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The Behaving Subject: From Robot to Person

Peter Finney

            “Like makes like.” Axioms such as that are often used by parents to explain the protection of their children. On a larger level, though, such a saying could embody much of the thought of Behaviorism. As a child develops, parents gain confidence in her ability to filter out the detrimental aspects of relations. Behaviorism, however, never reaches that conclusion; like always and everywhere makes like, as empirical observations indicated. B.F. Skinner's Radical Behaviorism extended empiricism to the behavior of the person, resulting in devastating conclusions, conclusions answered in Catholic teaching and personalistic philosophies.

            As the world emerged from the "Dark Ages," it embarked on a distinctive journey, breaking much of its ties with the past. Knowledge and beliefs were greatly inverted, leaving an individual with doubt and confusion. The spirit of the Enlightenment was one of both skepticism and optimism: skepticism with regards to previous authorities and optimism with regards to the individual's ability to succeed where the previous authorities apparently had failed. Heliocentrism, gravity, and evolution each was posited in the short succession as the truth, revealing geocentrism, teleology, and divine-ordered creation as the "errors" they truly were, naive attempts to make sense of the world. Science then became the justifier of truth, with all other intellectual pursuits subservient to it. With its rigorous, disinterested methods, science—the definer of truth—held empiricism as its lens with which to search for its truth. Therefore, empiricism became the measurer of knowledge, the measurer of the world.

            With empirical verifiability being the measure of knowledge, the material world became the focus of exploration. Empiricists, therefore, believed that an individual could not know beyond what was empirically verifiable, using it as their first principle, with their thought extending from it. That principle, though, could not prove that empirically verifiable knowledge was the totality of knowledge; it claimed that persons could only know what was empirically verifiable and allowed that something could be beyond an individual's knowledge, something unobservable or ungraspable by an individual. To draw the conclusion that all knowledge and explanations were what could be empirically verified was itself unable to yield empirical verifiability.

            Undaunted, though, by any logical shortcomings, empiricists clung to their beliefs, applying them zealously to all things observable and soon turning to the person. In the completely material world—a concept empiricists ascribed to necessarily, with all knowledge being observable—the person must be defined by materialistic concepts. Philosophers such as David Hume determined their entire philosophical thoughts through the empiricist concept, using that epistemology to determine metaphysics and ethics. The person no longer was a substantially self-contained entity with an inherent nature, but rather a disconnected individual, who was greatly defined by a fusing of life experiences.

            In a natural extension of empiricism, behaviorism was born, attempting to apply empiricism to a more pragmatic realm: the behavior of humans. Behaviorism, like many movements, stemmed from a reaction against another thought, in this case Mentalism. Sigmund Freud's novel studies had given rise to the precursor of psychology. In his thought, Freud put emphasis on the mind and its innerworkings. A psychologist's duty was to uncover mental processes that led individuals to act and feel as they did, developing mental states to describe those actions and feelings.

            Such an emphasis on the mind, though, was unacceptable to some. The mind, they reasoned, was unobservable from without, and therefore, studies of its workings were unable to yield conclusions with any accuracy. Another aspect of the person must be observed to understand behavior; a more empirical study was necessary to grant any assurity. John B. Watson in his 1913 work Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It set out to give that assurity. Watson's Methodological Behaviorism completely discounted the mind, viewing it as an unnecessary creation. For Watson, the mind was non-existent. A person acted as he did because of environmental and experiential factors alone, having a blank slate at birth with no inherent attributes. The person was material and could be explained as such. Watson even would believe that a sophisticated robot that reacted to its environment would be identical to a human person. A person for Watson simply behaved out of necessity, being compelled by his experience to act in a certain way. Behavior could be changed by a change in the environment, the stimulus driving an action. Any more complicated theory ascribing actions to free will or reason was as superfluous as it was incorrect. Watson hoped his Behaviorism "would prove that none of the supposed manifestations of mental life demanded a mentalistic explanation" (Skinner 14-15).

