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4 A Radical Behavioristic Reading of 4E Cognition and a 4E Cognition

5 Take on Radical Behaviorism:

6 The Return of Anti-Representationalism?

8 Andrés H. García-Penagos

9 Delta State University

10

11 Portions of this paper were presented as a paper at the 40th Annual Convention of the

12 Association for Behavior Analysis International; Chicago, IL; 2014.

13 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Andrés García-Penagos,

14 Division of Counselor Education & Psychology, Delta State University, 438 Ewing Hall, Cleveland,

15 MS, 38733. email: agarciapenagos@gmail.com

16
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17 4E Cognition and Radical Behaviorism:

18 The Return of Anti-Representationalism?

19 The customary introduction of almost every psychology book or chapter generally

20 includes a line or two denouncing the ills of behaviorism, with its (supposed) rejection of

21 mental events on grounds of their unobservability, and its (also supposed) extreme tabula-rasa

22 environmentalism generally evidenced in the usual half-quote from Watson (which is no doubts

23 the whole extent of Watson’s work that most people have actually read), with the concluding

24 remark on how Chomsky’s scathing review of Verbal Behavior was the final blow that brought to

25 an end the decades of dire behaviorism supremacy. Behaviorism, it would seem, has been

26 relegated, to what Alfred Hitchcock called a “MacGuffin,” a narrative device whose only role is to

27 give meaning to the actions of the protagonist, but that is ultimately irrelevant.

28 Straw man attacks on radical behaviorism have, of course, been noted and criticized by

29 a number of behaviorists from the very beginning (e.g., Skinner, 1974), with little success, I

30 must add, but it is also arguably true that little attention has been devoted by radical

31 behaviorists to counter the charges of irrelevance (but cf. Rachlin, 2014), probably as a result of

32 the increasing isolationism of our field from mainstream psychology.

33 Several reasons can be offered regarding this paucity. First, the prevalence of prediction

34 and control as the goals of behavioral science (related to some extent to the emphasis on

35 effective action as a truth criterion) has given modern behaviorism a heavily technological

36 emphasis, which is epitomized in the accelerated growth of applied behavior analysis and its

37 evident separation from the experimental analysis of behavior (calls for translational
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38 approaches notwithstanding), anchored in its tremendous success in the treatment of

39 behavioral deficits and conduct problems, typically in populations diagnosed with intellectual

40 disabilities or autism spectrum disorders. Accordingly, areas of psychology where behavioral

41 change is not the main concern (e.g., the study of memory or perception) are relatively

42 understudied. Second, ever since Skinner, whenever radical behaviorism has dealt with these

43 other topics it has limited itself to a sort of hermeneutical analysis, typically in the guise of

44 translations to “behaviorese,” with the traditional emphasis on the three-term contingency.

45 As is true, however, of the history of psychological thought, ideas long considered

46 outdated or dead tend to return under new guises. Interestingly, in the last twenty years or so

47 several “novel” approaches has inadvertently taken some of the old behaviorist flags in the old

48 debate between ‘direct’ and ‘mediational’ or ‘representational’ approaches to the

49 understanding of the mind. Any reader with some knowledge about radical behaviorism as a

50 philosophy of mind will discover herself experiencing a déjà vu when reading some of the ideas

51 advanced by these approaches. This motley crew of approaches has generally used a number of

52 adjectives to describe their approach to mental life and mental terms: Embodied, Extended,

53 Embedded (situated), or Enacted, to mention but a few. These E-approaches have proliferated

54 as arguably the main alternative to mainstream cognitive science, and have generated large

55 enthusiasm in many separate fields, as represented in the publication of new books, renewed

56 research, and the creation of many conferences devoted to these issues. But, is this a mere fad,

57 doomed to oblivion as many of its predecessors? Is it just a rehash of radical behaviorist ideas?

