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ABSTRACT: For radical behaviorists, talk about "private events" could be about any of four things: (a) private behavioral events, (b) physiology, (c) dispositions, or (d) explanatory fictions. Talk about private events as behavioral engages the influence of feelings, sensations, and covert operant behavior. Analyses based on private behavioral events allow radical behaviorists to understand how those events contribute to contingencies controlling subsequent operant behavior, whether verbal or nonverbal. Talk about private events in physiological terms risks confounding explanatory categories. Although physiology necessarily participates in behavioral events, physiological events are not the same type as behavioral events, public or private. Rather, an organism's physiology is a material cause. To portray physiology as an autonomous, initiating cause, as traditional psychology often does, creates a variety of explanatory problems. Talk about private events as dispositions does not reflect anything literally private. Rather, dispositional talk reflects the probability of behavior engendered by contingencies. Dispositional talk is about effects, instead of causes or intervening variables as traditional psychology often portrays them. Finally, some talk ostensibly about private events is little more than an appeal to explanatory fictions. This talk, common in traditional psychology, owes its strength to the everyday social reinforcement inherent in "folk psychology." The talk represents a surrender to mentalism and methodological behaviorism, notwithstanding any claims that it is "theoretical."
Key words: dispositions, explanatory fictions, mentalism, methodological behaviorism, neuroscience, private behavioral events
Introduction
Structurally, private events are held to be inside the skin in some sense and accessible to only one person. Functionally, private events are held to be causally related to subsequent behavior. However, different theoretical positions in psychology hold correspondingly different positions with respect to both structural issues - the dimensions of private events, and functional issues - and the nature of their causal relation to subsequent behavior.
A brief review of representative viewpoints in the history of psychology illustrates that concern about private events is longstanding. For example, in the late nineteenth century, such nascent viewpoints in psychology as Wundt's voluntarism, Titchener's structuralism, and American functionalism struggled heroically to distinguish themselves from philosophy and physiology and to become sciences in their own right. In keeping with the social-cultural assumptions of the time, these viewpoints assumed that the phenomena of mental life were the...