Believing Behaviorism is Arrogance
No Man's Knowledge Here Can Go Beyond His Experience." / John Locke
All scholars prove their hypothesis and discover academic facts by their empirical research and discovery. Even in the case of proving philosophical truth by logic, the process of proving itself is one kind of empirical found. So, human's researching and understanding toward the world has no choice but to be narrow because there are some mysterious secrets which cannot be realized by human's experience such as absolute truth in philosophy. However, positivism says that a human can uncover all of the secrets about the world only by science and technology. For example, behaviorists in psychology stated that psychologists should except invisible and abstract things such as desire in their research to study the human's mind. However, Is it true? No, psychologists can't understand the human mind correctly only with one viewpoint – behavior.
Science is defined as a field that are composed of assured and universally empirical found which anyone can't refute. So to speak, science is 'universal' and based on 'experience'. Many psychologists argued that psychology should be a science. It's a right statement because the human mind has some universal pattern such as reinforcement and attachment , but it is different from others'. So it is essential to categorize psychology as a science to research the human's mind systemically. However, Many psychologists get their too high horse, saying that they can prove all secrets related to human's mind with high technology such fMRI in 21C. Furthermore, Richard Dawkins, a famous scientist, had confidence to conquer human's originality by science in his book, The Selfish Gene. On the other side, some innovative scholars realized that behaviorism that reflects this attitude the best in psychology cannot explain the human's mind. For example, these scholars refuted the behaviorists' opinion, saying that behaviorists see all human's psychological mechanism as compensate and reinforcement like animals. So, like them, I would try to refute the scholars who over-believe the power of behaviorism, suggesting the fatal error of positivism and actual case which shows that behaviorism is limited in the research of the human's mind.
There are many evidences that prove that behaviorism can't be the complete mechanism of the human mind solely. From now on, I will suggest many real examples in psychology and the limitation of positivism to support my idea.
First, behaviorism only focuses on 'what human does'. For example, behaviorists set certain situation to lead some response from the subjects and record what the subjects did. Skinner's box of reinforcement is the most representative case of this. Skinner only recorded the change in the monkey's behavior, giving different stimuli, and he stated that the change of behavior is caused by reinforcement. However, in psychology, it is more important to reveal how reinforcement caused the change of behavior and influenced the human mind. Behaviorism can't explain this process. It only can find the change of behavior.
Second, behaviorism depends on only empirical finding. Like behaviorism, positivism which focuses on visible evidence and the scientific method of research depends on empirical experience. Although positivism revealed many phenomen a around us objectively, The world is filled with things we can't experience such as the universe, the God and the quantum mechanics. As a result, positivism was replaced by round sight to overcome this problem. Sociologists began to consider religion which cannot be explained by science as an important element to explain the society and human. As behaviorism is categorized in positivism, it is possible to say that psychologists should replace behaviorism by cognitive-biological approach which focuses on not only visible behavior and physiological process, but also the abstract, cognitive information processing to research abstract and invisible things in our mind such as consciousness.
Third, behaviorism ignores basic diversity of the human mind. Psychologists pay attention to find the universal pattern of the human mind because they wanted to find persuasive theory which could be applied on all people's mind. However, behaviorism displays the humans mind in diagram form too much. For example, Chomsky's the theory of language acquisition which is a representative example of behaviorism generalized every person's process of learning language. In fact, people learn a language in various way. Also, behaviorism ignores human's case-by-case characteristic. In the same condition and stimuli, human's behavior and psychological mechanism can be different because of individual's characteristic and cognitive process. However, behaviorists try to apply same patterns about the human's mind to all people.
People who over-believe the power of behaviorism think that they can understand all secrets of the human mind with behaviorism completely because many mysterious secrets of the human mind are proved by behaviorism. In their opinion, 'the human mind' in psychology is only measurable human behavior because psychology is one kind of science and the human mind is the object of psychology - science. They consider the emotion, instinct and unconsciousness as the worthless things to research and except these things from their subject of researching. So, they argue that behaviorism can explain all of 'the human mind'. However, their topicality is wrong. According to Wilhelm Wundt, who was the pioneer of modern psychology, psychology is the field which study human's memory, emotion, desire, behavior, cognition, relationship and so on. Also, today's many psychologists study not only human's behavior, but also the mechanism of emotions. Even if their topicality is right, behaviorism still cannot explain all mechanisms about the human mind because behaviorism can only show that it is possible to manipulate human's behavior by giving different stimuli. It cannot explain how that behavior can be lead from human's brain fundamentally. So to speak, behaviorism can't reveal all secrets of the human mind in any case.
It is hard to deny that behaviorism helped psychologists to prove most of the secrets about human's behavior. For this reason, Tolman and Skinner have been considered as the great psychologists in the world. However, many psychologists are over-believing the power of behaviorism, stating that they can prove all secrets of the human mind with behaviorism. I think this attitude is scientists' arrogance. Actually, it is apparent that behaviorism cannot explain all mechanisms of the human mind because it only focuses on 'what human does', not 'how human's behaviors were lead', depends on empirical founding like positivism and ignores the diversity of human's characteristic and psychological feature. It is important to realize the limitation of behaviorism because there are many things which psychologists haven't proved yet. If psychologists continue to use only behaviorism, psychology cannot advance. As a result, it will be limited to research only about human's superficial behavior and its name will be replaced by 'behaviology'. The most important part of psychology is how certain psychological mechanism such as attachment, sexual desire and reinforcement can be lead. As these mechanisms are different to be explained only by science, psychologists should concentrate on another way such as instant hypnosis and neo-behaviorism. I wish to psychologists to admit the limitation of behaviorism and to try to develop other way to research invisible mechanism in our mind more effectively. Finishing this essay, I want to give one saying to psychologists.
I have just found shallfish in the ocean of truth. There are infinite truth we haven't found in the sea.
- Isaac Newton
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