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ABSTRACT: An exploration of where a comparison of Sartre and Skinner takes us in attempts to better understand the relationship between the two solitudes or disciplines of psychology: humanistic and scientific psychology. From the splitter's perspective, the Sartrean world appears as the particularly human world of choice; the Skinnerian world as the physical world ruled by necessity. From the lumper's perspective, there appear a number of frequently overlooked similarities between Sartre and Skinner. Taken individually, these similarities are admittedly superficial; but considered collectively they suggest that it is possible to deconstruct the dichotomy of Sartre and Skinner and of the two psychologies.
Why Sartre? Why Skinner?
Psychology's Two Constructions of Freedom
Some construe freedom as free will, others as something associated with the fortunate situation in which people can do what they really want to do. The two constructions split psychology into its two most fundamentally opposed camps on both the level of praxis and of theory (Williams, 1992). In the dichotomizing spirit of Cronbach (1957), one can think of these camps as the two disciplines of psychology. The first discipline is that of phenomenology-based psychology, recognizing and attributing a vital role to raw, undistorted, subjective human experience, including the experience of freedom in the sense of "free will" and "free choice." The second discipline is that of scientific psychology whose ontology is determinist. Since the construct freedom plays very different roles in humanistic and scientific psychology, a useful step in exploring the relationship between the two may be a comparison of the two most widely known and radical interpretations of freedom, those of Jean-Paul Sartre and B. F. Skinner.
Between the two extremes of absolute freedom and absolute determinism is the soft determinist or compatibilist stance that freedom is compatible with determinism. Some soft determinists think of compatibilist freedom as the Humean freedom experienced when circumstances permit us to do what we want to do (Hume, 1739-40/1888, pp. 399-412). On the issue of freedom they are plain determinists and agree with William James (1884/1968) who argued that soft determinism is a mugwump stance adopted by those who want to have their cake and eat it too.
Other soft determinists choose a more risky path: they use the term freedom in the sense...