B. F. Skinner, organism.

B. F. Skinner illustrated the power of behavior analysis by turning it upon his own behavior. This article considers parallels in the life and work of Charles Darwin and places Skinner's views on life and death in the context of his selectionist paradigm for psychology. The term organism plays a special role, and the account shows why B. F. Skinner might have regarded it as an appropriate title.     

Rem B. Edwards,Religious Values and Valuations

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

William A. Frank and Allan B. Wolter,Duns Scotus,Metaphysician

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Jacques Loeb, B. F. Skinner, and the legacy of prediction and control

The biologist Jacques Loeb is an important figure in the history of behavior analysis. Between 1890 and 1915, Loeb championed an approach to experimental biology that would later exert substantial influence on the work of B. F. Skinner and behavior analysis. This paper examines some of these sources of influence, with a particular emphasis on Loeb's firm commitment to prediction and control as fundamental goals of an experimental life science, and how these goals were extended and broadened by Skinner. Both Loeb and Skinner adopted a pragmatic approach to science that put practical control of their subject matter above formal theory testing, both based their research programs on analyses of reproducible units involving the intact organism, and both strongly endorsed technological applications of basic laboratory science. For Loeb, but especially for Skinner, control came to mean something more than mere experimental or technological control for its own sake; it became synonomous with scientific understanding. This view follows from (a) the successful working model of science Loeb and Skinner inherited from Ernst Mach, in which science is viewed as human social activity, and effective practical action is taken as the basis of scientific knowledge, and (b) Skinner's analysis of scientific activity, situated in the world of direct experience and related to practices arranged by scientific verbal communities. From this perspective, prediction and control are human acts that arise from and are maintained by social circumstances in which such acts meet with effective consequences.     

Walter Miles, Pop Warner, B. C. Graves, and the psychology of football

In 1926-1927, a graduate student, B. C. Graves, working with Stanford University psychologist Walter Miles and legendary football coach Pop Warner, conducted an investigation of variations in signal calling as they affected the charging times of football players. The study was one of two that involved Miles and the ingenious multiple chronograph that he had invented to time the reactions of seven players simultaneously. These studies represented a brief digression in the career of Miles, who certainly was no sport psychologist. They tell of an interesting collaboration between scientist and coaches that produced one of the richest studies in sport psychology in the first half of the twentieth century.