Looking back

"What is behavior?"
If 5 radical behaviorists were asked that today, would there be consensus?
Perhaps curious readers could find out and publish the results on this blog.
Basic questions in behavior analysis could then be discussed in this forum.

Which would be a good - and indeed - a healthy and much-needed, activity.
Discussions took place in 1984; there they rest, in the professional literature.
27 years have elapsed!
Surely, the time has come for thorough revision.

I refer to:
Summing up
A Charles Catania
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1984) 7, 713-724;
a special issue in honour of B.F. Skinner's canonical papers

Never could I have followed arguments in this summary - had I not begun
to imagine what cumulative records might look like, should they reflect the
direction of locomotion and the rate of bar-pressing for one mobile rat.

And that would never have occurred to me had I not seen Philip Hineline's
question: Aversive control: A separate domain? And perused his paper in
The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1984, 42, 495-509

This really explains where my insights come from. And I wish to reiterate
I am no genius, have no delusions of grandeur; my intelligence is average
and so far as I know, my genes and my nerves are okay.
But it took me 27 years to put the points together into some sort of order.

Any credit for my sudden knowledge should go to scientists themselves.
I can take credit for other things but my hypothetical graphs are surely
the most extraordinary experience that ever happened to anyone!

What is the essence of behavior?
In 1984 that was the question; it is still not a simple question to answer.

July 27, 2012