To address the challenges of the times from subjective standpoints is typical of the traditional cultural models of all ages. The diverse subjective positions give rise to a variety of non-scientific “scenarios” that correspond to as many sets of social roles. Individuals who exercise these roles act as modern haruspices, who do not back out of making predictions and forecasts based on information so partial that the applied subjective probabilities turn out to be simply unreliable. However, the functions attributed to these roles contribute to defining models and guidelines for future behaviors, which are essential to direct social dynamics. This fact is a crucial point of human culture throughout history. It always results in disputes and discussions, which end in conflicts on the social and political levels. These situations are widespread in every social field and sphere, from the educational context to the very democratic system. In short, we could say that human history is a set of subjective positions, presumably oriented to the primary aim of social control. In the different historical periods, some subjective positions have established and strengthened themselves to a greater or lesser extent, influencing and expanding the political space. The latter has thus acquired a scope devoid of connotations related to behavior analysis based on scientific grounds.
Behavior Science with the Theory of Interests allows us to account for the incorrectness of those standpoints establishing the anomalous consideration of social (and political) reality in terms of opposition and conflict-an altered representation of social reality, so much so that it fails in explaining the very concept of “organization.” However, the fact remains that analyzing social reality also implies influencing that reality; in fact, perceiving social reality by human organisms results in human organisms adapting their behaviors to their perceiving (that is not the case with physical reality). Therefore, to be more specific, we could state that Behavior Science with the Theory of Interests makes it possible to bring out the real context of social interactions and explicate organizational issues in a dimension of scientific rationality.
In today’s globalized society, fostered primarily by scientific knowledge, the “in-my-opinion” perspective has so spread that it questions even the methodological paradigm on which science (also Behavior Science) rests. To question science means not considering that the new methodological paradigm, which Galileo first had the strength and the ability to realize, is the only innovative proposal in human history. It paved the way for modern society in a more general and profound meaning. Therefore, modern society should rest on the basic concept of scientific rationality. Without the innovative opening by Galileo, the further innovative opening by Darwin would not have been even conceivable. That said, Galileo’s and Darwin’s works turn out to be strictly and inseparably related.
From a perspective that overcomes common sense and redefines, on Galilean and Darwinian bases, the explicative methods human organisms can use to analyze and perform their own actions, the inconsistencies among the diverse methods whose foundations are different from the Galilean scientific method stand out. These inconsistencies affect the current social disciplines, all of which tend to define their boundaries in an exclusive mode based on research methods referring to a more general concept of methodological relativism. As a matter of fact, the scientific perspective (which assumes that the same research methodological criteria apply to both the study of human organisms and the natural sciences) does not admit the segmentation of human organisms into diverse and specific types of behavior, autonomous and disjointed, accordingly to the boundaries characterizing (at the present state of knowledge) the various social disciplines (such as economics, law, psychology, social network theory, sociology) also preventing any integration among them.
It is arduous to synthesize, at this point, the historical processes whose occurrence relates to how some disciplines have strengthened to the detriment of others. Such an effort would imply revisiting all processes that marked the course of the entire human culture.
What appears to a behavior scientist to be at least strange is the various social disciplines being so defined within their own boundaries and separate from one another that they do not recognize the irrefutable dimension of behavior-a dimension which pertains to behavior as a biological event. Even in the modern world, this situation is so pervasive as to result in harsh opposition to Behavior Science. It also emerges from a tendency to eliminate the very names of Galileo and Darwin from today’s “lexical vulgate.”
On that ground, it is necessary to handle the objects of study of the social disciplines within a partitioning of the most extensive set characterized by the predicate “behavior” (be it individual or social behavior). Namely, social disciplines’ languages must be made compatible with a consistent system of scientifically sound axioms to which all propositions belonging to those languages can be logically brought back. The meaning of the integration between social disciplines lies in this reconstruction of the corresponding fields of knowledge, which should be proposed and carried out in principle from an explicative perspective on human organisms founded on Galilean and Darwinian bases. This concept of integration is a radical departure from the concept of interdisciplinary, which is in line, on the contrary, with the commonsense research methods establishing the current boundaries of the social disciplines.
THE THEORY OF INTERESTS AND THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL INTERACTION
An attempt at clarification oriented to define the current state of knowledge about human organisms and society may seem superfluous to advocates of a pragmatism end in itself. However, an effort to understand the methodologies and objectives of social disciplines, and the continuing backwardness of their field, is indeed indispensable. As a matter of fact, knowledge is a factor that directly influences (or should influence) all of our behaviors, making each of them rational. Nonetheless, the postulate of rationality, which is now accepted and generalized when referring to natural phenomena, is still viewed with distrust of social phenomena. That marks the different degrees of development and awareness of human behaviors depending on whether they refer to natural phenomena or social phenomena. The Theory of Interests expresses the different types of social interaction in terms of sciential rationality, thereby responding to the methodological need to make the languages of the social disciplines compatible with a common system of axioms conforming to the syntax and semantics of the scientific language.