58 Or are they really compatible with the ontology and epistemology of radical behaviorism?
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59 In this paper I will attempt to briefly characterize 4E Cognition approaches historically

60 and in terms of their philosophical and conceptual antecedents, to provide a sketch of critical

61 reading of it from a contemporary behavioristic approach, emphasizing similarities and

62 differences. In the final part I will elaborate briefly on the meaning of the rise of the 4E

63 cognition approaches for radical behaviorism as a philosophy of mind, and its survival.

64 In any case, as the ever-immature discipline that is psychology also changes as a

65 function of its own selection pressures, it is always an interesting exercise to explore the sort of

66 Quo Vadis of our fragmentary discipline in the context of the developing history of psychology,

67 a history that at least in the last century has been “almost entirely a series of awful mistakes”

68 (Malone & Perry, 2008, p. 247). The mainstream psychology of today is as ambivalent as usual

69 in its commitment to empirical science, permanently attracted to reduction to the biological

70 sciences on the one hand, and to the social sciences and the humanities by the other, busy

71 presenting solutions to problems that haven’t even arisen or that don’t even exist,

72 grandiloquent in boasting about its few merits, and still dependent on the epiphany of mythical

73 Great Men and Women.

74 III. What Does “Thriving” Mean? Does Repeating Bad = Good?

75 This negative statement of the status of psychology as a science, and its history, runs

76 counter to the mainstream view that psychology is thriving, as measured by the number of

77 journals in a variety of topics, the number of published articles, of popular science books, and

78 increases in membership to APA or APS. The suspicious reader will have noticed that similar

79 arguments are of course made about the success of behavior analysis. I want to argue to the
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80 contrary, in both cases, but my assessment is hopefully not completely pessimistic: maybe as

81 Marr (2001) has suggested, behaviorism can still survive and even triumph, although it might

82 lose its name in the process.

83 IV. The History of Psychology: Latest Trends

84 As Malone has argued many times (e.g., 2010), psychology suffers from amnesia.

85 Consequently, it tends to discover “things” known long before. This can be attributed to at least

86 two factors. The most obvious is the proverbial Santayanan sentence of ignoring our history.

87 The second is less familiar, but probably as influential: advertisement. The so-called hard

88 sciences have always been the platonic idea for psychology, and one fundamental reason for

89 their success no doubt lies in their ability to discover new facts, to alter our very notions of

90 reality, to furnish our knowledge and influence about the universe. Discoveries, however, are

91 hard to come in psychology. Can you think of one in, say, the last ten years? Hence, it seems

92 convenient to disguise old knowledge under new clothes so as to increase our respectability.

93 Skinner was probably quite aware of this problem, “physics-envy” he called it, and accordingly

94 modeled his own model of science in another one as successful, but certainly less dependent

95 on discovery – the Darwinian theory of natural selection – and more on what we might call “re-

96 interpretation.”

97 V. Everything Is New Again

98 Examples of pseudo-discoveries abound (cf. Malone, 2009): the idea of representation,

99 as central as it is to modern mainstream psychology has deep roots in the thinking of Plato and

100 others before him, and was not alien to the British associationists. The recent emphasis on
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101 unconscious processing and priming would hardly surprise William James and Sigmund Freud.

102 The Piagetian notions of assimilation and accommodation were first in the work of Gottfried

103 Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and finally Johan Friedrich Herbart a century before. The

104 Freudian unconscious is also in the list of things that Plato said before, and if we are to believe

105 Kantor, every good idea in psychology can be traced back to Aristotle (even if we have to

106 overlook some of his bad ideas). So, in psychology as in many other areas of inquiry, “there is

107 nothing new under the sun,” although a more optimistic view might suggest that the advance of

108 psychology might resemble a Piagetian spiral: we go in circles, true, revisiting old places, but

109 every time we visit them is different as we do it from the standpoint of the knowledge that was

110 acquired in between. The real problem is, however, that science is not only accumulation of

111 knowledge but also the disposal of obsolete knowledge. This is the part that we are not doing

112 too well, and psychology accordingly regresses often to old and pointless debates that should

113 have been left behind long ago. So here we are in 2020, discussing once again the mind/body

114 distinction, and this time one of the contenders is a relatively new hybrid.

