Behaviorism

About behaviorism

Some of the oldest learning theories belong to the behaviorism as learning paradigm and date back from the beginning of the 20th century.

Behaviorists view learning as a visible change in ones behavior. Behaviorism assumes that the learner starts off as a clear state and simply responds to environmental stimuli. Those responses can be shaped through positive and negative reinforcement increasing or decreasing the probability of repeating the same behavior.

The key component to this paradigm are observable behaviors and their measuring.

Learning theories:

Clasicall conditioning (Ivan Pavlov, 1849-1936)

Operant conditioning (Burrhus Skinner, 1904-1990)

Critic

Behaviorism today mostly lost its influence and let cognitivism take its place as the dominant paradigm. Critics of behaviorist learning theories usually argue that behaviorism does not explain all kinds o learning since it ignores inner activities of the mind. For many critics it seems obvious that, at a minimum, the occurrence and character of behavior (especially human behavior) does not depend primarily upon one's reinforcement history, but on the fact that the environment or learning history is represented by an individual and how it is represented1) ne razumijem .

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Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy: Behaviorism