <..> For Einstein, this sense of history is a bit more obscure, but it is present, none the less. <..> Einstein’s point was that what we infer to be particulate bodies is nothing more than a series of ”events” that have been observed to occur in measurements we make . <..> So, for Einstein, “particulate-ness” is simply replaced by a ” history of observed events”. For Skinner, it is quite obvious that he places great emphasis upon history. His emphasis of the ontogenetic history of reinforcement and the phylogenetic history of survival requires no further remark.
What fascinates me about this article, is the logical and coherent point of view that is propounded, where seemingly unrelated branches of science can be interpreted under the same materialistic/selectionist theoretical framework. In the mainstream however, only two of the authors are universally accepted – Darwin and Einstein, while Marx and Skinner are presented as irrelevant.
To conclude this post, I would like to point out Kolbe’s argument for the combination of radical behaviorist and Marxist/socialist thought as that is exactly what I am advancing in this blog:
<..> but, how can we insure ourselves that we will not fall prey to an equally rotten situation under a totalitarian dictatorship? The only hope seems to be a marriage of Marx and Skinner. We must dispose of the tyrants, certainly; but, the change must be over-seen by individuals capable of applying the science of human behavior to insure a just result. Simply, Radical Behaviorists must become Marxists, and Marxists must become Radical Behaviorists – and together they must act.
Radical behaviorist leftist 