What Was Rothbard's Beef With B.F. Skinner?

Miscellaneous History
1

I was just interested if Rothbard ever directly criticized Skinner’s methodology or belief systems. I was reading a Mises Daily titled “How to Do Intellectual History” where Rothbard writes the following:

The basic methodological or philosophical approach to the history of thought that I favor is Skinnerism. I don’t mean the evil B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist. I mean Quentin Skinner.

Is there a reason Rothbard called Skinner “evil”? That is a very loaded word, and it seems for no apparent reason. He did note that Skinner was a behaviorist and, while scientists can tend to get carried away with their pet theories, Skinner’s contribution to operant conditioning is generally widely praised and I hope Rothbard isn’t that dismissive of all conditioning, since it appears to be an immutable fact of biological reality.

I do realize that Skinner wrote Walden 2 where he dreamt up a socialist utopia, but calling him evil went over the top I thought.

2

Perhaps because Ludwig von Mises had been critical of Behaviorism in Theory and History? Mises’ original critique was that the stimulus-response psychology of Behaviorism ignored purposeful behavior, or goal-oriented behavior. Which is ironic because Skinner’s branch of behaviorism was all about the study of individual incentive (though how much Mises was aware of Skinner’s work over that other of preceding behaviorists is something I am uncertain about).

There are in fact many aspects of Skinner’s “Behavior Analysis” which lends support to the Austrian school:

*Studies about what factors make a reinforcer effective for a given individual is applicable to the theory of subjective value.

*Studies about the use of schedules of reinforcement for conditioning tolerance for delayed rewards (colloquially referred to as “stretching the ratio”) provides insights about developing lower time preference.

*Studies about coercive methods of control reveal problems inherent to coercion that justify its opposition in the economic sphere. Skinner in particular was critical of punishment as being either ineffective or having merely transient effects. Additionally, coercion is found to encourage further undesired behavior such as evasion and counter-control.

Skinner’s novel Walden 2 is better described as a kind of vonluntary commune rather than socialism. He wrote an additional chapter titled “News From Nowhere, 1984” in which George Orwell visits the Walden 2 community and Skinner better delineates his politics, such as his position on welfarism being detrimental to its recipients. Nevertheless, the novel carries the pretense of scientism. Skinner believed that science would take the place of government and as a result he set up in his novel what appears to be a kind of behavioral technocracy. In all fairness, Skinner was attempting to envision a voluntary society, but not without a few crucial economic blunders like the behaviorists acting as intermediary price-fixers to “help” supply meet demand. Also, in his treatise Science and Human Behavior, he comes just short of expressing the theory of subjective value when he states, “In ‘a good bargain’ the object bought is more highly reinforcing than the money given up, and the sale takes place quickly,” but fails to articulate that the seller simultaneously values the object and the money in the reverse order. In general, Skinner’s behaviorism is undeservedly overlooked.

3

So was (and still is) Keynes’ contributions in economics. Do you see what a fallacy this is?

B.F. Skinner’s contributions to Psychology are as worthless as Keynes contributions are to Economics. Behaviorism was founded and “substantiated” on nothing but pseudo-scientific experiments ,which is something that is really big in the social sciences, to this day.

4

Maybe the evil title was earned because he put his son in a cage and experimented with him? [seem to recall seeing that somewhere]

5

Or Maybe because Behaviorism was the “scientific” basis for every murderous dictator ready to socially engineer the new socialist man. Behaviorism didn’t start with Skinner, it started with J.B. Watson in the early 20th century.

6

“Maybe the evil title was earned because he put his son in a cage and experimented with him? [seem to recall seeing that somewhere]”

Actually it was his daughter Deborah Skinner. And no, it’s not true. But she can speak for herself on the matter:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2004/mar/12/highereducation.uk

Apparently it’s only one of many other unsubstantiated rumors about Skinner going by some of the replies found here. Though I’m happy to entertain any informed criticism.

7

@DD5, it seems as if behavioral conditioning is indeed a fact of biology. I don’t think it’s junk-science, as all it does is analyze how learning can take place in a given environment and measures how effective incentives are for increasing or decreasing a target behavior. I don’t think it is antithetical to Austrian methodology at all, and it seems to be empirically verified.

I’m in agreement with Laissez anyway. Even with Skinner being a determinist (at least I think), it still doesn’t disagree with praxeology. Beacuse with praxeology, we still have people behaving rationally in order to achieve goals. Whether or not that is determined or “freely” chosen (however one defines the term) is irrelevant to the situaiton at hand with respect to the agent doing the acting. And if a subject has been manipulated (telling a kid “no!” when he is about to reach into the cookie jar is an example of operant conditioning), learning takes place and will be taken into account in future deliberations.