115 VI. Embodied/Situated/Extended Cognition Returns

116 The newest trend in psychology actually has more than one face. As a result it is hard to

117 identify characteristics that are common to all, and hence it might be better to talk of this “new”

118 psychology in the Wittgensteinian terms of “family resemblance.” This family has a common last

119 name –cognition– and the siblings have the names of “extended,” “situated,” “embodied,”

120 “embedded,” “distributed,” and “enactive.” As the common last name suggests, one

121 commonality is in its subject matter, the group of behavioral phenomena that we have
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122 historically called “mind.” They are also called “post-cognitive” as they all represent a variant or

123 an alternative to the mainstream cognitive approach in psychology, ranging from mere

124 dissatisfaction to radical rejection of the mainstream tenets and assumptions.

125 The rise of 4E cognition approaches has, interestingly, many parallels with the rise of

126 behaviorism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Both movements have appeared as

127 carriers of revolution against a hegemonic cognitivism that remains relatively unchanged, even

128 if it was originally described in chemical terms rather than in the information processing terms

129 of today. And both movements have attacked it for somewhat similar reasons: charges of

130 conceptual confusion, and limited progress, experimental and applied. And just like

131 behaviorism, 4E cognition agglutinates a wide variety of different approaches and perspectives

132 with large epistemological and ontological differences, some suggesting mere revisions to

133 mainstream cognitivism to those suggesting complete abandonment.

134 Like the many behaviorisms of the first half of the twentieth century, the different

135 approaches collectively called 4E cognition bear at best a family resemblance, as I said above.

136 Because of this, a fair and coherent characterization of their concepts, models, and research is

137 almost impossible, so I will limit myself to briefly sketch key aspects of some of these

138 approaches, particularly those that have received most attention.

139 The term 4E Cognition was, apparently, coined by philosopher Shaun Gallagher

140 (Rowlands, 2010) to group and characterize a number of new approaches to cognition that

141 started appearing in the cognitive science literature particularly after the 1990s, and that to
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142 some extent seemed to have in common a criticism to contemporary, mainstream cognitive

143 science of the information-processing type: Embodied, Extended, Embedded (or situated), and

144 Just as the many behaviorisms of the first half of the 20th century (including among

145 many others those of Watson, Weiss, Holt, Hull, Tolman, Kantor, Hebb) have traditionally been

146 categorized into two broad groups in regard to their commitment to some fundamental aspects

147 of the thesis of the mind as behavior, namely, radical and methodological behaviorism, a

148 parallel distinction has been proposed in 4E cognition into “weak” or “mild” and “strong” or

149 “radical” approaches (e.g., Alsmith & Vignemont, 2012; Goldinger et al., 2016), in regard to

150 their commitment to antirepresentationalism.

151 These approaches are also, and relatedly, critical of the Cartesian tradition and its

152 reductionistic emphasis in the brain as the “seat of the mind.” On the positive side, these

153 approaches tend to accept to a lesser or larger extent one or more of the following three

154 assumptions (Robbins & Aydede, 2008; see also Gomila & Calvo, 2008): (a) that cognition

155 depends not only on the brain, but also on the body (an embodied mind), (b) that to understand

156 cognition it is fundamental to understand the environment in which it occurs and how cognition

157 and environment transact with each other (an embedded mind), and (c) that the boundaries of

158 cognition extend beyond the boundaries of individual organisms, such that cognition

159 encompasses features of the environment (an extended mind).

160 VII. An Outside Job: Once Again From Philosophy

161 In common with other trends that anteceded it, the new cognitive science that is 4E

162 cognition has received a heavy influence from the outside, particularly from the
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163 phenomenological tradition in philosophy as represented in the works of the infamous Martin

164 Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but also some more subtle influences from the

165 pragmatism of John Dewey, and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. More directly and

166 recently, the work of philosophers Andy Clark, Shaun Gallagher, Mark Rowlands, Evan

167 Thompson, Alva Noë, and many others have proved influential. The work of Humberto Maturana

168 and Francisco Varela has also been represented in this area.

