Philosophical Critique, The Existence Of Forgetting - Skinner's Radical Behaviorism

In 1879, Wundt set up the first psychology lab in Germany, which is the start of psychology as a separate scientific discipline. During the more than one hundred years since then, Radical behaviorism, the most important school of psychology, has always been noticed for its radical ideas. The radical behaviorists are influenced by the philosophy of empiricism (which argues that knowledge comes from environment via the sense, since humans are like 'tabula rasa', or blank slate, at birth) and the Newton's physics (which emphasize scientific and objective methods of investigation, and the prediction or control of the world). For these beliefs, the radical behaviorists deny the existence of inner mind, asserting only the observable behavior should be studied if the psychology is to be the science. In this paper, B.F. Skinner being the most important psychologist in this school is chosen to be the deputy. Both his ideas and the weaknesses will be stated.The first aim of this paper is to find the causes of radical behaviorism's emergence. The direct causes are the American historical background when behaviorism was bom, American native pragmatism philosophy and the positivism philosophy. While the indirect, but more profound cause must be understood in the light of Martin Heidegger's critique on the metaphysics philosophy since Plato. So we can know about the meanings' transition of "being" and "human", which get behaviorists to regard human only as matter.The second aim is to try to transcend the behaviorism with the help of Heidegger's ideas in Being and Time. It's true that human is influenced by the environment, but according to Heidegger, it doesn't mean human can be controlled and hasn't any freedom. In fact, the existence of human has two levels, that is non-authentic and authentic. In the non-authentic level, skinner may be right, but in the authentic skinner was totally wrong.