Abstract
This chapter will review the cultural evolution of the experimental and quantitative analysis of behavior. We review and apply behavioral stage theory because it makes an ideal means of accounting for the evolution of modern behavior analysis. Stage theory posits that, as individuals progress from lower stages to higher stages, their perception of the world becomes increasingly decentered (Inhelder and Piaget, 1958, Werner, 1940, 1957) from themselves. This process of decentering occurs in individual humans over a relatively short period of time if sufficient cultural contingencies are provided. The process begins at birth and tapers off in adulthood. The same process of decentration is at work over a much larger time frame, namely that of cultural evolution. We argue that if decentration progresses far enough, mentalistic notions of causes of behavior such as free will are replaced by non-mentalistic or more behavioral notions of cause. Thus, cultural evolution recapitulates individual development. We will trace how decentration was selected for, first historically in other fields, and how it results in the late 20th century with AI and neural nets.
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Commons, M.L., Goodheart, E.A. (1999). The Origins of Behaviorism. In: Thyer, B.A. (eds) The Philosophical Legacy of Behaviorism. Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9247-5_1
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