169 Also, in common with other trends of the past, the new cognitive science parallels and

170 borrows from the technological advances in society. Just like Freudian psychoanalysis based its

171 understanding of “defense mechanisms” in the steam engine, or like the cognitive psychology

172 understood the mind as a computer, or the connectionist approach understood it as a computer

173 network, the embodied-situated-embedded-extended-enacted camp has been in general

174 fascinated with the proliferation of gadgets and the increased influence of technology in our

175 lives that has intensified during the last two decades. Related to this, the fields of artificial

176 intelligence and mobile robotics have also been fundamental for its development. Within

177 psychology, the most direct antecedents are James Gibson’s ecological psychology, and Ester

178 Thelen’s dynamical systems theory.

179 As a further sample of psychology’s amnesia, apparently unknown to most of the

180 authors in the field are other authors who proposed similar theses long time ago. Outstanding

181 among them are Alexander Bain, William James, and a further one that is so unlikely that the

182 new cognitive science will probably try to hide, John B. Watson. Bain, for instance, emphasized

183 the active role of organisms rather than the passive of traditional cognitive psychology. He was
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184 also the proponent of the “law of diffusion” according to which stimulation affects the activity of

185 the whole body. In the case of Watson, his analysis of language and thinking closely parallels

186 common arguments and research in embodied cognition (Malone & García-Penagos, 2014).

187 Take this sentence, for example:

188 Like everything that we do thinking is done with the whole body… If he is mutilated or if

189 his organs are defective or lacking, he thinks with the remaining parts left in his care…

190 thinking, whatever its type, is an integrated bodily process (Watson, 1920, pp. 87, 91).

191 VIII. Another Pseudo-Revolution?

192 The previous cognitive revolution was a sham, as Leahey (1992) has made clear. The

193 new cognitive science has even been called, in turn, a “new cognitive revolution,” and has been

194 busy in application for the last couple of decades, even if it is as fragmented as psychology

195 itself. Gomila and Calvo (2008) describe applications in the areas of neuroscience, artificial

196 intelligence and evolutionary robotics, cognitive anthropology, motor control and learning and

197 social psychology.

198 This fragmentary nature of these seemingly related fields might indicate that despite its

199 increase in popularity and some very interesting results, the new cognitive science still has to

200 reach paradigmatic status. As Chemero (2009) has pointed out, despite the de-emphasis in the

201 brain, some of the versions of this new cognitive science are merely extensions of the

202 traditional paradigm. They certainly emphasize what Hilary Putnam has called the “threefold

203 cord of mind, body and world,” with still unclear notions of how the first and the second are

204 different. According to Chemero (2009), the reason for this divided status in the new cognitive
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205 science lies in the centrality that the different versions confer to the concept of representations.

206 This notion, as is well known, has been fundamental for the computational cognitive

207 psychology of the last fifty or so years. Furthermore, as Malone has emphasized in many places

208 (e.g., Malone, 2009), computational representation is only the latest incarnation of an idea that

209 probably originated in the thinking of the Pythagoreans and that was later expanded by Plato,

210 and that entered modern thinking by way of Descartes. Representationalism and anti-

211 representationalism are the two psychologies, the low road of mentalism, and the high road of

212 (American) naturalism, of which radical behaviorism is a variety, maybe the most structured and

213 logically coherent.

214 IX. REPRESENTATIONS ARE THE CULPRITS – AND STILL INVOLVED!

215 The role of representation is then no minor issue, as it underlies unbreachable

216 epistemological and even ontological disagreements making the positions simply incompatible

217 and mutually unintelligible. Moreover, in our opinion, and certainly that of Skinner,

218 representationalism is one of the culprits of the stagnation of psychology, as it provides a false

219 sense of understanding when often it is nothing but an instance of naming. The fact that the

220 new cognitive science still speaks of brain and body instead of whole organisms suggests that

221 the bonds with traditional cognitive psychology are not completely cut and further risk an

222 interpretation of embodiment as just another “way station” between the internal mind and the

223 external world.