            Even for the most hardened anti-Mentalists, though, Watson's theory was extreme and perhaps idealistically naive in application. To eliminate the mind completely would be to contradict daily experience; people did feel driven to act from mental processes. Further, actions seemed much more complex than a simple stimulus-response relationship. Even more troubling was the lack of empirical observation Watson had to rely on. Pioneering an untapped science led Watson to have to rely on theories and small sample sizes for principles; more study of behavior and its antecedents was needed. Still, many studying Watson felt he was following the right path by breaking with the mind. One such person was B.F. Skinner, who became Behaviorism's leading advocate and developed his own theory: Radical Behaviorism.

            Skinner stepped slightly from Methodological Behaviorism's most radical points, attempting to "restore some kind of balance" between it and Mentalism, especially concerning mental aspects (Skinner 16). Radical Behaviorism hoped to be more open to behavioral explanations from the mind. Skinner believed his Behaviorism "does not deny the possibility of self-observation or self-knowledge or its possible usefulness, but it questions the nature of what is felt or observed and hence known" (16). Skinner broadened his definition of truth, allowing for internal, private events truly to have happened. The trouble was making sense of what could be taken from those events. Further, Skinner gave internal feelings no different status than events in the environment; there should be no special position for things within the person. Internal feelings were not self-generated mental activities but simply "certain collateral products of [a person's genetic and environmental] histories" (Skinner 17). Therefore, internal feelings of an individual were created from experience, not by the unique individual. They were just responses to the external environment or internal genes. The usefulness in knowing one's feelings was to understand more of the impact certain experiences have had. As Skinner summarized his belief:

What is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind or mental life but the observer's own body...nor does it mean (and this is the heart of the matter) that what are felt or introspectively observed  are causes of behavior. (17).

Feelings were material, always tied to corporality. With knowledge founded on empiricism and feelings on experience, the existence of a mind was viewed as unnecessary. Skinner made such a belief known, bluntly stating, "I question the existence of a mind" (20). Skinner might have salvaged the possibility of an internal world from the destruction of Methodological Behaviorism but ultimately concluded similarly in favor of the non-existence of a mind, warning others about the "mental fictions" of Mentalism (Skinner 18).  Clearly the "balance" restored by Radical Behaviorism was one drastically siding with its Behaviorist forefathers.

            For Skinner causality—or more precisely, perceived causality—gave insight of the person. Causality, for Skinner, arose out of convenience in language, as people tried to communicate bodily events. Knowledge was gained through experience, and experience within a community was key in the development of a person. In Skinner’s view the community implanted feelings into its youths, teaching them how to respond after a certain physical event; the community taught its youth what was occurring within them. Thus, causality became viewed as a physical-mental-physical chain, rather than only physical event causing another physical event. For example, when a body was in need of nutrients to fuel cellular processes, a person in need of those nutrients would acquire them through eating. When the community observed that person was eating quickly, it would tell the eater, “You are hungry” (Skinner 24). As such communal descriptions become repeatedly told to the youth, he came to believe that he was hungry, that a mental feeling had interpreted his bodily condition and led him to eat. Skinner believed that the community was only adding extra steps that were unnecessary and non-existent. He summarized the problem:

The difficulty is not that the patient is not being stimulated in a perfectly clear way, it is simply that he has never been exposed to instructional conditions under which he has learned to describe the stimuli accurately. (25).

Therefore, the need in Skinner’s eyes—the eyes of a pridefully optimistic Modernist—was for a greater knowledge of physiognomy, which would reveal the secrets of cause that the ignorant masses attributed to the mind.

Another main contribution of Skinner’s was his recognition of operant behavior. Watson viewed behavior as simply a stimulus-reflex event, with each action being controlled by a specific temporally antecedent stimulus. Skinner, through refining Watson’s view, was able to account for experience more accurately. Behavior did rely on antecedents, but specific behavior could change qualitatively, not just quantitatively as stimuli increase. As Skinner distinguished the two, “The standard distinction between operant and reflexive is that one is voluntary and the other is involuntary” (40). He might have stated that operant behavior was voluntary, but it was still greatly influenced—if not compelled. As he noted elsewhere, “I question the possibility of a free choice” (20). For Skinner, an action was voluntary only insofar as the action did not follow directly from the stimuli at hand; operant behavior was complex. Once that complexity, though, was understood through greater observations, behavior would be seen as the inevitable, freedom-less series of actions it was. To think differently would be to risk a “future that might turn heavily against [such an individual]” (Skinner 239).

