What sets Naess's deep ecology apart from most inquiries into environmental philosophy is that it does not seek a radical shift in fundamental values. Naess offered a utopian, life-affirming grand narrative, a new Weltanschauung that shifted the focus of inquiry to coupling values, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom to behavior. The core of Naess's approach is that sustainability hinges on developing more thoroughly reasoned and consistent views, policies, and actions, which are tied back to wide-identifying ultimate norms and a rich, well-informed (...) understanding of the state of the planet. But humans can have multiple ultimate norms and these norms sometimes conflict; our neurobiology may not be well-structured for accommodating consequences that are spatially and temporally separated and uncertain; we are governed by bounded rationality; much of human learning results from the passive modeling of unsustainable activities; and our cultures can be maladaptive, creating hurdles and perverse incentives/disincentives that likely demand more than consistent reasoning from wide-identifying ultimate premises. After keenly demonstrating how problem characterization and formulation shape both solution strategies and outcomes, Naess may conceptualize the process of change too narrowly. In the end, deep ecology helps us to shine a brighter searchlight on the gap between our attitudes and our generally unsustainable actions and policies. In doing so it expands the frontier of the unknown, opening more questions. This is its allure, frustration, and promise. (shrink)

Different accounts of Skinner's work are often in conflict. Some interpretations, for example, regard Skinner as a mechanist. Other interpretations regard Skinner as a selectionist. An alternative interpretation is to see Skinner as employing both views with changes in these views and their proportionate relations over time. To clarify these distinctions, it is helpful to see Skinner's work against the background of similar changes that have been taking place in Western Culture. An extended and overlapping shift in cultural values has (...) occurred from modernism to postmodernism. Some key distinctions in this shift are that modernism emphasizes abstract simplicity, permanent necessity, and absolutely certain sources of truth. Postmodernism emphasizes complex and concrete contexts, probability, and explanations of change in terms of consequences. Skinner shows a similarly extended and overlapping shift over time that results in separate sets of responses which may be regarded as two sides or two selves of Skinner: one an organized collection of responses aligned with modernism, another an organized collection of responses aligned with postmodernism. (shrink)

This essay explores some possibilities brought by the question about philosophy’s utility for science. We point to some arguments in favor of the importance of philosophy for science in general and Behavior Analysis in particular. We argue that philosophy is the consciousness of science. Without philosophical consciousness, science incurs epistemological naiveties; it uncritically defends scientific neutrality; it risks turning into a mere technique in the service of ideologies that endangers science’s existence. As the philosophy of Behavior Analysis, Radical Behaviorism can (...) play the role of conscience of that science. (shrink)

Social scientists have not integrated relevant knowledge from the biological sciences into their explanations of human behavior. This failure is due to a longstanding antireductionistic bias against the natural sciences, which follows on a commitment to the view that social facts must be explained by social laws. This belief has led many social scientists into the error of reifying abstract analytical constructs into entities that possess powers of agency. It has also led to a false nature-culture dichotomy that effectively undermines (...) the place of biology in social scientific explanation. Following the principles of methodological individualism, we show how behavioral explanations supported by data and theory from the neurosciences can be used to correct the errors of reificationist thinking in the social sciences. We outline a mechanistic approach to the explanation of human behavior with the hope that the biological sciences will begin to find greater acceptance among social scientists. (shrink)

It is argued that the cognitive revolution provided general support for the view that associative learning requires cognitive processing, but only limited support for the view that it requires conscious processing. The point is illustrated by two studies of associative learning that played an important role in the development of the cognitive revolution, but which are surprisingly neglected by Mitchell et al. in the target article.