224 So, the new cognitive science shows us at least two faces as the Janus of the Greek

225 myth. On the one hand, we have one approach to “mind” that is encouragingly similar to ours:
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226 One that emphasizes the whole organism rather than engaging in the mereological fallacies

227 that can be traced to Descartes’ view of the pineal gland, and that also counters modularism;

228 one that emphasizes the inseparability of an active organism and a rich environment; one that

229 is historical and ever changing. On the other hand, there is the approach that insists that mind

230 is computation, and symbol manipulation, the one that insists that the mind is still in the head,

231 the one that cannot conceive it as rejecting representation, one where the body and the world

232 are infused sort of magically with a mind that sounds as fluid as the animal spirits of Descartes.

233 This is no small debate, and unfortunately radical behaviorism insists in remaining outside.

234 X. RADICAL BEHAVIORISM AND E/S/E COGNITION: WE IGNORE ONCE AGAIN?

235 So, what has the recent trend on embodied, situated cognition to say about radical

236 behaviorism and the analysis of behavior? And what has the analysis of behavior to say about

237 the new cognitive science? Radical behaviorism has traditionally had a particular stance

238 regarding trendy topics in psychology. Skinner was not particularly fond of psychology, and

239 never discussed much about “the rest of psychology,” with the sole exception of the old

240 psychology of learning. His major influences, as is well known, include a philosopher and

241 scientist from scientific revolution (Francis Bacon), and a contemporary hedonist philosopher

242 (Thomas Hobbes), an Austrian physicist interested in the philosophy of science (Ernst Mach), a

243 German physiologist interested in tropisms (Jacques Loeb), and maybe Bertrand Russell. It

244 almost seems like the fact that no psychologist in the list of influences was deliberate.

245 Regardless of the reasons, the analysis of behavior inherited from its famous founder a certain

246 disdain for mainstream psychology (quite understandably), that translated unfortunately into a
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247 lack of dialogue. This also probably had to do with Skinner’s emphasis on induction, with the

248 consequence of a decreased emphasis on the comparison and confrontation of hypotheses. A la

249 Darwin, it seems like Skinner felt that debate was pointless, and that the rest of psychology

250 would eventually be convinced that his psychology was superior in its simplicity and elegance, a

251 simple process lying at the root of most important human phenomena: selection by

252 consequences.

253 This anti-controversy strategy is, of course, somewhat paradoxical, as it relegated the

254 analysis of behavior to the role of the student who knows the answer to a professor’s question

255 but remains silent as her classmates give wrong answers. As the poor professor leaves the

256 classroom obviously devastated one can only wonder, what has the student gained with her

257 silence? The attitude of our field with respect to the ever-changing but similar trends in

258 mainstream psychology has, in our opinion, a lot in common. Whatever good insights they

259 provide we argue we knew all along. Whatever incompatible points they present, we just sweep

260 under the rug. At best, we congratulate them on being close to the truth, and we express our

261 sympathy for them not being behavioral enough, or not precise enough in their use of the term

262 “reinforcement.” If they inquire about our alternative, we offer them “just-so” interpretations

263 that necessarily involve the idea that “there must have been some reinforcement, at some

264 point.”

265 Now, we are not arguing that the analysis of behavior should not be skeptical of these

266 so-called “advances” in psychology. Don’t forget Sturgeon’s law! What we are saying is that for

267 a science that tries to study adaptive behavior, we are not very adaptable ourselves. Probably,
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268 Skinner’s most famous quote is this one, taken from Walden Two (an actually atrocious book):

269 “Regard no practice as immutable. Change and be ready to change again. Accept no eternal

270 verity. Experiment.” Need we say that this doesn’t seem to describe our modern science very

271 well? Remember, just to provide a simple example, the schism that occurred recently in our

272 discipline with the creation of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, as relational

273 frame theory (RFT) was dismissed as not behaviorist enough by our local orthodoxy police. How

274 unfortunate! Despite whatever limitations it might have, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

275 (ACT ) put behaviorism back in the map of current psychology.

