What are rewards, stimuli and values are questions that may be answered in many different ways, but if they can be identified in a particular social model then operant conditioning concepts may be applied because these concepts are inherently involved in the identification. 3.4 Cognitive Science, Meaning and Critical Theory Viewed as a debate over the efficacy of behavioral modeling techniques, the behaviorist and cognitivist positions are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. These are profoundly different matters. The point at issue is one that has been most extensively developed by the Frankfurt School in their distinction between scientific theories and critical theories . Critical theories aim at emancipation and enlightenment.
Scientific theories require empirical confirmation through observation and experiment.
Relative to these distinctions, both behaviorism and cognitive science are scientific theories, and neglect the way in which meaning is imposed on human behavior, becomes part of that behavior, and, like theories of behavior, comes to have major effects on behavior. Two areas in which these distances are most notable are in the study of cultural differences in cognition and subjective mental experience and the brain. The meanings of things arises out of the social interaction one has with one's fellows. The meanings of things are handled in and modified through an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters. What symbolic interactionism adds to exchange theory is the notion that the stimuli and rewards involved may be a matter of social convention rather than of physical phenomena, and that the conventions are not rigid but subject to an interpretive process.