Transcendence, defined as the capacity to perceive the immediate stimulus environment in relation to long-range or abstract concerns, is a key aspect of self-control, and indeed self-regulation often breaks down because attention becomes focused exclusively on the immediate stimuli (i.e., transcendence fails). Factors that restrict attention to the here and now will weaken self-control, whereas factors that promote transcendence will enhance it. Guilt may be one example of the latter.

Contrary to his own perspective, Rachlin introduces a ghostly inner cost to explain the persistence of behavioral patterns and agency to explain their origins. Both inconsistencies can be set straight by taking account of history and a context larger than the pattern itself. Persistence is explained by stimulus control, if one assumes that defection from a pattern has stimulus properties and is punished. The origins of patterns are understood as an outcome of selection in the larger context of cultural or (...) biological evolution. (shrink)

Discussions of what minds are and what they do is a contentious issue. This is particularly so when considering non‐human animals, for here the questions become: do they have minds at all? And if so, what kinds of minds are they? Alternatives to Cartesian or computational models of mind open up a whole new space of possibility for how we should conceive of animal minds, while also highlighting how Skinner's pragmatist‐inspired radical behaviourism has much more to offer than most researchers (...) in animal cognition would like to admit. Pragmatism, or ‘American Naturalism' is also highlighted by Chemero as the alternative for human cognition. The challenge, then, is to build an understanding of mind along pragmatist lines in a way that does justice to both human and non‐human animals. A clear understanding of embodiment, and commitment to a radical form of enactivism, can, perhaps, begin to generate a better kind of continuity. (shrink)

Rachlin's view of self-control is rejected on the grounds that his arguments do not establish the possibility of abstract, external, stimulus patterns and that his experiments, although they show that pigeons and human beings do sometimes choose postponed rather than immediate gratification, do not challenge the commonly held view that internal factors are involved in the former choice.

The target article extends molar behaviorism in two positive ways: beyond average aggregates and beyond restricted laws of Although a molar framework based on purely overt events shows promise for advancing behavior theory, Rachlin's specific form of teleological behaviorism is in need of clarification.

The willingness to trade off large but ill-defined future consequences for immediate work characterizes social problems such as environmental sustainability. This commentary argues that important applications of behavioral models of self-control are being overlooked in the experimental literature. Tying the experimental literature to longterm health, environmental, and other risks makes the experimental work more germane, and raises new research questions for experimental modeling.

Operant psychologists are looking for alternatives to radical behaviorism. Rachlin offers teleological behaviorism, but it may pose as many difficulties as radical behaviorism. There is, however, a less drastic way to defend Rachlin's thesis of It portrays operant principles as relating distal efficient causes to behavioral effects.

The costliness of disrupting a pattern may not be a useful criterion for distinguishing between acts and patterns; there are instances in which omitted components of patterns are hard to detect (e.g., typographical errors), or in which distortions are easily introduced (e.g., slurred words in a trite phrase). Are there behavioral criteria for distinguishing between acts and patterns?

Rachlin overlooks that free will determines when and in what direction acts that appear impulsive will occur. Because behavioral patterns continuously evolve, animals are not guaranteed when they will, or how to, maximize larger-later reinforcements. An animal therefore uses self-control to emit free acts to vary behavioral patterns to optimize larger-later rewards.

Johannes Müller's law of specific nerve energies (LOSNE) states that the mind has access not to objects in the world but only to our nerves. This law implies that the contents of the mind have no qualities in common with environmental objects but serve only as arbitrary signs or markers of those objects. The present article traces the implications of LOSNE for non-physical theories of mind and for modern neural identity theory (that mental events are identical with their neurological representations) (...) and argues that these theories are essentially inconsistent with LOSNE. Teleological behaviorism, a behavioral identity theory of the mind, identifies a person's mind with the correlation over time between that person's overt behavior and environmental objects; this behavioral conception is consistent with a revised form of LOSNE in which the mind is conceived to exist not within the body but at the borderline between the body and the world. (shrink)

Complex cases of self-control involve processes such as guilt-avoidance, inhibition, self-punishment, conscious thought, free will, and imagination. Such processes, conceived as internal mediating mechanisms, serve the function in psychological theory of avoiding teleological causation. Acceptance of the scientific legitimacy of teleological behaviorism would obviate the need for internal mediation, redefine the above processes in terms of temporally extended patterns of overt behavior, and clarify their relation to selfcontrol.

