What is behavior?

By definition, behavior is a series of acts put together and named. For example, the name of a behavior might be “jumping.” The acts defining the behavior “jumping” would be raising one foot while pushing upward with the arms and then raising the other foot, and so forth. Or jumping might be more like hopping with two feet being raised at the same time the jumper pushes up into the air. So, to change a behavior, a behavior specialist would want to define the acts. As my mentor would say, “If the child is picking their nose, is it the right or left nares and which finger on which hand?” Then, he would ask, “How often within what time frame?” which would be followed by “and what was the antecedent or act that came before and what was the consequence or act that came after?” Yes, I was “trained” in behavioral therapy, worked in a school set up by Sidney Bijou, a protege of BF Skinner, but something was always missing in this work. You see we could “train” children to sit down but they could then stand up just as quickly. We could toilet train children but then when they acquired language they were no longer “trained.” We could keep a child from chewing off their fingers but that same child could not tell us what he wanted for lunch. We could train a student to a structured routine but they could not problem solve. And, most importantly, we could decrease the frequency of a behavior we did not like but the learner often came up with another behavior we did not like. My search for how to help these students become empowered as agents, not controlled by others’ rewards and schedules of reinforcement, led me to search why humanity is different than other animals, dominated and controlled by behavioral training. For example, we always “trained” one on one our animals like whales and dolphins and eventually moved them into small groups of 1-2-3. But people live in social networks, classrooms of 20-40 children. To be able to live in such social networks, our brains are different than other animals which is expressed by a complex system of language used pragmatically for communicative intent, based on semantics of meaningful ideas, and predicated on previous information so that language meaning is greater than the whole. So I did my dissertation on what if we didn’t work on behavior but worked on those language functions? And then I studied Charles Peirce’s works about pragmaticism (the whole is greater than the parts). Yes, I can still count behaviors, reduce their frequency, identify the antecedents and consequences, set up reinforcement schedules but the social needs of humans to be empowered (check out the Language of RESPECT) moves us into something more than just thinking about behavior. We must raise children’s, youth’s, adult’s levels of thinking if we want behaviors to become more pro-social. To understand how we go to that paradigm, reading about semiotics is helpful. I am currently reading the third edition of “What is this thing called philosophy of language” (2024) which takes me back to how I found more than behavior. It is an introductory book but it focuses on something more than learning to behave…it focuses on why we learn to use language for meaning that is greater than physical referents. Check out the next blog on using language for more than physical identification of objects.