PHL 333 Study Guide - Final Guide: Natural History, Scientific Method, 600 Miles
15 Oct 2018
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From "On Human Nature"
• Our culture is passed on to us by those who manipulate the stimuli, enforce the
punishments, and bestow the rewards required to elicit the responses that they
desire
o The results of this manipulation are a set of internal conditioned reflexes,
or learned habits, which link the environment with appropriate behaviour
o Just as we condition (train) animals to behave in certain ways when we
give them certain commands, we condition (teach) humans to behave in
ways that society find desirable
o According to this view of behaviour , what we are born with , our innate
tendencies and powers, determines very little of our behaviour
o Beyond our reflexes , our senses, and other biological equipment, such as
the mechanisms of respiration and circulation, we have no innate
tendencies
o Instead, we are born as what John Locke called a tabula rasa, or "blank
state."
o It is upon the blank state that the natural and social environments write to
make us what we are
o Everything that we do is caused by the forces within these environments
that create through conditioning of one sort or another the very types of
persons that we are
o Watson went so far as to claim that if he had control of a child from infancy
onward, he could shape its behaviour in any way he decided to
o He could create a doctor, lawyer , criminal, good man or evil mad--- just
because he could control the environmental causes that make the man
• Skinner went on to develop behaviourism in much greater detail than had his
predecessors
o Under his direction, not only did behaviourism become an extremely
successful approach to the study of animal behaviour, it also became the
leading theory of human behaviour and the leading scientific theory of
human nature
o It became a standard doctrine not only of psychology, but also of the many
social sciences, that human behaviour is shaped by cultural forces alone
o It is what we learn, our nurture, that make us who we are
o We have no free will to resist those forces, nor are there any inborn
natural ways of behaving--- and thus no nature at all
Darwin (1809 - 1882)
The Influence of Darwin
• Most of the theories discussed in this chapter accept a materialist view of reality
and a scientific view of knowledge
