Skinner, Creativity, and the Problem of Spontaneous Behavior

Abstract

Behavior is generative, by which I mean that it is probabilistic, continuous in time, and always novel. At first glance, B.F. Skinner's work would seem to make contact with generative aspects of behavior, since he studied the “emitted” behavior of “freely moving organisms,” since he analyzed language, music, literature, and other creative activities, and since he himself was an exceptionally creative individual. In fact, Skinner's work focuses on the effects of various interventions on ongoing behavior; it says little about where that behavior comes from in the first place. Generativity theory suggests that simple behavioral processes of the sort Skinner studied operate simultaneously on the probabilities of a large number of different behaviors. Instantiated in a computer model, the theory has successfully emulated complex, novel performances in both human and animal subjects, and it may some day allow for the real-time simulation of novel performances in individual human subjects.