Mr.Samsa wrote:Yeah, I was usually "methodology" in a broader sense - not only in how to collect the data, but what the data is, the unit of measurement, the philosophical underpinnings, etc. Cognitivism and behaviorism simply can't be different paradigms because they're not incommensurable. Not only can we directly compare data, but we can explain it using our own terminology, and assist each other in our investigations. The cognitivists may make extra assumptions, or extra claims, which aren't relevant to behaviorist researchers, but I don't see how that would make it distinct enough to be considered its own paradigm.
I just meant that to me they seem to be different types of theories, even if the are commensurable and share a common methodology. I don't care too much about the definition of "paradigm", I just used the term as "majorly accepted theory in the field".
Mr.Samsa wrote:The idea that Skinner ignored physiological or mental causes is simply wrong. Skinner was obviously one of the first scientists in the nature-nurture debate to claim that it's both, and explained numerous times how you cannot study or understand behavior without understanding the biological and environmental causes behind it.The confusion over Skinner's stance on physiology stems from his early comments on the topic, which were interpreted to be dismissive in an absolute sense. He did argue against using physiological concepts to explain behavior, but only because he was writing at a time where we knew practically nothing about the brain. Positing neurological causes for behavior was simply, at best, guesswork, and at worst an explanatory fiction. As the decades rolled on, and technology advanced, Skinner argued that we are now able to make claims of neurological causes, as the only thing that was holding him back was empirical data of the thing that was said to be causing the behavior.
As for mental causes, he accepted these too. He viewed external and internal behaviors as simply being "chains of behavior", links which are both an effect of the preceding link and a cause of the following link. It didn't matter if the link was an external behavior, an internal one, or a biological cause, it all had the same effect. He laid out the groundwork for the cognitivists to study internal states by developing the methodology which makes it possible to scientifically investigate unobservable states, however, he did warn us to be cautious when explaining an unobservable behavior with another unobservable behavior, as we can derive the existence of the first through indirect methods and effects from observable behaviors, but to derive the existence of the second unobservable behavior we only have the first unobservable behavior as our guide. He personally didn't think this was a fruitful avenue of research as he felt it was fraught with possible errors, but he certainly didn't rule it out. His behaviorist method is, without modification or additions, CBT which works on not only changing thoughts to change behavior, but also changing thoughts to change other thoughts, so it's certainly not the case that behaviorism rejects the idea that internal states cannot be causes of behaviors.
Yes, he accepts mental causes and internal states, but only in terms of behaviors, or like you said "chains of behavior", while cognitivists see mental causes not in terms of behavior, but in terms of mental mechanisms that would be an emerging function of the brain (and maybe other physical systems too).
As that article from Burgos that seeker shared puts it: "the radical behaviorists’ account of the nature of theories restricts theoretical terms in psychology to behavioral terms, which radical behaviorists take as observational. [...]
There are many terms in psychology that are theoretical but are not meant as behavioral, such as those provided by MacCorquodale and Meehl (1948) as examples of terms that designate hypothetical constructs:
Guthrie’s movement-produced stimuli, Hull’s rg’s, Sd’s, and afferent neural interaction, Allport’s biophysical traits, Murray’s regnancies, the notion of ‘anxiety’ as used by Mowrer, Miller, and Dollard and others of the Yale-derived
group, and most theoretical constructs in psychoanalytic theory.
Cognitivistic terms (as used by cognitivists; see note 3) such as “memory,” “representation,” “attention,” “reasoning,” “thought,” and “intelligence,” among many others, would not qualify as theoretical either. "
So I think we are talking about two different theories here (even if one can make some translations to the other one's terms): one regarding behavior, the other regarding mental mechanisms. That's what I haven't seen integrated in a psychological theory yet.
Another problem I see is that cognitive psychology can only actually be a theory within psychology if functionalism and computational theory of mind prove to be true (and even if they do, then we'll have to ask ourselves if we are talking about psychology or computer science), if not it would just be the study of brain functions (and hence a part of neurology). But this issue doesn't seem to be sufficiently clear at present.
The behavioral account sets the task for the physiologist. Mentalism on the other hand has done a great disservice by leading physiologists on false trails in search of the neural correlates of images, memories, consciousness, and so on. Skinner