Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies

Behaviorism

72 Behaviorism Skinner’s conception of science is very odd. —Noam Chomsky T raditional dog training is anecdotal. Bill Koehler believed dog behavior was profoundly ethical, and Vicki Hearne elaborated on Koehler’s theory, but most traditional trainers are simple prag­ matists, and success with a difficult dog trumps epistemology every time. To date, e­collar trainers are pretheoretical: no thinker has explained how the new variable­intensity e­collar helps a dog learn. The traditional pet training curriculum wasn’t formalized until the eve of World War II, and expanded in postwar suburbs where veterans wanted a wife, a house, two children, a Chevy, and a family dog—preferably a purebred dog. Most prominent dog trainers, like Koehler, got their experi­ ence training war dogs—big, powerful “manstoppers”—and except for women competing in AKC obedience trials, most trainers were men. Two years after the AKC started its obedience trials, eight years before Blanche Saunders published her first training book, and eighteen years be­ fore Bill Koehler published his, B. F. Skinner’s The Behavior of Organisms was rocking psychology departments. Skinner didn’t find “behaviorism” under a cabbage leaf. Its reductionist, skeptical epistemology (theory of knowledge) was British empiricism taken to its radical extreme. I studied philosophy at Montana State University with Dr. Cynthia Schuster, a tall, brilliant empiricist who’d studied with Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, logical positivists who insisted that what wasn’t observable and quantifiable was illusory. Positivists dismissed the philoso­ phers’ “substance” as well as the theologians’ “soul” and “God” and con­ signed “ethics,” “metaphysics,” “emotions,” and “instinctual” behaviors to the intellectual rubbish heap. Behaviorism 73 No, they were not kidding: When Hans Reichenbach published an ar­ ticle denying ethics were knowledge, a colleague stormed into his seminar. “Hans, you cannot mean this! Look. In 1933 when Hitler dismissed you from the University of Berlin, you knew that he was wrong and you knew that you were right. So how can you pretend this stuff about no knowledge in ethics?” Reichenbach replied, “What you do not understand is that I do believe what I have said. I did not like Hitler’s aims. He did not like mine. He had power. Fortunately I was able to get out and come to a place where people’s desires and aims were more like mine. But I do not see how I could claim to know that Hitler was wrong and I was right. Such claims to knowledge do not stand up to the criteria by which I define knowledge.” In the 1890s, Ivan Pavlov removed dogs’ salivary glands to quantify their saliva production and proved scientifically that dogs salivated not only when food appeared but at a ringing bell associated with previous meals. For this cruel proof of what any beginning dog trainer could have told him, Pavlov won the Nobel Prize. John Watson popularized Pavlov’s theories in the US: Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behavior­ ist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. Nineteenth­century psychology was the philosophy of mind—think William James. The behaviorists had “physics envy,” abjuring those fuzzy philosophical theories and aspiring to be a hard science. They quit publish­ ing in philosophical journals and founded their own damn journals. Wat­ son’s refusal to recognize a dividing line between man and animal sparked a bonanza of animal experimentation that would, behaviorists believed, produce a verifiable science of human behavior. They were anti­Darwinians. In the nature/nurture debate behavior­ ists came down foursquare for nurture: all behaviors were created and all 74 mr. and mrs. dog behaviors were equal. Complex behaviors could be shaped from simpler ones, properly reinforced. Exporting their theories of learning to human subjects didn’t work well. Watson’s film of Little Albert, a “fear conditioned” eleven­month­old in­ fant, was more distressing than convincing, and subsequent attempts by Watson to demonstrate human conditioning persuaded no one. Watson’s theories were becoming curiosa when B. F. Skinner revivified and radicalized them. B. F. Skinner was a...