276 No surprise radical behaviorism tends to lack allies. In occasions it seems like we

277 actually want to shoo them away. As Malone (2010) has argued before, and to provide just an

278 example of this attitude, take Daryl Bem’s social perception theory, an approach to social

279 cognition that is truly rooted in radical behaviorism, and which has been not only incredibly

280 influential in social psychology as a major alternative account of the phenomena of cognitive

281 dissonance, but which also has very interesting implications for the analysis of feelings and

282 emotions (Laird, 2007). Of it, Skinner wrote in his Notebooks that “he didn’t see the

283 connection.”

284 Further proof of behaviorism’s isolationistic policy lies in the calls of the last decade to

285 cut the few links we have to psychology already, and start calling our “science” by the even

286 worse names of “behaviorology” or “praxics,” –as if “behavior analysis” wasn’t bad enough! This

287 is, we believe, a function of the anti-controversial style that we mentioned above, and also of
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288 the complicated jargon, and methodological rigidity that characterizes our research and

289 theorizing.

290 We seem to be happy believing that we are a sort of Cerberus, with one head

291 representing the experimental analysis of behavior, the second representing the conceptual

292 analysis of behavior, and the third one representing applied behavior analysis. The metaphor

293 might not be working as well, however: our Cerberus is growing disproportionately, a result of

294 course of the selection pressures of academic contingencies, with the conceptual and

295 experimental heads decreasing in size, likely to become vestigial organs in the future. Many

296 (e.g., Hayes, 2001; Marr, 2001) have noticed that our tricephalic discipline might be guilty of its

297 own demise, beyond the obvious reasons of lack of economic funding, and the particular

298 orthodoxy that prevents us from doing the “trendy” research that is so popular in mainstream

299 psychology, and which in its current incarnation is best represented in beautifully colored brain

300 pictures.

301 Notions of progress in science are of course a matter of heated debate. Imre Lakatos

302 famously argued that for a research program to be progressive means not only an improved

303 understanding of the problems a science deals with, but particularly that the research program

304 can be expanded to deal with a larger number of problems or to cover new phenomena.

305 Progressive fields ask new questions! A fast look to the trends in publications in both JEAB and

306 JABA will easily show that is not the case with our discipline, and hasn’t been in decades. For all

307 our talk on prediction and control as the aims of the science of behavior, the analysis of
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308 behavior has downplayed prediction and in some cases has even discouraged it, as is evident in

309 some recent criticisms of the quantitative approach (cf. Moore).

310 We emphasize that this grim outlook might not be true of the whole field of behavior

311 analysis. Applied behavior analysis shows signs of progress, at least as related to the number of

312 fields in which it is making a difference, and we see the push away from the treatment of

313 autism spectrum disorders (cf. Normand & Kohn, 2013) into diverse applied fields, like I/O

314 psychology, substance addiction, and college-level instruction among other fields as a positive

315 sign of the vitality of the area. It is not surprising, then, that the other two heads of Cerberos

316 have started to cling to it to increase their chances of survival, even if under the cliché of

317 another of psychology’s buzz words: “translational research.” (And even in this area, it seems

318 that the experimental analysis of behavior is lagging behind, and knowledge from other areas

319 of psychology might end up being more translatable for applied purposes, e.g., developmental

320 research, or research in behavioral economics).

321 Many in our field have essentially acquiesced to this situation, in the light of cuts in

322 funding, increased limitations and requirements for animal research, and a generational shift

323 that has not been kind on us. The idea that behaviorism will survive in educational departments

324 and go extinct in experimental psychology is far from outrageous. As Lakatos has noticed, it is

325 common for degenerating research programs to survive, at least for a while. In his view,

326 scientists tend to hope that their degenerating research programs might recover eventually.

327 But, is it reasonable to expect that the diminishing heads of conceptual and experimental

328 analysis of behavior will start growing again? Behavioral pharmacology has adapted by relying
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329 on multidisciplinary efforts which is a fantastic idea, although it has always been

330 multidisciplinary by nature. The rest of the experimental analysis of behavior, however, does

331 not seem to be in the same way.

