Future of the Science of Behavior at Walden Two

Skinner, B. F.  (1948/1976/2005).  Walden Two.  Indianapolis, IN:  Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

CHAPTER 32 (pp. 267-276)

What remains to be done?  Well, what do you say to the design of personalities?  Would that interest you?  The control of temperament?  Give me the specifications, and I’ll give you the man!  What do you say to the control of motivation, building the interests which will make men most productive and most successful?  Does that seem to you fantastic?  Yet some of the techniques are available, and more can be worked out experimentally.  Think of the possibilities!  A society in which there is no failure, no boredom, no duplication of effort!  (p. 274)

Frazier continues to propose new areas:  cultivation of special abilities; what makes a child’s mind mathematical?  musical?; making better mathematicians, better artists, better craftsmen; improving social and cultural design; the special qualities of the group (communal science); efficient group structure; the Superorganism!

Chapter 4, Culture: philosophic perspectives III

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

Goal-seeking in culture

“If it is true, as earlier contended, that all cultures have implicit or explicit goals — that is, purposes toward which they endeavor to move with some sense of direction — then it is also true that all cultures have more or less articulate sets of values that symbolize rightness or wrongness, goodness or badness, beauty or ugliness.  But the nature of cultural goals, like that of order and process, may be interpreted again in conflicting ways, depending upon the metacultural assumptions from which it is approached.”  (p. 58)

“Let us consider … the view that the values of culture are primarily determined by the basic interest of human beings — by their striving for satisfaction of needs and wants. . . . These range all the way from the physiological hunger of food and sex to the more subtle but nevertheless equally genuine sociopsychological wants of recognition and cooperation.”  (p. 59)

“Such an approach to cultural goals may be expressed axiologically as a functional theory of ethics — ethics being defined here as the philosophic study of moral conduct. . . . the interests of human beings everywhere in the world can be found to have many common denominators, no matter how diversified cultures might otherwise be.  Thus, one of the typical contentions of this approach is that we need to study the values of people cross-culturally — that is, to compare one culture with another to see how far their goals function in both similar and different ways.”  (p. 59)

“Another approach to the problems of goals … is the theory that cultures are moving progressively toward an ultimate end that is somehow inherent in the order and process of culture.  According to this theory, goals are the driving force of all cultural change in that they provide the ‘magnets’ that draw men onward and, in a sense, upward toward perfection.”  (p. 60)

“In ontological terms, the view that culture … is moving inevitably toward an ultimate goal is called teleology.  The nature of the goal may vary according to different theorists, however.  Marxists, for example, hold that it is the ‘classless society’ — the Communist ideal of pure economic freedom through public ownership and control of all means of production.  Those of Father Teilhard’s [de Chardin] faith conceive that the ultimate goal is eternal salvation, and that all cultural processes are in one way or another a means to this perfect and final end.”  (p. 60)

“. . . one may hold that the first view of the goal problem — exemplified by Malinowski — is perhaps closer to what we have called the reconstructionist orientation than to the others.  Reconstructionists hold that the delineation of human goals is to be achieved through cross-cultural research that enlists not only anthropology but all the sciences of human behavior, such as psychiatry and political science.”  (p. 60)

“The reconstructionist educator also takes the position that not only is it possible to describe the desires of human beings by such research, but that it is possible to arrive at much greater consensus than we have thus far achieved as to the desirability of the most important cross-cultural goals.  In other words, description could lead to both prescription and proscription of goals — both to those that are recommended as culturally desirable and to those that are condemned as culturally undesirable.”  (p. 60)

“The bridging of the gap between described values … and prescribed — that is, normative — values, … is suggested by the reconstructionist theory of ‘social consensus.’ . . . It is necessary first to consider the maximum evidence available as to whether certain goals … are in fact accepted by all or most cultures. . . . . The second step requires communication both among members of one culture and also among cultures that the evidence is what it claims to be.  The third step is the endeavor to express as wide agreement as possible upon the basis of the evidence communicated.  The fourth step is to act in order to test out the agreement by observation and experience — thereby determining whether verbalized testimony harmonizes with behavioral testimony.”  (p. 61)

“Referring back for a moment to the knowledge-getting process, one might say that social consensus involves both inquiring and acquiring.  That is, it involves the kind of social inquiring necessary in collecting and comparing evidence and in reaching maximum communication about that evidence.  It involves social acquiring in the sense that the aim of the collecting and communicating of evidence is to achieve as much active agreement as possible about desirable goals on the basis of the evidence and the communication.”  (p. 61)

