Behavior Analytic Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a decidedly American viewpoint in philosophy whose development in the late nineteenth century is often attributed to Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey (Menand, 2002), and whose influence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is often attributed to the late Richard Rorty. As is well known, James and Dewey contributed to psychology as well as to philosophy. Indeed, pragmatism was instrumental in the development of American functionalism at the close of the nineteenth century, and is often linked with the development of behaviorism during the twentieth century. In regard to behaviorism, Leigland (1999), Moxley (2001, 2001/2002, 2002), and more recently Schoneberger (2016) have reviewed the relation between pragmatism, for example, as represented by Peirce and Rorty, and the behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, known as behavior analysis. The present paper seeks to continue the discussion of the relation between pragmatism and behavior analysis, and for purposes of illustration to compare the pragmatic dimensions of behavior analysis with those of cognitive science.Pragmatism as a Philosophical OrientationPragmatism has been described in many ways by many commentators, sometimes as much in terms of what it opposes as what it advocates. The following passage from Dewey (1926) is illustrative:[Philosophy's] primary concern is to clarify, liberate, and extend the goods which inhere in the naturally generated functions of experience. It has no call to generate a world of de novo, nor to delve into secrets of Being hidden from common sense and science. It has no stock of information or body of knowledge peculiarly its own; if it does not always become ridiculous when it sets up as a rival of science, it is only because a particular philosopher happens to be also, as a human being, a prophetic man of science. Its business is to accept and to utilize for a purpose the best available knowledge of its own time and place. And this purpose is criticism of beliefs, institutions, custom, policies with respect to their bearing on good. This does not mean bearing upon the good, as something itself formulated and attained within philosophy. For as philosophy has no private store of knowledge or of methods for attaining truth, so it has no private access to good. As it accepts knowledge of facts and principles from those competent in science and inquiry, it accepts the goods that are suffused in human experience. It has no Mosaic or Pauline authority of revelation entrusted to it. But it has the authority of intelligence, of criticism of these common and natural goods.... (pp. 407-408, italics in original)Dewey here clearly continued in the tradition of Peirce and James by challenging the dominant philosophical thinking of his time and suggesting an alternative approach. Absent was an emphasis on a metaphysics that extended beyond the domain of human affairs. In its place was a firm commitment to analyses grounded in human experience and behavior.A second and more modern illustration of pragmatism is the work of Richard Rorty. Much as Dewey had, Rorty (e.g., 1979, 1991) emphasized that pragmatism is therapeutic instead of constructive. It is therapeutic in the sense that it argues the job of philosophers is to clarify and refine an understanding of the processes according to which humans interact with the world, often in causal ways. For Rorty as for Dewey, the meaning and value of philosophical terms invoked in this endeavor follow from their implications and consequences with respect to human experience and behavior. Rorty rejected the idea that philosophers should be concerned with constructing a metaphysical story about how human minds create the world in which humans live, and then with justifying how this story reflects a reality that philosophers know in some privileged way. Rorty employed the umbrella term antirepresentationalism in conjunction with his pragmatic views. …