Self-control, so important in the theory and practice of psychology, has usually been understood introspectively. This target article adopts a behavioral view of the self (as an abstract class of behavioral actions) and of self-control (as an abstract behavioral pattern dominating a particular act) according to which the development of self-control is a molar/molecular conflict in the development of behavioral patterns. This subsumes the more typical view of self-control as a now/later conflict in which an act of self-control is a (...) choice of a larger but later reinforcer over a smaller but sooner reinforcer. If at some future time the smaller-sooner reinforcer will be more valuable than the larger-later reinforcer, self-control may be achieved through a commitment to the largerlater reinforcer prior to that point. According to some, there is a progressive internalization of commitment in the development of self-control. This presents theoretical and empirical problems. In two experiments temporal patterning of choices increased self-control. (shrink)

Many situations in human life present choices between (a) narrowly preferred particular alternatives and (b) narrowly less preferred (or aversive) particular alternatives that nevertheless form part of highly preferred abstract behavioral patterns. Such alternatives characterize problems of self-control. For example, at any given moment, a person may accept alcoholic drinks yet also prefer being sober to being drunk over the next few days. Other situations present choices between (a) alternatives beneficial to an individual and (b) alternatives that are less beneficial (...) (or harmful) to the individual that would nevertheless be beneficial if chosen by many individuals. Such alternatives characterize problems of social cooperation; choices of the latter alternative are generally considered to be altruistic. Altruism, like self-control, is a valuable temporally-extended pattern of behavior. Like self-control, altruism may be learned and maintained over an individual's lifetime. It needs no special inherited mechanism. Individual acts of altruism, each of which may be of no benefit (or of possible harm) to the actor, may nevertheless be beneficial when repeated over time. However, because each selfish decision is individually preferred to each altruistic decision, people can benefit from altruistic behavior only when they are committed to an altruistic pattern of acts and refuse to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

The present intractability of and near intractability of make self-control a difficult topic.

Rachlin's view of self-control as a sequence or chain of behaviors is contrasted with traditional behavioral analyses of self-control which emphasize a simplistic interpretation of the hyperbolic function relating small-sooner (SS) and larger-later (LL) reinforcers to specific behaviors. The validity of Rachlin's teleological analysis is examined in relation to the acquisition and steady-state performance of self-control behaviors. Central to an analysis of self-control is the functional difference between behavior under the control of SS and LL reinforcers, because SS-reinforced behavior is (...) more complex due to temporal parameters. (shrink)

Self-control is in the eye of the beholder. However, we speak of if a person has come to think conscious thoughts that change the motivational value of stimuli in the outside world. It is claimed that conscious thinking, and not habits bordering on compulsion, is behind self-control.

You cannot overcome addiction or impulsiveness through abstract patterns alone. They show you the way to go, but do not fuel the effort. Some further variable is needed in the equation, some internal force or motivational mechanism, whatever its nature. Overlooking this leads to a neo-Socratic exaggeration of the role of cognition in selfcontrol.

A pair of arguments suggests that self-control is not properly conceptualized on the pattern/act/preference model Rachlin proposes. The first concerns the irrational following of personal rules. The second concerns scenarios in which behavioral patterns an agent deems good come into conflict.

It is common to find depictions of behaviorist approaches to the mind as approaches according to which mental events are “dispositions for behavior.” Moreover, it is sometimes said that for these approaches the dispositions are for publicly observable behaviors, or even “purely physical movements,” thereby excluding from being constitutive of mental events any internal bodily happening, besides any movement not taken as “purely physical.” In this paper I aim to pinpoint problems in such widespread depictions of behaviorism about the mind, (...) by arguing that they turn out to be too restrictive or too broad, as the case may be. In addition, I put forward an alternative, more balanced characterization, which wards off such problems. Based upon this alternative characterization, I attempt to classify some of the embodied mind theories as behavioral, non-behavioral, or borderline cases between behavioral and non-behavioral perspectives. (shrink)

Ordinary psychological predicates, and the phenomena we report to by means of them, can be grouped together into different categories. For instance, it is usual to group together phenomena such as belief and expectancy in a category of ‘propositional attitudes’, whereas sensations, like pain and itch, in a distinct one. Which taxonomy of the mental would be plausible to be adopted in contexts such as those of introductory books to the philosophy of mind, i.e., when we need to set out (...) only from minimal assumptions regarding these predicates and phenomena? This article suggests some desiderata and principles for such a taxonomy; exposes and critically assesses some taxonomies presented in introductory books to the philosophy of mind; and proposes the sketch of an alternative one. (shrink)

Teleological behaviorism, unlike Skinnerian behaviorism, recognizes that are needed to account adequately for human behavior, but it rejects the essential role in behavioral explanations of the subjective perspective of the agent. I argue that teleological behaviorism fails because of this rejection.

Rachlin introduces a new theory before exhausting its predecessor. His earlier model of future-discounting may be developed by integrating over the duration of extended rewards and punishers. The difference in value of an event within a pattern over the event in isolation derives from the deprivation provided by the pattern; yet the pattern attracts because acute rewards are more potent than incremental deprivations.

