It's very relevant. The tricky thing with the iPlant is that it's hard to imagine what society would end up looking like if a powerful behavioural technology was in widespread use. I've tried to imagine how people might use it to overcome health problems and contribute to scientific research, but the applications are truly endless (and some are disturbingly bleak). This makes people resist the development of iPlants and makes it difficult to formulate policy and legal safety-nets. This book may be the first I've read that's truly ambitious in thinking about making behaviour more effective and better controlled. It articulates an overarching goal: making people more and more influenced by the long-term consequences of their behaviour and the evolution of their society. It articulates and responds to objections regarding de-humanization and abuse. All this is very relevant to thinking about future behavioural technologies like the iPlant. I guess I wish Skinner would have included a chapter describing in detail which behaviourist practises he personally thought society should adopt, how we should go about adopting them (including how to deal with the backlash when traditions are challenged) and what society would or could look like once we had adopted them. Does he spell this out in detail somewhere else? Walden Two maybe? I'm also curious what the critics said about this book in particular (not, as you say, the partisan bickering around behaviourist science as such).
Thanks again
Chris
1 comment:
Walden II does indeed provide Skinner's explicitly acknowledged personal vision of a society based on the systematic use of especially the positive laws of learning he advocates. The fundamental lesson of that book, though, is that laws of learning, like any other natural laws (viz., physics and chemistry) operate to limit or enhance common societal goals, largely depending on how ignorant or informed we are about those fundamental laws. Indeed, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner explains why our ignorance of those laws largely accounts for our vulnerability to commonly learned beliefs and practices that make our common societal goals so elusive.
Post a Comment