With operant behavior able to be conditioned or changed, Skinner’s final emphasis was to provide material conditions, conditions that formed behavior. Skinner, unlike Watson, allowed for a genetic involvement to accompany the environment as conditioners. Genetics, though, were allowable only because of a lack of information, often becoming a proverbial “dumping ground” for unexplainable behavioral causes. Clearly, genetics strode closely to the home of the Mentalistic “mental fictions” Skinner so vehemently denied. More important to him was the evolution of species, in which the environment affected species across generations. Speaking of evolution and environment, Skinner stated, “The combination of the two effects is the behavior we observe at any given time” (17). Behavior in one’s lifetime was the process of acquiring environmental experience, grafting together life’s experience in the previously empty person.

The human person was left in a very tenuous position after Skinner’s thought. As he defined one, “A person is an organism, a member of the human species, which has acquired a repertoire of behavior” and is unique solely because of his unique acquisition of behavior (167). Lacking a common essence and initially being empty, people had to be defined by their outer behavior, by their superficial qualities. A person, therefore, was clearly an animal, possessing “no essentially human feature that has been shown to be beyond the reach of scientific analysis” (Skinner 239). Furthermore, outside material causes established behavior, the one unique quality all beings possessed. The person was compelled to act from outside influences, wresting his destiny from his hands, “chang[ing] man from victor to victim” (Skinner 239). Moreover, the environment, not the individual, was the originator of action (Skinner 225). The person was viewed solely as a complex composition of parts, not being different than any other animal sans complexity. A person's actions were necessary, predictable responses to various environmental variables in a given situation. There was no internal reality of thought or reason, no mind, only a compilation of a person's life experience, by which it solely chose courses of action. There was no will, no sin, no responsibility, no dignity of persons. Succinctly, “We are beings that can be trained, but not truly educated; we are beings who can be manipulated, but not respected” (O’Connell 157).

Man is “the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake” (Gaudium § 24). The person for the Catholic Church was dramatically different from Skinner’s view. The person was made in the very image and likeness of God, given a privileged state as created for its own end. The person was not simply a “remarkable [animal]” (Skinner 239), but a being endowed with unique gifts by his very creation. Furthermore, each person was intrinsically connected to each other, having an innate common nature, a truly distinctive human essence. The Catechism summarized such a belief, stating, “Created in the image of the one God and equally endowed with rational souls, all men have the same nature and the same origin” (1934).Moreover, having the same nature and origin, all people were driven to the same end. As Gaudium et Spes noted, “All, in fact, are destined to the very same end, namely God himself” (§ 24). The person, clearly, was not the isolated being Skinner made him out to be.

The Church also affirmed the inherent differences in people’s abilities, God having uniquely created each person. Truly, “The ‘talents’ are not equally distributed” (CCC 1936). With His plan for each person, God endowed each person with the necessary gifts and strengths to fulfill his end. Attributes, though owing much to experience, were not completely derived from the environment; certain people were naturally better at things than others because of God’s unique creation. As Pope Benedict XVI beautifully stated in his homily at his papal installation Mass, “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”

The Church tried to take the middle road between Mentalism and Behaviorism for the most part. The person, she asserted, was a unity of body and soul (Gaudium § 14). The mental faculty was not the sole arena of causes, nor was material conditioning. The person depended on both aspects to bring about action and behavior. Attacking the very core of Behaviorism, Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, clarified the role of the person as originator, while validating his ability to think, stating:

We are by nature creators, not just consumers. We are creators because we think. And because our thought (our rational nature) is also the basis of our personalities, one could say that we are creators because we are persons. (171).

Reason, the essentially human trait, revealed itself as the proof of man as actor, creating his very personality or behavior. To have viewed people as simply consumers, whose actions were necessitated by experience, would be to deny the essence of each person.

Most importantly, the Church asserted that the person was free when making those actions, an idea in direct contradiction to Behaviorist conclusions. In a statement replete with implications, the Catechism declared that “God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions” (1730). Having reason and the ability to generate thought, the person was free to create actions. As Wojtyla stated, a person acted and was personally able to distinguish such action “from all facts that merely ‘happen’ in a personal subject” (189). Further, the person was moved by a “conscious and free choice,” an act of the will, “not by blind impulses” (Gaudium § 17).