Rachlin's thought-provoking analysis could be strengthened by greater openness to evolutionary interpretation and the use of the directed attention concept as a component of self-control. His contribution to the understanding of prosocial behavior would also benefit from abandoning the traditional (and excessively restrictive) definition of altruism.

Regarding Rachlin's behavioral act/pattern theory of self-control, it is argued that some cases of self-control involve pattern/ pattern conflicts rather than merely act/pattern conflicts and that some patterns must be viewed as internal representational states of mind (plans) rather than merely as patterns of actual overt behavior.

The primary argument against Rachlin's act-versus-pattern analysis of self-control is that it is wrong to think of a temptation as a solitary act while the alternative is conceived of as an element of a pattern. Either both are solitary acts or both are members of patterns, however different the patterns may be in their complexity and abstractness.

Toward a neurobiologically grounded approach to explaining self-control we discuss the case of a patient with a bilateral lesion in frontal ventromedial cortex. Patients with such lesions display a marked deficit in social decision making. Compared with an account that examines the causal antecedents of self-control, Rachlin's behaviorist approach seems lacking in explanatory strength.

Portraying psychological process as extended over time in multiply overlapping scales is a conceptual advance that can be understood as analogous to our understanding of spatial relationships. There may be a residual contradiction, however, when Rachlin invokes in ways that seem to imply earlier conceptions. The roles of superimposed or conditionally related stimuli also remain to be addressed.

In the real world, there are choices between large, delayed, punctate rewards and small, more immediate rewards as well as choices between patterns and acts. A common element in these situations is the choice between long- and short-term interests. Key issues for future research appear to be how acts are restructured into larger patterns of behavior, and whether, as Rachlin implies, pattern perception is the cause of pattern generation.

Rachlin's attack on the internal commitment model rests on the demonstrably false claim that self-punishment does not exist. He is correct that habits are an effective device for solving self-control problems, but his additional claim that they are the only such device makes it hard to explain how good habits develop in the first place. Someone with a self-control problem would always choose the spuriously attractive reward, which, over time, would create bad habits.

There may be evolutionary as well as economic reasons why organisms generally act impulsively. I discuss this possibility and suggest some follow-up experiments that may clarify the exciting empirical and theoretical contributions made by the experiments discussed in the target article.

Rachlin's hyperbolic-discounting model captures basic features of the subtlety of human impulsiveness and self-control and has received convincing experimental support. His distinction between self-control patterns and impulsive acts expands his earlier work to a greater range of self-control behaviors. Possible mechanisms that may weaken or strengthen patterns of self-control are considered.

In this paper I analyze the relation between ascribing knowledge to a human agent in two kinds of circumstances, namely acting according to environmental contingences and acting according to a rule. My discussion begins with the distinction I put forward between descriptive and explicative hypotheses. After relating the notions of rule and belief, I try to support the idea that modifications in overt behavior are prior to any ascriptions of knowledge to an agent, connecting this topic with processes of investigation. (...) I discuss also if there can be beliefs which do not bring about modifications of behavior, and I argue that in certain circumstances of our investigation about the behavior of people, in order to give it unity, we are to ascribe beliefs of that kind to people. Given those points, I depict epistemology as the theory of the processes of investigation involved in human action. DOI:10.5007/1808-1711.2010v14n2p279. (shrink)

The central fact in the delineation of radical behaviorism is its conceptual avoidance of propositional content. This eschewal of the intentional stance sets it apart not only from cognitivism but from other non-behaviorisms. Indeed, the defining characteristic of radical behaviorism is not that it avoids mediating processes per se but that it sets out to account for behavior without recourse to propositional attitudes. Based, rather, on the contextual stance, it provides definitions of contingency-shaped, rule-governed verbal and private behaviors which are (...) non-intentional. However, while the account provided by radical behaviorism fulfills the pragmatic criteria of prediction and control of its subject matter, it has problems of explanation that stem from the failure of radical behaviorist interpretation to address the personal level of analysis, to provide for the continuity of behavior, and to show how its accounts can be delimited in the face of causal equifinality. This leaves gaps in its explanation that radical behaviorists choose either to ignore or to fill with the very intentional locutions that they formally abhor but which I argue are essential. As a result, many psychologists who style themselves radical behaviorists have already moved beyond radical behaviorism as a philosophy of science. They have done so primarily as a result of adopting the language of intentional psychology in order to explain behavior; where they have not done this, they have resorted to the unscientific assumption that somewhere there is a learning history that explains their data. While it is indeed the case that a learning history precedes all operant behavior, the explanatory gap that is revealed by the search for this unobtainable information reveals the inescapability of intentionality. Hence, psychologists, including radical behaviorists, are right to employ it. The challenge is to understand why this is so and to celebrate rather than denigrate the resulting extension of behavioral science. In this response, I first raise and seek to answer two questions: what is radical behaviorism, and what is intentional explanation? I go on to discuss the incompleteness of radical behaviorism. There follows a summary of the argument with respect to intentional behaviorism and super-personal cognitive psychology. And, finally, I bring the discussion back to Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who initiated so much of it. (shrink)

