Some early similarities and later differences between Bertrand Russell and B. F. Skinner

B. F. Skinner credited Bertrand Russell with converting him to behaviorism and with writing one of the books that most influenced him. Particularly in Skinner's early work, there are similarities between Skinner and Russell that extend across mathematics, determinism, positivism, verbal behavior, future communities, evolution, and pragmatism. Later, Skinner's views changed, and he parted company with Russell in most of these areas. Perhaps the most dramatic and fundamental departure came when Skinner embraced pragmatism, which Russell said he "hated." However, there was a time during which Russell wrote favorably of pragmatism as a view for science. Although the similarities between Skinner and Russell may have resulted from common cultural influences, Russell appears to deserve credit for leading Skinner into the stimulus-response behaviorism of two-term necessities; he may also deserve some credit for helping to lead him out of it and into the selectionist behaviorism of three-term contingencies.     

Is talking to yourself thinking?

The question whether talking to yourself is thinking is considered from two viewpoints: radical behaviorism and teleological behaviorism. For radical behaviorism, following Skinner (1945), mental events such as ‘thinking’ may be explained in terms of private behavior occurring within the body, ordinarily unobservable by other people; thus, radical behaviorism may identify talking to yourself with thinking. However, to be consistent with its basic principles, radical behaviorism must hold that private behavior, hence thinking, is identical with covert muscular, speech movements (rather than proprioception of those movements). For teleological behaviorism, following Skinner (1938), all mental terms, including ‘thinking,’ stand for abstract, temporally extended patterns of overt behavior. Thus, for teleological behaviorism, talking to yourself, covert by definition, cannot be thinking.     

Radical behaviorism and psychology's public: B. F. Skinner in the popular press, 1934-1990

B. F. Skinner is perhaps 2nd only to Freud among the most publicly identifiable psychological figures of the last century. This article reviews the popular press coverage of Skinner between 1934 and 1990 to examine how radical behaviorism was interpreted, portrayed, and received by psychology's public. Reactions to Skinner were often skeptical or condemnatory. It is suggested that some members of the public had difficulty accepting his views because of the disparities between the philosophy of radical behaviorism and the phenomenology of everyday experience. Furthermore, Skinner's status as a psychological expert was inextricably linked to the public's perception of his credibility not only as a scientist but also as a human being.     

What is Radical Behaviorism? A Review of Jay Moore's Conceptual Foundations of Radical Behaviorism

B. F. Skinner founded both radical behaviorism and behavior analysis. His founding innovations included: a versatile preparation for studying behavior; explicating the generic nature of stimulus and response; a pragmatic criterion for defining behavioral units; response rate as a datum; the concept of stimulus control; the concept of verbal behavior; and explicating the explanatory power of contingencies. Besides these achievements, however, Skinner also made some mistakes. Subsequent developments in radical behaviorist thought have attempted to remedy these mistakes. Moore's book presents a “party line” version of radical behaviorism. It focuses narrowly on a few of Skinner's concepts (mostly mentalism and verbal behavior) and contains no criticism of his mistakes. In fact, Moore adds a few mistakes of his own manufacture; for example, he insists that the mental realm does not exist—an unprovable and distracting assertion. The book's portrayal of behavior analysis would have been current around 1960; it mentions almost none of the developments since then. It also includes almost no developments in radical behaviorism since Skinner. Moore's book would give an unwary reader a highly distorted picture of contemporary behavior analysis and radical behaviorism.     

Contingency Horizon: on Private Events and the Analysis of Behavior

Skinner’s radical behaviorism incorporates private events as biologically based phenomena that may play a functional role with respect to other (overt) behavioral phenomena. Skinner proposed four types of contingencies, here collectively termed the contingency horizon, which enable certain functional relations between private events and verbal behavior. The adequacy and necessity of this position has met renewed challenges from Rachlin’s teleological behaviorism and Baum’s molar behaviorism, both of which argue that all “mental” phenomena and terminology may be explained by overt behavior and environment–behavior contingencies extended in time. A number of lines of evidence are presented in making a case for the functional characteristics of private events, including published research from behavior analysis and general experimental psychology, as well as verbal behavior from a participant in the debate. An integrated perspective is offered that involves a multiscaled analysis of interacting public behaviors and private events.     

