Radical behaviorism

Radical behaviorism, or the conceptual analysis of behavior, was pioneered by B. F. Skinner and is his "philosophy of the science of behavior." It refers to the philosophy behind behavior analysis, and is to be distinguished from methodological behaviorism—which has an intense emphasis on observable behaviors—by its inclusion of thoughts, emotions, and other internal mental activity in the analysis and theorizing of human and animal psychology. The research in behavior analysis is called the experimental analysis of behavior and the application of this field is called applied behavior analysis (ABA).

Radical behaviorism inherits from behaviorism the position that the science of behavior is a natural science, a belief that animal behavior can be studied profitably and compared with human behavior, a strong emphasis on the environment as cause of behavior, and an emphasis on the operations involved in the modification of behavior. Radical behaviorism does not claim that organisms are tabula rasa whose behavior is unaffected by biological or genetic endowment. Rather, it simply asserts that experiential factors play a major role in determining the behavior of many complex organisms, and that the study of these matters is a major field of research in its own right.

Radical behaviorism differs from methodological behaviorism largely by its extreme emphasis on operant conditioning, its use of idiosyncratic terminology (jargon), its tendency to apply notions of reinforcement to philosophy and daily life and, especially, in its treatment of private experience as modifiable behavior.

The most precise way to describe radical behaviorism as "radical" is to understand that instances such as evolution and cell division are occurrences that just happen. There is no 3rd party that assists in this transformation, they can however be explained by other naturally occurring events. They should not try to be explained through objects that are not tangible i.e. ghosts or inner entities. We therefore conclude that natural occurring events may be examined in relation to our past and present environments through the effect they have on human beings.

Although there are many criticisms of Skinner's work, many textbooks and theorists like Noam Chomsky label Skinnerian or radical behaviorism as S–R (stimulus–response, or to use Skinner's term, "respondent"), or Pavlovian psychology, and argue that this limits the approach. Although contemporary psychology rejects many of Skinner's conclusions, his work into operant conditioning which emphasizes the importance of consequences in modifying discriminative responses is useful when combined with current understandings about the uniqueness of evolved human thought over other animals.

...
Wikipedia