Learning 111Though interiority has a much longer history within Western thought
and culture, within psychological programs of research into learning as
manifested in behavior, mind became increasingly privatized as an inner
sphere whose reality was unavailable for expression, and unaccounted for
as a matter of intersubjectivity or dialogue. Assuming the causal regularity
of the shaping of behavior, and its adaption, experimentation would seek to
uncover the laws of learning that would manifest directly (positively) in
the visible world as a material event. Consequently, the timing of
conditioning, acquisition/extinction of behavior, stimulus generalization
/discrimination, and reinforcement patterns would all find their
abstractions confirmed in the specific findings correlating with an external
world. For instance, in operant conditioning, the relative response rate in a
variable ratio schedule of reinforcement (such as feeding coins to a slot
machine) or in a variable interval schedule (such as giving students a pop
quiz) would be ascertained as measurable, quantifiable, and apparently
impersonal. Nonetheless, as with the problem of other minds, important
aspects of externality – such as the context and socio-economic
embeddedness of these technological procedures – remained outside the
ken of their implantation as tools, or as instrumentations in orchestrating
certain forms of sociality. For instance, it was not reflected upon by these
researchers that seemingly straightforward research, such as how to
reinforce “good” behavior in unruly children, might silently mirror an
already existing political and economic understanding of mind. That is,
such behavioral interventions would strengthen an understanding of a
private, interior mind that would express itself as behavior, which was
devoid of meaning, or intrinsic relationality, other than what might
manifest as objective and controllable.
2.3. Engineering Learning
Until the turn to cognition and more recently to evolutionary
psychology, behavior as learning would become the cornerstone of an
increasingly naturalistic social science, which emphasized a certain