SKINNER AS MISSIONARY AND PROPHET: A REVIEW OF BURRHUS F. SKINNER: SHAPER OF BEHAVIOUR

Do we need another book about B. F. Skinner? According to Frederick Toates, the answer is “yes” because “there is still much to be said” (p. vii) about Skinner. In his recent biography, Burrhus F. Skinner: Shaper of Behaviour (2009), Toates attempts to integrate Skinner into the mainstream of psychology by showing areas of commonality between Skinner''s radical behaviorism and subdisciplines within psychology such as cognitive, social, and biological psychology. Admirably, although in some instances understandably naively, Toates attempts to demonstrate the power of positive reinforcement to explain myriad complex behaviors, including a fairly lengthy interpretation of religious behavior. In addition, Toates credits Skinner for being ahead of his time on both social and environmental issues. Toates falters, however, in his insistence that behavior analysis still needs and can benefit from cognitive concepts. He nevertheless provides an otherwise objective and sympathetic view of Skinner the person and the behavioral science he helped to create in a book that should be informative for both behavior analysts and those outside the field.     

Radical behaviorism: A productive and needed philosophy for education

Radical behaviorism is the philosophy of the science of behavior originating in the work of B. F. Skinner and elaborated over the years by a community of researchers, scholars, and practitioners. Radical behaviorism is a complete, or thoroughgoing behaviorism in that all human behavior, public and private, is explained in terms of its functional relations with environmental events. Radical behaviorism is often misrepresented in the literatures of education and psychology. Two fundamental misconceptions of radical behaviorism are that its followers (1) are logical positivists who require that a phenomenon be observed by two or more people before it qualifies for scientific analysis, and (2) either will not or cannot incorporate private events (e.g., thoughts, feelings) into their analyses of human behavior. This paper offers an advocacy perspective on contemporary radical behaviorism. In particular, we define radical behaviorism and briefly outline the history of the term's use in psychological literature, discuss the scientific practice of behavior analysts, explain the intolerance exhibited by radical behaviorists, and comment on the use of popularity as a criterion for good science. The paper concludes with a discussion of the recent shift in educational research and practice from empiricism and outcome-oriented intervention toward a holistic/constructivist philosophy described by its advocates as incompatible with behaviorally-based instruction.     

A day of great illumination: B. F. Skinner's discovery of shaping

Despite the seminal studies of response differentiation by the method of successive approximation detailed in chapter 8 of The Behavior of Organisms (1938), B. F. Skinner never actually shaped an operant response by hand until a memorable incident of startling serendipity on the top floor of a flour mill in Minneapolis in 1943. That occasion appears to have been a genuine eureka experience for Skinner, causing him to appreciate as never before the significance of reinforcement mediated by biological connections with the animate social environment, as opposed to purely mechanical connections with the inanimate physical environment. This insight stimulated him to coin a new term (shaping), and also led directly to a shift in his perspective on verbal behavior from an emphasis on antecedents and molecular topographical details to an emphasis on consequences and more molar, functional properties in which the social dyad inherent to the shaping process became the definitive property of verbal behavior. Moreover, the insight seems to have emboldened Skinner to explore the greater implications of his behaviorism for human behavior writ large, an enterprise that characterized the bulk of his post-World War II scholarship.     

Radical Behaviorism and the Clarification of Causality,Constructs, and Confusions: A Reply to Hayes,Adams, and Dixon

The Psychological Record - In a recent paper by Hayes, Adams, and Dixon (1997), Skinner’s radical behaviorism was criticized on conceptual and philosophical grounds. The criticisms centered...     

The gifts of culture and of eloquence: An open letter to Michael J. Mahoney in reply to his article, "Scientific psychology and radical behaviorism"

In what seems to be a response to a paper by Skinner (1987), Mahoney (1989) provides evidence of unfamiliarity with and intellectual intolerance toward radical behaviorism by presenting a critique of it that includes a variety of improper and counterfactual attributions. For example, he argues that radical behaviorism is Cartesian rather than Baconian when the historical record shows the opposite, that it is fundamentally associationist when in fact it is selectionist, and that its philosophy of science is essentially that of operationalism and logical positivism when instead it moved on to other criteria decades ago. The details of Mahoney's history are sometimes flawed and sometimes unsubstantiated, as when he provides a distorted account of the origins of the Association for Behavior Analysis or when he makes undocumented claims about the banning of books. On examination, many of his arguments are couched in stylistic terms that share their rhetorical features with racial, ethnic, and religious stereotyping.     

Skinner on cognition

One of the most controversial, if not the most controversial, aspect of behaviorism is its claims (actual and putative) concerning cognition. Part of this controversy is caused by egregious exegetical errors on the part of Skinner's critics. Critics can then easily refute behaviorism by attributing these problematic claims to Skinner. This paper attempts to faithfully describe Skinner's claims regarding cognition. Skinner advances several arguments regarding the role of cognitions in human behavior and in the science of human behavior. We suggest that there are two distinct kinds of claims in this web: 1) claims regarding the proper relation between science and cognitions and 2) claims regarding the status of cognitions as natural events. Due to the multiplicity and interdependence of many of these arguments, it is best to view Skinner's position on cognition as consisting of a web of interdependent claims.     