In a nutshell, the structural character and the dynamic character of the Theory of Interests allow for any case of social interaction to be explicated in scientific terms by bringing it back to two primary forms of social interaction:
the positive involvement between two interests (behaviors) of two subjects, and the corresponding conjunct interrelation (which reformulates the commonsense concept of cooperation); the negative involvement between two interests (behaviors) of two subjects, and the corresponding disjunct interrelation (which reformulates the commonsense concept of conflict).By further logical specifications, it is possible to define situations of social interaction increasingly complex and articulate:
the organization;the power (typical of institutions);
the exchange (typical of the market);
every phenomenon typical of the social structures, such as pluralism and democracy (and its dysfunctions, including the appropriation-expropriation of public functions), social classes, deviant power, and the various forms of deviation.
The Theory of Interests and Behavior Science have been developed with different modalities and knowledge objectives. The Theory of Interest has been developed to explain all human behavior’s characterizations in a unified way in the attempt to define a consistent set based on the primary concepts of “positive involvement” and “negative involvement.” Behavior Science has been developed to take behavior as an element susceptible to rigorous experimental analysis. Only later did it become clear the connection between the two paradigms (the Theory of Interests and Behavior Science), which, as said, complete each other through a correspondence relation.
At the present state of knowledge, the science of behavior allows us to take for granted the following knowledge acquisitions:
Economics is the most developed social discipline at the syntactic level because mathematics (and, in the most modern version, Debreu’s axiomatization in algebraic and topological terms) guarantees the consistency of the economic language. However, the semantic interpretation of the economic language is not equally guaranteed because there is no experimental verification making it univocal, despite the many attempts that have been made and are still being made.
We can say the same for the social network analysis elaborating formal (mathematical and stochastic) models about behaviors yet giving them a semantic interpretation through commonsense exemplifications.
Behavior science shows that also experiments based on game theory carried out in the economic field realize (through behavior repetition) trial-and-error learning processes, which are hindered or facilitated by factors such as the subjects’ past history and the particular social interactions (external behavioral stimuli) reinforcing the subjects’ operant behaviors.
One can recognize only a normative purport to economic theory as things stand. It means economics must be learned so that it can be reflected in the social context.
A discourse is scientific when its theoretical context corresponds to the experimental context. In this way, we can analyze those hidden variables we would not know otherwise. Behavior science allows us to find hidden variables, just as natural science investigates the field of hidden variables in physics. Therefore, we should assume that by applying the scientific method to social issues, we should be able to approach those issues radically differently from common sense.
The crucial contradiction of the current historical period (strangely unnoticed by the present common culture) is that two antithetical tendencies coexist in human behavior. The first is specified in a set of operations conforming to dictates of experimental science, now attested in many fundamental fields of our existence. The second is specified, in fields equally important, in those actions using in an irrational and distorted manner the technologies (and technical knowledge) made available to us by the science or not using them at all.
In brief, this is a particular situation of “dissonance” between (scientific) knowledge of nature and (a-scientific) knowledge of human organisms that the present culture does not seem to sense.
Behavior Science is currently in this situation: it could make a decisive contribution to solving many problems of our societies, but human organisms ignore and reject it to leave room to value judgments, that is, opinions by definition subjective, which are constantly being applied in the field of individual and collective choices.
In general, opinions have no sciential purport because, by definition, every opinion has the same value as its negation, whereas science is such because, by definition, no scientific proposition can have the same sciential purport of its negation, that is, no scientific proposition can be replaced by its contrary.
Scientific language is univocal and consistent, whereas value judgments are not univocal and can be contradicted.
Some issues about Behavior Science and the Theory of Interests and their application to explain different models of social organizations are discussed in a video interview published on the History of Behavior Analysis channel.
The Theory of Interests expresses a reference paradigm on which the scientific integration of the social disciplines can be founded. This theory is formulated using a language apt to axiomatization, which is characterized (like any language) by a syntactic aspect and a semantic interpretation referring to that same syntax. Note
Note on the abstract structure and the semantic interpretation of scientific language
In the case of physics, the need to represent the corresponding abstract language not so much in logical-formal terms but in rigorously mathematical terms is more straightforward. In the case of disciplines dealing with biological phenomena, the abstract language may be interpreted instead in logical-formal terms but not necessarily in strictly mathematical terms.
The syntactic and semantic aspects of the Theory of Interests conform to the criteria typical of scientific language: the syntax expresses the logical-formal structure of social interaction in terms of relations between interests; the semantic interpretation entails that the concept of interest is connected with the behavior through a correspondence relation.
The correspondence between behavior and interest allows for the foundation of the Theory of Interests on an experimental dimension. The Theory of Interests and the experimental analysis of behavior explicate (i.e., they explain scientifically) the invariants and the regularities characterizing the multiplicity of forms and features of the living organisms’ behaviors, emerging throughout the encephalization process that occurs in a strictly evolutionary context.