metonymy4u

Behaviorism is often given a bad name by those who I will call the meaning seekers. These are authors who think that to present a description of stimulus and response is inadequate. Whether they wish to add back in some sort of symbol, signifier, or the more scientific sounding “cognitive appraisal,” they are nevertheless engaging the age old practice of seeking something else. For the past 250 years, our particular community version of this quest has it that human psychology can be subdivided into two primary components: the immediate experience, or sense data, and the synthesis of the data through interpretation and judgment.

But what if we looked at the situation from a different perspective? What if instead of seeking the inner synthetic principles of knowledge we instead learned to speak simply about the felt sense of experiences? What if we analyzed events, without remainder, into descriptions of experiences and degrees of certainty about those experiences? And for this felt sense of certainty—a.k.a. meaning—we substituted for the authoritarian sounding “truth,” a poetic discourse whose symbolism could only be cashed out when apprehended by an audience of our peers?

On this reading, “meaning” does not lose any of its value to the community for being interpreted in terms of stimulus and response. It merely abrogates any claim to authoritarianism. And so the meaning seekers lose nothing they didn’t already have, and the behaviorists gain all that they wished to gain from the very beginning. Which is an acknowledgement that meaning itself is simply one event amongst many—though, to be sure, an event particularly interesting to those of us who are aware of living inside our own skins!