Know thyself: method and ontology in the approximation between Socrates and Skinner's radical behaviourism

Abstract

The Delphic precept "know thyself", appropriated by Socrates as a philosophical programme, and B. F. Skinner's behaviour analysis are traditions usually treated as incommensurable. This essay examines under what conditions an approximation between them can be sustained and at what point it necessarily breaks down. It is argued that the convergence is real but strictly methodological: both Socratic examination and functional analysis of behaviour displace self-knowledge from the inner forum to a public procedure, make it dependent on the intervention of another, and take the consequences of conduct as the criterion of correctness. The rupture, in turn, is ontological and admits of no reconciliation: the Socratic precept presupposes a soul to be known and makes introspection the route to that knowledge, whereas radical behaviourism explicitly rejects introspection as a source of data and mentalism as a form of explanation. It is held that only by making this boundary explicit does the approximation become defensible, and that dissolving it — treating Socratic self-knowledge and discriminative self-description as synonyms — reduces the parallel to impressionistic analogy, without theoretical or clinical yield.