The Premack Principle provides a way out of this dilemma. For example, they talk about learning as increasing the individual's behavioral repertoire , and a skill that someone lacks as not being part of his behavioral repertoire . Although it might seem like you should start training by first training your rat the beginning of the maze, in fact training will be much faster if you train it to find the goal box first, then the first few steps leading to the goal box, and so on, until you have added each component of the maze from the last part of the maze up to the front. Subjective vs. objective. One of the major distinctions that we make in a scientific analysis is between those phenomena which are the private, internal, unobservable, and therefore unmeasurable by others, which are labelled subjective , and those things which are public, external, observable and therefore measurable by others, which are labelled objective .
Objective phenomena are therefore accessable to analysis.
The key to understanding current behavior lies in the past history of the individual. He does careful work because in the past, when he has done sloppy work, his boss has yelled at him, which he found aversive, making it more probable that he does careful work now. We can see what he did before, what happened as a result of it, and the effect it had on his behavior. We tend to explain the behavior of ourselves and others in terms of the purposeful intentions of the individual. He does careful work because he doesn't want to get yelled at by his boss.