Ciência e comportamento científico em ‘verbal behavior’ de B. F. Skinner: características e pressupostos

Abstract

This research focuses on the conceptions of Science and Scientific Behavior in B. F. Skinner’s book ‘Verbal Behavior’, aiming to analyze the consistency between the features and assumptions underlying these conceptions. The first step was to identify both descriptive and prescriptive uses of scientific statements in this book, whose topography may be misleading. The scientific features expressed in these statements were categorized across the categories of activities, aims and values, methodologies and methodological rules, and products. The analysis of these features reveals certain commitments that are rarely made explicit and are often merely presupposed. The main finding regarding Skinner’s conception of a scientific program is that it is frequently prescribed through statements that are topographically descriptive of the scientific community of the natural sciences, aligned with a physicalism modeled on the language and dimensions of physical science. These commitments reappear in formulations concerning scientific behavior, shaping a type of realism of physical events that proves inconsistent with the non-realist assumptions of the criterion of truth as effectiveness, which are also proposed in these formulations. Non-realism is also reflected in the postulation of prediction and control as scientific goals. However, the formulations on the internal relationship between behavior and the scientific community reveal implicit values behind these goals—values that are insufficient if taken as the sole elements of the axiology of a science of verbal behavior. Furthermore, this relationship highlights weaknesses in inductivist claims that locate the beginning of science in the mere description of behavior as it is crudely observed, or in the observation of single events. This is because the scientific community itself arranges the conditions under which observations are made, selects the stimulus properties to be isolated, and trains how environments are to be described. The inconsistency between certain commitments—whether in isolated statements or in the theory of scientific behavior—may stem from the lingering influence in Skinner’s thinking of assumptions acquired during his early training in physiological research, which were not revised in light of the development of an operant psychology increasingly grounded in a selectionist causal model.