Behaviorism in psychology is often criticized and rejected by those labeled as behaviorists, but recent re-evaluations suggest these criticisms are based on a caricatured view. This paper argues for a point of agreement between behaviorism and enactivism in their fundamental concepts of 'behavior' and 'action'. Modern behaviorism understands behavior as having interactive properties between an agent and the environment, not mere physical movements, and sees behavior as related to subsequent events and inseparable from mental phenomena. The paper demonstrates that distorted criticism arises from misunderstanding behavior, and that enactivist approaches to action align with these behaviorist concepts, suggesting a more productive relationship.
Edward Tolman, known for cognitive maps and latent learning in rats, is usually seen as a forerunner of cognitivism because his intervening variables were later treated as mental representations. Yet the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew on Tolman's sign-Gestalt concept, interpreting it as non-representational and using it in his relational account of behavior. Merleau-Ponty recast Tolman's ideas into a view of behavior as structured, embodied interaction between organism and environment. These reformulated insights later helped found enactivist cognitive science, which emphasizes perception-action co-constitution and dynamic agent-environment coupling. Tolman's own framework remained ontologically ambiguous, allowing his work to influence both cognitivism and its opponent, enactivism.