Such a freedom was endowed in the person but was not absolute. The Catechism warned that “[freedom] attain[ed] its perfection when directed toward God” (1731). God, each person’s telos, must be viewed properly and be the direction of freedom. To not treat Him as the natural end was to “do evil…an abuse of freedom” (CCC 1733). Treating a lower good as an ultimate end made a person less free, “lead[ing] to the ‘slavery of sin’” (CCC 1733). The free agent was only truly free insofar as he directed his freedom properly. Even amidst the “slavery of sin,” however, actions still had a degree of freedom, though a greatly diminished degree. The person was no “victim” in the Church’s eyes but the “victor,” not the selfless robot but the dignified originator.

One philosophical school that aided in the defense of the person as person was Personalism. Developed by the twentieth-century French thinker Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism sought to give meaning to the person. Its central positions were “the existence of free and creative persons” and “the fundamental nature of the person…[lying] not in separation but in communication” (XVI, 17). Pope John Paul II, often described as the “Personalist Pope,” described Personalism as concerning itself “with the person as a subject and an object of activity, as a subject of rights, etc.” (167). Clearly in Personalism, the person received the attention and dignity from a philosophical thought he sorely had lacked for hundreds of years, a direct response to “positivism, materialism, and beheaviourism” (Copleston 313). Further, every person’s life had meaning, with each having “his or her vocation in life” (Copleston 315). Through communication with others, a person could discover the meaning to his life, the plan inscribed in his being. Through Personalism, a person again existed.

Mounier’s free individuals, though, were not self-interested, but rather decentralized, focusing their attention on the other person, as evidenced in the Personalist philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, like Mounier, people were meant to be in communication, in relationship with each other. Levinas posited the face of the Other as that communication, communication that took place before any other on the passive level of sensibility (Wisdom 101). The Other, though, was shrouded in mystery. Wojtyla echoed Levinas’s description, writing, “The human being in so many ways is a mysterium—a mystery (269). Being a mystery, the face was "what in the countenance that escapes our gaze" ("Violence" 29), containing a "trace" of the divine (Wisdom 117). Levinas believed the mysteriously transcendent trace of the divine was the "idea of a God who passes radically before me" (Wisdom 117). For Levinas, each person, each Other contained an irreducible being, transcendent and mysterious, having to be respected by his very existence. Levinas ultimately developed a Personalist philosophy that called for the defense of the Other because of its inscribed nature, because—in another way—of its being “the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake” (Gaudium § 24). Levinas’s Other was truly made in God’s image and likeness, being free and deserving respect. Indeed, the Other was quite different from the robotic person of Behaviorism. Indeed, the Other was truly a person.

Like many thoughts that err, Behaviorism had much of importance to say. It pointed out to a world too often imbued in superstition that many of a person’s actions were developed by his experiences in the environment. Ultimately, though, it was too rigidly oriented towards its thesis that all behavior could be observed and controlled by outside, material forces. As John Paul II warned, “We cannot stop short at experience alone” (Fides § 83). Such a one-sided empirical view would be prone to lead to “if not an outright denial of universal human values, at least…a relativistic conception of morality” (Veritatis § 33). The Church, though, believed that she must make use of the empirical sciences, but without viewing them as the basis for her teachings; empiricism must be seen as one of many thoughts, being used only to the extent that it would not contradict essential Truths. Through the teachings of the Church and the philosophies of Personalists, the person can once again regain his status as the height of creation, not just a “remarkable [animal]” (Skinner 239), but a being “little less than a god” (Ps. 8:6).

Works Cited

Burggraeve, Roger. The Wisdom of Love in the Service of Love: Emmanuel Levinas on       Justice, Peace, and Human Rights. Milwaukee: Marquette, 2002.

______. "Violence and the Vulnerable Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel Levinas on

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Catechism of the Catholic Church. Boston: Pauline, 1994.

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Mounier, Emmanuel. Personalism. Notre Dame: Notre Dame, 1952.

O'Connell, Timothy E. Principles for a Catholic Morality. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990.

Pope Benedict XVI. “Text of Pope Benedict XVI's homily at installation Mass.” Catholic News

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Skinner, B.F. About Behaviorism. New York: Knopf, 1974.

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