The kid is going to internalize the bad feeling of disappointing his mother and then choose whether or not he wants the cookies with the opportunity cost of possibly upsetting his mom. Economic laws still apply.

8

That’s not Behaviorism. Nobody objects to the idea that intelligence requires adaptive mechanisms to external stimuli. That you are willing to pay your taxes under threat of force is indeed a “fact of biology” that has to do with behavioral conditioning. But that’s not what Behaviorism is about.

Behaviorism maintains that all behaviors can be scientifically described and explained without reference to any physiological processes. Behaviorism of the Watson/Skinner school reject the idea of specialized innate faculties in the brain other then basic sensory and motor. All cognitive abilities, intelligence, and traits of personality are basically the product of environmental social conditioning. The infant mind is a blank slate according to Behaviorism.

Again, that’s not Behaviorism. Behaviorism would maintain that how considerate of a kid, and later as an adult, he will turn out to be, is a function of social conditioning. This is utter nonsense! Nobody objects that pointing a gun to his head can affect his behavior. But remove the gun, and the kid behaves differently.

9

Indeed. It seems to me like Rothbard’s objection to B. F. Skinner and Behaviorism in general is the fact that they seemingly deny the existence of an innate human nature. After all, if the mind is a “blank slate”, then an individual can be conditioned in an infinite number of ways. Human nature thus becomes infinitely malleable to the point of non-existence.

Ultimately, however, there is a physiological explanation for all behavior. (At least, there is if you’re a physical determinist, like me.) Since human physiology is established before any conditioning can be made, this would imply that there’s a “pre-loaded” human nature.

10

I think it is widely believed that behaviorism is fine for dogs and things like that, but not humans. It is not widely praised in psychology anymore. Because psychology today focuses on the mind itself and not just behavior. Noam Chomsky’s critique of Behaviorism is quite famous as well. And is often considered one of the final blows to that ideology. This was back in the 1960s. Chomsky was/is a rationalist, much like Rothbard. And there is not so much a creative or rational element available under behaviorism.

11

It’s possible that B. F. Skinner’s philosophy was widely misunderstood. Others may have simply believed that it justified their pre-existing fantasies of mind control and other shenanigans.

On another note, couldn’t it be said that the behaviorists themselves were free (if not expected) to be creative and/or rational? Or do you mean something different by “creative or rational element”?

12

I don’t think he was misunderstood. If one is to follow behaviorism to its natural conclusions and seek its social ramifications, it is clear that the individual is a product of the group. This is the kind of stuff that collectivists really get excited about. This is why behaviorism is not really dead, and it is still the very much kept alive by the State.

Look, if you can’t plan how your kids turn out to be, how in the world are you going to plan the future society?

13

John Ess wrote:

Do you know what work this was in? I’d be interested in looking at it.

14

I think Chomsky’s blow to behaviorism is with his work on Universal Grammar which implies an innate language faculty. But I would say it’s one of the first blows, and not “final”.

15

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1967----.htm

16

Regardless of whether or not Skinner was wrong about radical behaviorism, I think it was unnecessary for Rothbard to define him as “evil.” I think it had to do more with Rothbard’s obsession with liberty and metaphysical free will versus the accuracy of human conditioning.

Regardless though, I think Chomsky was probably right. Radical behaviorism has gone the way of logical positivsm, and hence why it has adapted into “Post-Skinnerism.”

17

DD5: “Behaviorism maintains that all behaviors can be scientifically described and explained without reference to any physiological processes.”

Can’t say I disagree, but neither do I see what’s so objectionable about that. The Skinnerian behaviorists have never denied that conditioning works the way it does for biological reasons. It’s just that they have felt that behavior analysis is capable of standing on its own as a distinct discipline much like how chemistry can stand as a discipline distinct from physics.

DD5: “Behaviorism of the Watson/Skinner school reject the idea of specialized innate faculties in the brain other then basic sensory and motor.”

Well, of course. If it were all “innate faculties” that formed an individual that would be an extreme form of Pavlovian behaviorism. But I’m afraid that humans are much more complex than a mere bag of reflexes. But to cut to the heart of the matter, you seem to be implying that there must be some kind of seat of consciousness superseding both reflexes and incentive. At the end of the day we can only concern ourselves with investigating cause and effect. I daresay it is not a sound form of reasoning to posit an unmoved mover at the reins of the human mind.

Autolykos: “After all, if the mind is a “blank slate”, then an individual can be conditioned in an infinite number of ways. Human nature thus becomes infinitely malleable to the point of non-existence.”

