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- Title
BEHAVIORAL CAUSATION, CONTINUITY, AND NOVELTY.
- Authors
Tonneau, François
- Abstract
In the target article, Smith (2019) tackles the problem of "the first instance" from a purely selectionist standpoint. He first shows that, intuitions to the contrary notwithstanding, natural selection can explain the occurrence of one particular type of novelty: the occurrence of novel magnitudes in the distribution of a quantitative phenotypic character. Extending this reasoning to the behavioral domain, Smith proposes that behaviorism may solve the problem of behavioral novelty in terms of operant reinforcement, behavioral atoms, and continuous response properties. Contrary to Smith, I argue that operant selectionism fails as an account of behavioral novelty even in simple cases, that selectionism is more crippling than helpful to behavior analysis, and that behaviorism in no way depends on the assumption of fundamentally continuous response dimensions.
- Subjects
PROBLEM solving; BEHAVIORAL assessment; CONTINUITY; NATURAL selection; PHENOTYPES
- Publication
Behavior & Philosophy, 2020, Vol 48, p10
- ISSN
1053-8348
- Publication type
Article