Skinner’s Quote of the Day

"The behavior of the homesick, forlorn, lovelorn, or lonely is commonly attributed to the feelings experienced rather than to the absence of a familiar environment." (p. 65)   Subscribe to…

". . . a person is said to be unable to go to work because he is discouraged or depressed, although his not going, together with what he feels, is…

"People can usually say what they are looking for and why they are looking in a given place, but like other species they also may not be able to do…

"Seeking or looking for something seems to have a particularly strong orientation toward the future. We learn to look for an object when we acquire behavior which commonly has the…

"​Purpose" was once commonly used as a verb, as we now use "propose."  " I propose to go" is similar to "I intend to go." If instead we speak of…

"​Possibly no charge is more often leveled against behaviorism or a science of behavior than that it cannot deal with purpose or intention. A stimulus—response formula has no answer, but…

"​The critical condition for the apparent exercise of free will is positive reinforcement as the result of which a person feels free and calls himself free and says he does…

"​The conspicuousness of the causes is at issue when reflex behavior is called involuntary—one is not free to sneeze or not to sneeze; the initiating cause is the pepper. Operant…

"​Freedom" usually means the absence of restraint or coercion, but more comprehensively it means a lack of any prior determination: "All things that come to be, except acts of will,…

"​The spontaneous generation of behavior has reached the same stage as the spontaneous generation of maggots and micro organisms in Pasteur’s day. " (p. 59)   Subscribe to RSS feed…

"The apparent lack of immediate cause in operant behavior has led to the invention of an initiating event. Behavior is said to be put into play when a person wills…

"To distinguish an operant from an elicited reflex, we say that the operant response is “emitted.” (It might be better to say simply that it appears, since emission may imply…

"The process of operant conditioning . . . is simple enough. When a bit of behavior has the kind of consequence called reinforcing, it is more likely to occur again…

"Contingencies of reinforcement have the edge with respect to prediction and control. The conditions under which a person acquires behavior are relatively accessible and can often be manipulated; the conditions…

"The question is not whether the human species has a genetic endowment but how it is to be analyzed. It begins and remains a biological system, and the behavioristic position…

"In an important sense all behavior is inherited, since the organism that behaves is the product of natural selection. Operant conditioning is as much a part of the genetic endowment…

"Universal features of language do not imply a universal innate endowment, because the contingencies of reinforcement arranged by verbal communities have universal features." (p. 48) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"When we have reviewed the contingencies which generate new forms of behavior in the individual, we shall be in a better position to evaluate those which generate innate behavior in…

"There are certain remarkable similarities between contingencies of survival and contingencies of reinforcement. Both exemplify, as I have noted, a kind of causality which was discovered very late in the…

". . . verbal behavior could arise only when the necessary ingredients had already evolved for other reasons." (p. 42) Subscribe to RSS feed here

". . . plausible conditions of selection are hard to find in support of such an assertion as that “principles of grammar are present in the mind at birth,” since…

"Darwin simply discovered the role of selection, a kind of causality very different from the push-pull mechanisms of science up to that time. The origin of a fantastic variety of…

". . . to say that a bird builds a nest because it possesses a nest-building instinct, or because certain conditions release nest building, is merely to describe the fact,…

"Profiting from recent advances in the experimental analysis of behavior, [behaviorism] has looked more closely at the conditions under which people respond to the world within their skin, and it…

"Even those who insist upon the reality of mental life will usually agree that little or no progress has been made since Plato’s day." (p. 36) Subscribe to RSS feed…

"Plato is said to have discovered the mind, but it would be more accurate to say that he invented one version of it." (p. 35) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"A person who has been “made aware of himself” by the questions he has been asked is in a better position to predict and control his own behavior." (p. 35)…

"Self-knowledge is of social origin. It is only when a person’s private world becomes important to others that it is made important to him." (p. 35) Subscribe to RSS feed…

"Explanations of behavior vary with the kinds of answers accepted by the verbal community. If a simple “I feel like it” suffices, nothing else will appear. Freud was influential in…

"The words used to describe covert behavior are the words acquired when behaving publicly." (p. 31) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"Verbal behavior can easily become covert because it does not require environmental support. “I said to myself . . . “ used synonymously with “I thought . . . ,”…

"We often ask about feelings by asking “What does it feel like?” and the answer usually refers to a public condition which often produces a similar private effect." (p. 27)…

"Fortunately, . . . the verbal community can to some extent solve the problem of privacy. For example, it can teach responses descriptive of internal conditions by using associated public…

"The community can teach a child to name colors in various ways. For example, it can show him colored objects, ask him to respond with color words, and commend or…

"We might expect that because a person is in such intimate contact with his own body he should be able to describe its conditions and processes particularly well, but the…

"We respond to our own body with three nervous systems, two of which are particularly concerned with internal features. The so-called interoceptive system . . . The so-called proprioceptive .…

"We feel [the world within our skins] and in some sense observe it, and it would be foolish to neglect this source of information just because no more than one…

"A small part of the universe is contained within the skin of each of us. There is no reason why it should have any special physical status because it lies…

"When it is important to be clear about an issue, nothing but a technical vocabulary will suffice. It will often seem forced or roundabout. Old ways of speaking are abandoned…

"For purposes of casual discourse, I see no reason to avoid such an expression as “I have chosen to discuss . . .” (though I question the possibility of free…

". . . it is impossible to engage in casual discourse without raising the ghosts of mentalistic theories. The role of the environment was discovered very late, and no popular…

"To spend much time on exact redefinition of consciousness, will, wishes, sublimation, and so on would be as unwise as for physicists to do the same for ether, phlogiston, or…

"I consider scores, if not hundreds, of examples of mentalistic usage. They are taken from current writing, but I have not cited the sources . . . (I express my…

"One writer has recently said that “mere speculation which cannot be put to the test of experimental verification does not form part of science,” but if that were true, a…

"Much of the argument goes beyond the established facts. I am concerned with interpretation rather than prediction and control. Every scientific field has a boundary beyond which discussion, though necessary,…

"When what a person does i[s] attributed to what is going on inside him, investigation is brought to an end. Why explain the explanation? For twenty-five hundred years people have…

"The environment made its first great contribution during the evolution of the species, but it exerts a different kind of effect during the lifetime of the individual, and the combination…

"An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out of reach of introspection. At the moment we must content ourselves, as the…

"Radical behaviorism restores some kind of balance. It does not insist upon truth by agreement and can therefore consider events taking place in the private world within the skin. It…

"Radical behaviorism . . . does not deny the possibility of self-observation or self-knowledge or its possible usefulness, but it questions the nature of what is felt or observed and…