This paper aims at discussing the usage by Davidson as to events of Quine's criterion of ontological commitment. According to Davidson, we are ontologically committed to the existence of events as individuals as we employ literally terms such as ‘Caesar’s death’, for instance. David-son extends this analysis to actions as well, since actions are human events. One of the consequences of this view is that psychology deals with individual events in a non-lawful way. An alternative view is here proposed, based (...) on a complementary criterion, namely ontological den-sity, according to which from the point of view of a given theory, we can always distinguish between events (or phenomena) and individuals (entities) among the overall occurrences described by the theory. Some consequences of this alternative view of psychology as a science dealing lawfully with general human events are also explored here. (shrink)

This paper briefly presents an account, partially based upon Ryle’s approach, of the functions of intentional psychological terms as they are used in ordinary language. According to this account, intentional psychological terms describe known patterns of behavior that are determined by selective mechanisms of causation. That is, these terms describe relations between certain responses, selected on the basis of the consequences they produce in the environment, and contexts of their occurrence, to which they become associated. Intentional psychological terms do not (...) point to inner causes of a given behavior, but can explain it only in the sense of stating that it could be expected to occur, if we can identify its behavior pattern and the context in which it occurs. We proceed then to examine three main objections that have been raised against Ryle’s position, namely: (a) Davidson’s challenge to the non-causal accounts of reason-explanations; (b) Armstrong’s worries about “leaving the counterfactuals hanging in the air”; and (c) the holistic objection to the (wrongly) presumed Ryle’s atomism. We aim at showing that none of these objections pose serious problems to the proposed account. (shrink)

Most psychology begins with a distinction between organism and environment, where the two are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) conceptualized as flipsides of a skin-severed space. This paper examines that conceptualization. Dewey and Bentley's (1949) account of firm naming is used to show that psychologists have, in general, (1) employed the skin as a morphological criterion for distinguishing organisms from backgrounds, and (2) equated background with environment. This two-step procedure, which in this article is named the morphological conception of organism, is (...) shown to inform the writings of the well-known psychologist B. F. Skinner. A review of difficulties with the morphological conception is followed with a review and preliminary integration of four attempts at an alternative conception of organism, and thus environment. Together, these four attempts converge on an analysis of living systems as transdermal (through and across skin) processes only within which organism and environment are distinguishable as complementary phases. The notion of a biological total process, or bioprocess, is employed to clarify this alternative analysis, in which an organism is an ongoing organization rather than a skin-bound body. (shrink)

Brain-centered theories of consciousness seem to face insuperable difficulties. While some philosophers now doubt that the hard problem of consciousness will ever be solved, others call for radically new approaches to conscious experience. In this article I resurrect a largely forgotten approach to consciousness known as neorealism. According to neorealism, consciousness is merely a part, or cross-section, of the environment. Neorealism implies that all conscious experiences, veridical or otherwise, exist outside of the brain and are wholly independent of being perceived (...) or not; nonveridical perceptions of the environment over an arbitrarily short period of time are supposed to be objective constituents of the environment over a more extended time scale. I argue here that neorealism fares at least as well as brain-centered theories of consciousness on a number of fundamental issues. On one fundamental issue—the nature of the relation between veridical and nonveridical perceptions—neorealism outperforms its competitors. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo principal apresentar uma reconstruçáo lógico-conceitual e avaliaçáo de três argumentos de Skinner para a tese de que os termos psicológicos comuns sáo, em geral, inadmissíveis em análise do comportamento (a tese da inadmissibilidade). Começamos fazendo uma revisáo da abordagem de tais termos sustentada por Skinner, particularmente sua abordagem das categoriais de termos psicológicos disposicionais. Muito dela é aqui aceito, mas adotamos, como hipótese de trabalho, um desacordo com a premissa de Skinner de que eles sejam (...) irremediavelmente mentalistas. Nossa análise mostra que, se esta hipótese estiver correta, entáo os argumentos analisados náo resultam ser inteiramente plausíveis; e, embora a opçáo do autor seja plenamente aceitável, também o é uma (em princípio) opçáo alternativa, que explore os valores heurísticos de tais termos (sem incorporá-los ao vocabulário de base) para a descoberta de padrões comportamentais e seus contextos, em ambientes abertos de pesquisa. Um objetivo colateral deste artigo é mostrar o equívoco de duas suposições muitas vezes assumidas em filosofia da mente sobre o behaviorismo radical: a de que ele náo tem uma abordagem relevante sobre o funcionamento dos termos em questáo e a de que sua tese da inadmissibilidade se baseia em premissas verificacionistas. (shrink)