A Review of Baum's Review of Conceptual Foundations of Radical Behaviorism

Baum expressed numerous concerns about my Conceptual Foundations of Radical Behaviorism in his review. If his review were an independent submission and I were an independent referee, I would recommend that his review be rejected and that he be encouraged to revise and resubmit, once he has studied the field a bit more and clarified for himself and journal readers several important matters. I outline two sets of concerns that he might usefully clarify in his revision: (a) the important contributions of B. F. Skinner to a book about radical behaviorism, and (b) the nature of private behavioral events. In particular, the methodological behaviorism inherent in Baum's position needs to be resolved.     

Probability and radical behaviorism

The concept of probability appears to be very important in the radical behaviorism of Skinner. Yet, it seems that this probability has not been accurately defined and is still ambiguous. I give a strict, relative frequency interpretation of probability and its applicability to the data from the science of behavior as supplied by cumulative records. Two examples of stochastic processes are given that may model the data from cumulative records that result under conditions of continuous reinforcement and extinction, respectively.     

Is behaviorism false because there is no such thing as conditioning? Popper and skinner on learning

Sir Karl Popper has claimed that behaviorism is misguided because it holds that conditioning occurs through repetition. According to Popper, there is no such thing as learning through repetition. To the limited extent that philosophers of science have concerned themselves with behaviorism, this attack is one of the most direct and unique in that the battleground is not over the value of mentalism/cognitivism but a bold claim that conditioning—the heart and soul of behaviorism—is fictitious. This paper examines the soundness of Popper's argument against behaviorism by examining whether operant and classical conditioning rely on learning through repetition and suffer from other problems Popper attributes to the notion of conditioning. Although Popper correctly attributes certain properties to classical conditioning, he fails to undermine the empirical evidence that such conditioning occurs. Second, we claim that although B. F. Skinner is never entirely clear, operant conditioning does not rely on repetition nor does it suffer from the other problems Popper attributes to conditioning. Thus, Popper's argument also fails because of his assumption that all conditioning is classical conditioning and therefore his misattributing properties of classical conditioning to operant conditioning. We conjecture that the earlier polemics of John Watson and Watson's sole reliance on classical conditioning probably contributed to Popper's confusion on this point.     

How Hume’s Philosophy Informed Radical Behaviorism

The present paper analyzes consistencies between the philosophical systems of David Hume and B. F. Skinner, focusing on their conceptualization of causality and attitudes about scientific behavior. The ideas that Hume initially advanced were further developed in Skinner’s writings and shaped the behavior-analytic approach to scientific behavior. Tracing Skinner’s logical antecedents allows for additional historical and philosophical clarity when examining the development of radical behaviorism.     

Why Skinner is difficult

Skinner's views are commonly misrepresented. One reason for this difficulty is that changes in the way that Skinner formulated his views occurred in a gradual evolution over time throughout Skinner's career, and the changes and their significance were not as conspicuously marked as they might have been. Among these changes were a movement from a two-term necessity to a three-term contingency; a movement from discriminative stimulus to setting as the first term in his three-term contingency; and a movement from determinism to random variation as a foundational principle in his selectionist behaviorism. When not seen in their historical development over time, a sample reading of Skinner's views may readily result in misleading or inaccurate interpretations, particularly in respect to his later work. Seen in historical context, however, the accounts that survived after the changes Skinner made are well integrated in a selectionist theory of behavior.     

Interbehavioral Perspectives: On Act Psychologies and the Psychological Nouns

In a recent paper, Lee contrasted “act psychologies” with cognitive psychology, alleging that the former are incomplete in their coverage of what most people consider really psychological. By including the contextual interactionist approach of J. R. Kantor with B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism under the “act psychology” umbrella, Lee has shown that she is unfamiliar with the fact that Kantor, during his 60-odd years of active writing, covered virtually every aspect of psychology. She is particularly concerned about the neglect of those psychological nouns that are meaningful abstractions without being aware that contextual interactionism (interbehavioral psychology) uses the very terms which she mentions as long as they are used in reference to interactions and not to faculties or other psychic entities.

     

Needs (Murray, 1938) and state-variables (Skinner, 1938).

Skinner's concept of drive as a state-variable and his powerful rationale for introducing it agree closely with Murray's treatment of need. Operant behaviorists' usual deprecation of motivation in favor of stimulus control arises partly from features of parameters, insufficiently explored in some regions, of Skinner box research. For human adults on rich reinforcement schedules, response selection is chiefly controlled by the regnant motive. Skinner's life-long interest in inner events and translating psychodynamic concepts into behaviorese was obscured by his metalanguage philosophy of science (behaviorism).