Skinner’s Reinforcement Theory: a Heideggerian Assessment of Its Empirical Success and Philosophical Failure

Affinities have been noted between radical behaviorism and phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism, but this paper claims the most promising one has been neglected. Skinner’s behaviorism is best seen as elucidating that time-sense characteristic of ordinary, habitual life which Heidegger calls a “temporalizing of everydayness.” We usually live ‘from moment to moment’ as if we were just as predictable as the things around us, but Heidegger and Skinner agree there are moments when noticing this makes ‘more of the same’ seem unacceptable. Yet in Skinner’s deterministic ontology such occasions are only envisioned via the anomaly of “self-management.” With Heidegger, behaviorism can be the science of ordinary life, yet leave room for that real but ill-conceived ‘volition’ which Skinner rightly criticizes but wrongly rejects. Thirty years ago, Kvale and Grenness (1967) eloquently demonstrated that radical behaviorism and phenomenology (especially Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s) are philosophically similar insofar as both reject the need for positing an “inner person” to understand human activity. Kinships between radical behaviorism and Continental philosophy have also been noted more recently, but comparisons now are usually framed in relation to “hermeneutics” (e.g., Packer, 1985; Miller, 1994) and “poststructuralism” (Freeman & Locurto, 1994). What all these discussions tend to overlook, however, is the fact that Skinner’s work (but not his own characterization of it) clearly illustrates the kind of time-sense which is characteristic of ordinary, routine life—a time-sense Heidegger calls the “temporalizing of everydayness” (1927, pp. 370-372, 404-420). This oversight represents a missed opportunity to sharpen our understanding of the phenomenological or Continental-philosophical implications of Skinner’s actual science of human behavior and to play down his own misleading “behaviorist”