Conditioning describes a very particular way of learning in which the individual responds to incentives. Incentives that only work if certain individual factors are in place. It’s not an “anything goes” kind of learning. It’s certainly not the “individual incentives don’t matter” kind of blank slate that socialists and communists wish were true.

Autolykos: “Since human physiology is established before any conditioning can be made, this would imply that there’s a “pre-loaded” human nature.”

I would agree except to add that much of this is in fact covered within behaviorism as well. There’s nothing mutually exclusive about having a “human nature” versus having a human brain that learns according to certain behavioral precepts.

DD5: “If one is to follow behaviorism to its natural conclusions and seek its social ramifications, it is clear that the individual is a product of the group. This is the kind of stuff that collectivists really get excited about.”

See, that makes about as much sense as saying that the aggregate effects of the free market upon individual actors is collectivist in its natural conclusions. You can’t say it’s collectivist without showing that it purports that individual incentive doesn’t matter.

DD5: “I think Chomsky’s blow to behaviorism is with his work on Universal Grammar which implies an innate language faculty.”

Positing an unfalsifiable mechanism, like Chomsky’s “Language Acquisition Device,” is not exactly in keeping with good scientific practice. His theory of universal grammar is not something for which I have seen much, if any, substantiation. In the interest of completeness, the following is a link to Kenneth MacCorquodale’s 1969 rebuttal to Chomsky. Much like John Maynard Keynes, Chomsky’s work initially went unchallenged because his would-be opponents did not foresee that his ideas would ever be taken seriously.

http://behavior.org/resources/324.pdf

18

It’s falsifiable, even if it is logical rather than empirical claim. In fact, it is not ‘unfalsiable’ anymore than Mises’ theories (which is a common fallacy). If you found a child who was otherwise healthy and exposed to people who failed to ever learn their spoken language (like many fail to learn math or reading), the Chomskyan theory would be false. The concept he used to battle behaviorism was the ‘poverty of stimulus’ which claims that there is a lack of time to gain competence in a language, so people must have the innate capacity to ‘acquire’ it. Just try to learn a language later in life and see how much more difficult and time consuming it is.

You can take some examples. If you found a language somewhere in the world which did not have recursion (the ability to embed sentences within sentences) as a feature, it would also be false. If you found a language that did not allow creativity or an infinite number of utterances (but instead merely contained a finite number of token sentences to be repeated), it would falsify the theory. There are many other facets of the theory. Depending on which book you’re talking about and in what year.

Chomsky’s theory is multifaceted and has changed over the years because of other linguists falsifying various claims. But the main idea of innateness and creativity has remained. That’s why each of his books has a different thesis (ie: Syntactic Structures, Aspects of the theory of Syntax, Government and Binding, Principles and Parameters, Minimalist Program, etc.).

People did oppose the theories right off the bat. George Lakoff and those guys did, but they failed every time. Many other people did not see Syntactic Structures as deviating from the norm at that time which was structuralism (Chomsky’s mentor Zellig Harris was in fact a structuralist). There’s also the fact that most linguists at that time were really not on the offensive since structuralism did not create very many programs of study and was winding to a halt because all it involved was simply documenting written sentences and phonetics of obscure languages. (the basic ‘behavior’ of language).

19

Chomsky merely set the stage for what was to come. In fact, much of the specific tenets of the original “universal grammar” have been debunked by subsequent psycho-linguist researchers, however, the principle of innate language faculty firmly remains and has been substantiated by a great deal of research since then.

Straw man! Can you please show me where I implied such nonsense?

and I’m afraid it is you who is making gross oversimplifications by implying a simple and rather naive environment vs. innate biology dichotomy. The interaction between innate and external stimuli is indeed complex, but it is nothing like the behaviorists hypothesized. And modern post-skinner, or whatever you call them, behaviorists still don’t get it.

I don’t dispute their “feelings”. Just that their school of thought is quite removed from scientific habit of mind.

20

Is this common knowledge? Can I find it e.g. on Wikipedia? I don’t ask to cast doubt on its veracity – I just want to see whether I should ask you for source material.

With that said, I think “conditioning” strikes a chord with many people because it’s often taken to mean “brainwashing”. That is, phrases such as “he was conditioned to accept” seem to imply that it was done against his will. In other words, someone overrode his own incentives and replaced them with others.

While that may not be what Skinnerian behaviorists mean by “conditioning”, nevertheless that’s what’s permeated into “popular culture”, if you will. Of course, to call someone evil because others misinterpreted his meaning is unwarranted IMO.

Fair enough. Something I meant to say earlier is that praxeology itself seems to be set up the same way. I recall Mises writing that the physiological nature of the mind is irrelevant to praxeology, for it studies human actions. Perhaps Skinnerian behaviorism and praxeology are basically one and the same thing, just with different semantics!