332 XI. DROP THE OPERANT/REINFORCEMENT JARGON [w/o substituting something goofy]

333 Not only that: trends like radical embodied cognitive science (Chemero, 2008), and

334 previous ones like Gibson’s ecological psychology, although not exactly orthodox by traditional

335 behaviorist theorizing or methods, share the same set of epistemological assumptions with us,

336 they share for the most part our primary core of assumptions: (a) a rejection of dualisms, (b) an

337 emphasis on dynamics, not statics, (c) a rejection of mediators, (d) an inclusion of private

338 experience, (e) a notion of “mental” that is defined as temporal extension (Malone & Perry,

339 2008), and (f) a functional definition of terms. As Malone & Perry note (2008; see also, Branch,

340 1987), traditional operant conditioning terms have no special status, and behaviorism does not

341 require talk of reinforcement.

342 It is still early to judge whether these approaches will be successful in the long turn, but

343 one thing seems to be certain. Whereas the new cognitive science is slowly but certainly casting

344 doubt on the epistemological, conceptual, and methodological foundations of the solipsistic

345 and dualist cognitive psychology that has been mainstream for at least the last six decades, and

346 is the matter of heated and necessary debate that might indeed change the face of the

347 psychology of the coming decades, radical behaviorism has been busy navel-gazing.

348 Furthermore, in moving away from “intracranialism” and approaching enactivism, these

349 approaches seem to be making progress in a way that is not fundamentally incongruent with
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350 the core epistemological and ontological assumptions and tenets that are at the root of radical

351 behaviorism. Compare if you will, the relative influence of Skinner’s approach to perception to

352 that of O’Regan and Noe which is to a large extent compatible with our epistemological tenets,

353 and you will notice how much we have lost by trying to fit every phenomenon to a three-term

354 contingency analysis.

355 In addition, the E-approaches have re-established a long-lost link between cognition

356 and our understanding and knowledge of evolutionary biology, by putting the organism and its

357 environment at the forefront as a subject matter, instead of the isolated mind of folk

358 psychology. A wonderful example of this attitude can be seen in the recent development of

359 research traditions like Niche Construction Theory that emphasize the activity of organisms in

360 modifying the environment which in turns increases their chances of survival and reproduction.

361 As Killeen & Glenberg (2010) put it: “Now that the study of embodied cognition in humans is

362 resituating cognitive science on a more behavioral path, it is time to reforge the bonds between

363 behavioral analysis of human and non-human complex repertories, making the study of

364 cognition truly comparative” (p. 74). Recent emphasis in the situated cognition camp on “social

365 affordances” has even linked the biological sciences to the social sciences, skipping us in

366 between with little effort.

367 This does not mean that aspects and assumptions of the eclectic collection of

368 approaches that is the new cognitive science should not be carefully scrutinized, criticized, or

369 denounced. Their appearance in the scene of modern psychology, having so many basic

370 commonalities with our own views, is a welcome change that suggests that behaviorism might
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371 still survive even if under a different name. It is also a reminder that the self-satisfied and

372 isolationistic attitude we have about our tricephalic field is leading us to our own timely demise.

373 [and about time]

374 As Larry Laudan, another philosopher of science, has put it, theories do not just

375 disappear as new research traditions come to take the place of a previous one, but rather they

376 are absorbed or taken over by the alternatives. Indeed, what we identify as behaviorism has

377 survived through the centuries despite the opposition of a giant and powerful nemesis,

378 represented in mystical accounts of experience, later replaced by essentialistic religious

379 tradition. We shouldn’t be dismayed by this demise, although those in my generation might

380 scratch our heads when facing the prospect of the life after graduation. That is, by necessity the

381 fate of scientific theories, at least if one understands them not as “God’s eye” views of eternal

382 truths but as instrumental in our understanding of the world. We want to believe, however, that

383 before our current radical behaviorism is left to the often horrendous misrepresentations in

384 psychology textbooks, it should make a last stand, or a number of them. To correct

385 misrepresentation, to debate, to pass the torch, to correct the historical errors that threaten to

386 condemn the new cognitive psychology to be a mere extension of its flawed predecessor.

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