The major process of culture, acquiring, is thereby linked with cultural goals and the seeking of them — a good indication of why it is impossible in the experience of living cultures to separate any one of the three dimensions (order, process, or goals) from the other two.  It indicates, also, why reconstructionist education, though concerned with achieving desirable goals by practice with social consensus at every possible stage of enculturation, recognizes that cultural goals in turn demand both effective processes of achieving them and effective order of human relationship within which these processes may function.  (p. 61)

“By contrast, the perennialist theory of cultural goals does not assume that one achieves them primarily by a social or public process of acquiring and inquiring, but rather that the goals of man, already inherent as they are in the nature of culture and universe, will be attained if you and I can somehow learn to recognize the absolute laws of reality, knowledge, and value necessary to their attainment and can then abide by these laws to the utmost.”  (p. 62)

In this recognition of objective law, the perennialist reminds one of the essentialist’s attitude toward superorganic order, but he differs from the latter in his insistence that the value-seeking and value-achieving process requires, no less than knowledge-getting, a strong ingredient of intuition and even of revelation.  (p. 62)

“The ultimate goals of culture are not delineated by a cooperative process of gathering, communicating, and agreeing upon relevant evidence; they are discerned, finally, by one’s inherent capacity to discover their character through one’s own rational and spiritual power — reinforced, of course, by divine power.  Education’s most important responsibility is to share in and enhance this discovery.”  (p. 62)

Chapter 4, Culture: philosophic perspectives I

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

Metacultural assumptions of culture

“We call the assumptions or presuppositions of culture metacultural because they lie, strictly speaking, beyond or above or beneath an exclusively scientific description.  and since philosophy is itself sometimes defined as the critical study of assumptions, let us for present purposes call the philosophy of culture a metacultural discipline.”  (p. 45)

The reality of cultural order

“One of the most interesting contributions to the study of culture is Alfred L. Kroeber’s concept of the superorganic. . . . Culture, however, is a level above that of the merely organic.  It has emerged from the organic, to be sure, but, like other emergent levels of nature that have evolved from lower levels, culture has acquired its own distinctive features that are explicable in their own scientific terms.”  (p. 47)

Leslie White in The Science of Culture, explains that “culture causes culture, as it were.  Thus, the order of culture is subject to its own laws, just as the order of the biological level of nature is subject to its own laws. . . . These laws are located most centrally in the patterns [for instance, patterns of language, patterns of custom] of culture.”  (p. 47)

“The metacultural assumption implicit in this viewpoint of cultural order may be associated with a cluster of philosophic beliefs that we shall characterize as belonging to ontological realism. . . . Thus, culture too is an objective reality, just as are other levels of nature.”  (p. 47)

“Some ontological realists have been called historical materialists because they hold not only that culture has an objective reality which generates itself but that this occurs according to historical laws which are explicable in terms of the utilization of material energy in increasing complex ways.  That is, the spatiotemporal order of culture is to be viewed most fundamentally according to ways people channel the energies of nature in order to produce economic goods.”  (p. 48)

“A related but far from identical view of reality of culture . . . is called by philosophers objective idealism. . . . it is perhaps enough to recall that this theory of reality assumes that, although reality is governed by its own objective laws of stability and change, the ‘stuff’ of reality is not ‘material’ but rather ‘spiritual’ in character.”  (p. 48)

“Is it possible for one to hold a kind of superorganic view of culture and yet to be an idealist in one’s metacultural assumptions?  We think that it is.  One such proponent is the philosophically minded sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. . . . Sorokin tries to establish the basic laws of the history of culture which, despite their complexity, follow in a certain sequence, one upon the other, and are primarily characterized by the way human beings think and feel and then behave according to their thinking and feeling.  Culture has an objective reality, but this reality is spiritual in its innermost nature.”  (p. 49)

“The superorganic approach to cultural order is congenial to both the essentialist and perennialist orientations.”  (p. 51)

“Our chief conclusion is that . . . essentialism provides powerful theoretical support for the common view that education’s primary role is to induct each generation into the objective order of culture — an order that has already emerged in nature and is now waiting to be perceived and transmitted according to its own inherent laws.”  (p. 52)

“The operational approach to culture, on the other hand, has close affinity to the progressivist and reconstructionist views of education. . . . progressivists hold an operational theory of culture in the respect that they believe its members should learn how to interpret the meaning of various patterns of culture, not so much for the purpose of perpetuating them — although this role is also a necessary one — but, most importantly, for the purpose of modifying them through such operations.”  (p. 52)