Skinner’s view on hallucinations. Validity and revision

Abstract

This work outlines the vision that B.F. Skinner held on hallucinations as psychological phenomena, and defends its validity and relevance nowadays. Our thesis starts with the Skinner’s conception on the behaviors of perceiving, imagining and dreaming. It is highlighted that, in Skinner’s point of view, the differences between perception on one hand and imagination or dreaming in the other, focus on what kind of variables control the behavior in question. Thus, the perceptive behavior would be controlled primarily by stimulus surrounding the person, while the imagination or dreaming would be by variables that are “under the skin” of the subject and, therefore, are private and directly inaccessible to the verbal community. On this basis, Skinner comes to an understanding of hallucinations as perceptual behaviors that occur in the absence of a perceived stimulus, similar to the behavior of imagining or dreaming, but, when hallucinating, the person, for various reasons, does not recognize his / her behaviour as controlled mainly by private stimulation. Finally we made some critical remarks regardingthe lack in Skinner’s psychology of a radical theory on the human person.

Keywords

• hallucinations
• behaviorism
• imagination
• own behaviour discrimination