Autodiscriminación condicional: la autoconsciencia desde un enfoque conductista

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a behaviorist version on selfawareness, supported on the experimental analysis of behavior, the natural science of the behavior established by B. F. Skinner (1938). Although to Skinner, and other behaviorist authors, self-awareness is an special kind of verbal behavior (and exclusively human therefore), we argue that self-awareness would be understood as a more basic process: conditional selfdiscrimination, that is a type of stimulus control whose discriminative stimulus is an own feature of the individual (the own physical image, the own internal states, the own behavior, etc.) conditionally associated to arbitrary stimuli (verbal autoclitics, in the human case). The ability of conditional self-discrimination has been proved in other species, which suggest to us that self-awareness is a learned ability, more extended on the nature and the evolution.