Skinner’s Quote of the Day

The Quote of the Day will be back soon with the quotes from another Skinner's classic.

"All human behavior . . . is ultimately to be accounted for in terms of the phylogenic contingencies of survival which have produced man as a species and the ontogenic…

"We do not look for ultimate responsibility in a machine, nor should we look for it in man." (p. 297) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"Only when we know what a man actually does can we be sure that we have simulated his behavior. The Outside Story must be told first." (p. 295) Subscribe to…

"As our understanding of human behavior increases, however, we appeal less and less to explanatory fictions, and we can then accept the fact that the essential differences between machines and…

"If a science of human behavior is impossible because man possesses free will, or if behavior cannot be explained without invoking a miracle-working mind, then indeed man cannot be simulated."…

"Man is a machine, but he is a very complex one. At present he is far beyond the powers of men to construct—except, of course, in the usual biological way."…

"A man learns to respond to himself and his own behavior as he learns to respond to things in the world around him, although it is hard for the verbal…

"As Newell, Shaw, and Simon say, ‘Man can solve problems without knowing how he solves them.” In other words, his behavior can be shaped by contingencies which he has not…

". . . the real question is not whether machines think but whether men do." (p. 288) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"[Machines] are certainly almost human, and since we know why they behave as they do, do we not know what it means to possess a Mind? . . . We…

"The physiological processes which mediate behavior do not, so far as we know, differ from those involved in other functions of a living organism. The activities which testify to the…

"When we can generate or change a state directly, we shall be able to use it to control behavior. Neither the science nor the technology of behavior will then vanish,…

"In a more advanced account of a behaving organism “historical” variables will be replaced by “causal.” When we can observe the momentary state of an organism, we shall be able…

"We can predict and control behavior without knowing how our dependent and independent variables are connected. Physiological discoveries cannot disprove an experimental analysis or invalidate its technological advances." (p. 283)…

"A behavioral analysis is essentially a statement of the facts to be explained by studying the nervous system. It tells the physiologist what to look for. The converse does not…

"It is not for nothing that psychoanalysis is called “depth psychology” or that linguists look for the “deep structure” of a sentence. And it is perhaps inevitable that an analysis…

"Current analyses of verbal contingencies are no doubt still incomplete, but what is gained by appealing to cognitive processes? If new sentences cannot arise in behavior, how can they arise…

"There is no harm in saying that a student gets high marks because of his intelligence or plays the piano well because of his musical ability, or that a politician…

"Teachers and therapists do not change personalities, they change the world in which students and patients live." (p. 273) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"We replace the Superego and Id of Freud as well as the Conscience and Old Adam of Judeo-Christian theology with “good” and “evil” phylogenic and ontogenic contingencies." (p. 273) Subscribe…

"We dispossess the Inner Man by replacing him with genetic and environmental variables." (p. 273) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"As it increases its power, both as basic science and as the source of a technology, an analysis of behavior reduces the scope of dualistic explanations and should eventually dispense…

"No science of mental life stays within the world of the mind. Mentalists do not stay on their side of the fence, and because they have the weight of a…

"A radical behaviorism denies the existence of a mental world, not because it is  contentious or jealous of a rival, but because those who claim to be studying the other…

"Behaviorism, as we know it, will eventually die—not because it is a failure but because it is a success. As a critical philosophy of science, it will necessarily change as…

"In the early days of research on LSD, it was seriously argued that all psychiatrists should take the drug in order to see how it feels to be psychotic. We…

"A curious by-product of dualism is the belief that phenomena said to show extrasensory perception are parapsychological rather than paraphysical."  (pp. 249-250) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"It is a little too simple to paraphrase the behavioristic alternative by saying that there is indeed only one world and that it is the world of matter, for the…

"The behaviorist is often asked “What about the unconscious?” as if it presented an especially difficult problem, but the only problem is consciousness. All behavior is basically unconscious in the…

"A science of behavior does not, as is so often asserted, ignore awareness. On the contrary, it goes far beyond mentalistic psychologies in analyzing self-descriptive behavior. It has suggested better…

"Descartes could not begin, as he thought he could, by saying, “Cogito ergo sum.” He had to begin as a baby—a baby whose subsequent verbal environment eventually generated in him…

"The [mentalistic] formulation leads directly to a technology based on the manipulation of mental states. To change a man’s voting behavior, we change his opinions; to induce him to act,…

"So far as behavior is concerned, both sensation and perception may be analyzed as forms of stimulus control." (p. 235) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"The heart of the behavioristic position on conscious experience may be summed up in this way: seeing does not imply something seen. We acquire the behavior of seeing under stimulation…

"Because the community cannot reinforce self-descriptive responses consistently, a person cannot describe or otherwise “know” events occurring within his own skin as subtly and precisely as he knows events in…

"The community is generally interested in what a man is doing, has done, or is planning to do and why, and it arranges contingencies which generate verbal responses which name…

"Instead of concluding that man can know only his subjective experiences—that he is bound forever to his private world and that the external world is only a construct—a behavioral theory…

"An adequate science of behavior must consider events taking place within the skin of the organism, not as physiological mediators of behavior, but as part of behavior itself. It can…

"Science often talks about things it cannot see or measure. When a man tosses a penny into the air, it must be assumed that he tosses the earth beneath him…

"Freud had devised, and never abandoned faith in, one of the most elaborate mental apparatuses of all time. He nevertheless contributed to the behavioristic argument by showing that mental activity…

"It was John B. Watson who made the first clear, if rather noisy, proposal that psychology should be regarded simply as a science of behavior. He was not in a…

"Almost all current textbooks compromise: rather than risk a loss of adoptions, they define psychology as the science of behavior and mental life." (p. 223)   Subscribe to RSS feed…

"If psychology is a science of mental life—of the mind, of conscious experience—then it must develop and defend a special methodology, which it has not yet done successfully. If it…

"In short, we can solve the problem of aggression by building a world in which damage to others has no survival value and, for that or other reasons, never functions…

"The environmental solution becomes more plausible the more we know about the contingencies." (p. 216)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"Damage to others may be reinforcing for several reasons." (p. 210)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"If, through evolutionary selection, a given response becomes easier and easier to condition as an operant, then some phylogenic behavior may have had an ontogenic origin." (pp. 203-204)   Subscribe…

"Is a chimpanzee learning binary arithmetic in a laboratory (45) showing chimpanzee or human behavior? The chimpanzees who “manned” early satellites were conditioned under complex contingencies of reinforcement, and their…