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Critique of Behaviourism

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 27yrs • M •
lucasqueiroz is new to Captain Cynic and has less than 15 posts. New members have certain restrictions and must fill in CAPTCHAs to use various parts of the site.
Critique of Behaviourism
It is true that I prefer behaviourism to the freudian and cognitive psychologies and that I have read two of Skinner's books, but I do not agree with some behaviourists ideas and I am going to show why.

1)behaviourism can not determine weather a certain operant behaviour will be emitted or not.

It is true that behaviourists have ideas of their probabilities of emission, but they can not determine weather any of them will be emitted or not just observing their probability of emission, because observing the probability that a phenomenon will happen does not allow us to predict for certain weather a phenomenon will happen or not, unless he supposes the probability to be 0% or 100%, what behaviourists almost never do.
So when a behaviourists states that a certain operant behaviour will be emitted or not he is always making a bet, even if it is a good one(unless he does what almost never happens:state that the probability of this behaviour is either 0% or 100%).

2)behaviourism leaves some important variables unalysed
Even though the genetic of a being does influence it's behaviour it is left out of account on behaviourist's analises. Thus their analyses are not enough to account for behaviours by themselves, though they are very useful.

3)because behaviourism works with probabilities, it it somehow subjective

Probabilities are not objective and here is why: suppose you live in a planet "x" and collect statistics that indicate that 80% of all beings have hair while an allien collects statistics in a planet "y" that indicate that 90% of all beings have hair.

If probabilities were objective it would not be possible for those two people to arrive at different conclusions. It happens because probability depends on your past experience.

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Critique of Behaviourism
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