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Radical Behaviorism and the Subjective-Objective Distinction

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Abstract

The distinction between subjective and objective domains is central to traditional psychology, including the various forms of mediational stimulus-organism-response neobehaviorism that treat the elements of a subjective domain as hypothetical constructs. Radical behaviorism has its own unique perspective on the subjective-objective distinction. For radical behaviorism, dichotomies between subjective and objective, knower and known, or observer and agent imply at most unique access to a part of the world, rather than dichotomous ontologies. This perspective leads to unique treatments of such important philosophical matters as (a) dispositions and (b) the difference between first- and third-person psychological sentences.

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Moore, J. Radical Behaviorism and the Subjective-Objective Distinction. BEHAV ANALYST 18, 33–49 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392690

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