Skinner’s Quote of the Day

"If what is felt are collateral products of the causes of behavior, then feelings can be a useful clue." (p. 110)

"The enthusiasm of cognitive scientists is not easily explained by looking at practical achievements. On the contrary, in reactivating the dream of the central initiating control of behavior, cognitive science…

"Many of the findings in cognitive science find a useful place in behavioral analyses." (p. 109)

"Step by step we may paraphrase the accomplishments of cognitive scientists in behavioral terms . . . Many of them have made important discoveries and no doubt deserve credit even…

"A behavioral account is incomplete, in part because it leaves a great deal to neurology ..." (p. 106)

We have no sensory nerves going to the parts of the brain that engage in “cognitive processes.” (p. 105)

"We have more information about ourselves than about other people, but it is only the same kind of information—about stimuli, responses, and consequences, some of them internal and in that…

"But radical behaviorism accepts the argument that parts of our bodies enter into the sensory control of what we do, not only in behavior such as figure skating but in…

"Kahneman and Tversky have reported that people say they would be less likely to buy a second ticket to the theater if a first had been lost than to buy…

"In a behavioral account, what one feels is one's own body, and what one feels when one is behaving or likely to behave is therefore a collateral product of the…

"To the extent that economic theory is concerned with what people say they will do, SEU [subjective expected utility] theory may be adequate, but a behavioral scientist (and, one would…

"Expectation is a current surrogate of a history of reinforcement." (p. 102)

"Cognitive psychologists need current surrogates of histories of selection in part because they pay little attention to selection as a causal principle." (p. 101)

"How organisms are changed by contingencies of reinforcement is the field of a behavioral analysis. What is happening inside is a question to be answered by neurology, with its appropriate…

"Cognitive scientists argue that the rules are in the contingencies and that a person can learn about them in either way. They have therefore felt free to take the easier…

"An unnecessary return to rules may be troublesome. When the toad asked the centipede, “Pray, which leg goes after which?” the centipede “worked her mind to such a pitch/She lay…

"When we learn to drive a car, for example, we begin with responses to verbal stimuli. Our behavior is rule-governed. We flip switches, push pedals, and turn the wheel as…

"Verbal behavior evidently came into existence when, through a critical step in the evolution of the human species, the vocal musculature became susceptible to operant conditioning." (p. 98)

"In a behavioral account [of perception] the whole organism responds, and it responds to the world around it—for reasons that an experimental analysis of behavior, with the help of neurology,…

"Ethologists study the species-specific behavior attributable to contingencies of survival in natural selection. Contingencies of operant reinforcement select the behavior of the individual in a similar way but, for course,…

"The old stimulus-response formula was an attempt to give the environment an initiating role, but it has long been abandoned. The environment selects behavior." (p. 94)

"Cognitive science takes the traditional position: Behavior starts within the organism. We think and then act; we have ideas and then put them into words; we experience feelings and then…

"The [current] chapter is speculative, but the speculation is under the restraint imposed by a commitment to the established principles of an operant analysis." (p. 92)

"There is a good chance that [laughing and crying] evolved at about the same time as vocal behavior, but they are not operants, although they can be simulated as such—as…

". . . we could say that other primates have engaged in verbal behavior in artificial verbal environments created by scientists but have not developed a language [in the sense…

"Verbal behavior is behavior that is reinforced through the mediation of other people, but only when the other people are behaving in ways that have been shaped and maintained by…

"What is reinforced in the sense of being followed by a given type of consequence is a response; it is the operant that is reinforced in the quite different sense…

"It is easy to understand the primitive view that behavior is inside the organism before it comes out. Perhaps there is a touch of the primitive in saying that behavior…

"As we would put it today, autoclitics have evolved as instructions to the listener that help him behave in ways more likely to have reinforcing consequences and hence more likely…

"The possibility of recombining the elements of vocal responses ... accounts for much of the power and scope of verbal behavior." (p. 85)

"The crucial question is what happens when a person says something he or she has never said before. Novel behavior occurs on novel occasions, and an occasion is novel in…

"There are two types of mand. Pull is an action-mand, reinforced when the listener does something . . . An object-mand is more likely to occur in the presence of…

"When tacts are taught as “the names of things,” teachers use a generalized reinforcer—such as “Good!” or some other social reinforcer." (p. 84)

"We do not say that fish means or refers to fish when it is an echoic, textual, or intraverbal response. If we tend to say so when it is a…

". . . a mand or a tact. As those terms are defined in Verbal Behavior, the consequences must be generalized." (p. 83)

"... the evolution of operant conditioning appears to have been accompanied by the evolution of a pool of behavior that played no other part in natural selection and was therefore…

"One learns to gesture through movement duplication but to speak through product duplication, which is more precise." (p. 80)

"Vocal behavior must have had several advantages in natural selection. Sounds are effective in the dark, around corners, and when listeners are not looking, and they can be made when…

"The human species took a crucial step forward when its vocal musculature came under operant control in the production of speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all the distinctive…

"It is often said that bees have a language, that they “tell each other where good forage is to be found,” that the dance “conveys information,” and so on. Such…

"It was only after a tendency to imitate had evolved that contingencies existed for the evolution of the reciprocal process of modeling." (p. 77)

"The plausibility of a reconstruction [of evolution] depends in part upon the size of the variations that are assumed to have occurred. The smaller the variations, the more plausible the…

"Because a verbal environment is composed of listeners, it is understandable that linguists emphasize the listener." (p. 75)

"Strictly speaking, verbal behavior does not evolve. It is the product of a verbal environment, or what linguists call a language, and it is the verbal environment that evolves." (p.…

"Verbal behavior left no artifacts until the appearance of writing, and that was at a very late stage. We shall probably never know precisely what happened, but we ought to…

"Evolutionary theory has always been plagued by scantiness of evidence. We see the products of evolution but not much of the process." (p. 75)

"A culture may be defined as the contingencies of social reinforcement maintained by a group. As such it evolves in its own way, as new cultural practices, however they arise,…

"The human species made further progress in the transmission of what had already been learned when its vocal apparatus came under operant control." (p. 74)

"Some of the great human achievements were due to extraordinary lucky accidents. Other people came under the control of the same fortuitous contingencies through imitation, and the behavior was transmitted…

"When the behavior of another person is important, modeling is reinforced when the other person imitates." (p. 74)