Skinner’s Quote of the Day

"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…

"Most methodological behaviorists granted the existence of mental events while ruling them out of consideration." (p. 17) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"It is so easy to observe feelings and states of mind at a time and place which make them seem like causes that we are not inclined to inquire further.…

"The quickest way to [avoid the mentalistic problem] is to confine oneself to what an early behaviorist, Max Meyer, called the “psychology of the other one”: consider only those facts…

"Structuralism or developmentalism do not tell us why customs are followed, why people vote as they do or display attitudes or traits of character, or why different languages have common…

"A kind of prediction is possible on the principle that what people have often done they are likely to do again; they follow customs because it is customary to follow…

". . . the major difficulties are practical: we cannot anticipate what a person will do by looking directly at his feelings or his nervous system, nor can we change…

"The person with whom we are most familiar is ourself; many of the things we observe just before we behave occur within our body, and it is easy to take…

"Why do people behave as they do? It was probably first a practical question: How could a person anticipate and hence prepare for what another person would do? Later it…

"The major problems facing the world today can be solved only if we improve our understanding of human behavior. Traditional views have been around for centuries, and I think it…

"Unfortunately, very little is known about this analysis outside the field. Its most active investigators, and there are hundreds of them, seldom make any efforts to explain themselves to nonspecialists.…

"The criticisms listed above [on pp. 4-5] are most effectively answered by a special discipline, which has come to be called the experimental analysis of behavior. The behavior of individual…

"I believe the explanation [why behaviorism is still so seriously misunderstood] is this: the science itself is misunderstood." (p. 8) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"Much is at stake in the way in which we look at ourselves, and a behavioristic formulation certainly calls for some disturbing changes". (p. 7) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"[Watson’s] new science was also, so to speak, born prematurely. Very few scientific facts about behavior—particularly human behavior—were available . . . Among the behavioral facts at hand were reflexes…

"Watson himself had made important observations of instinctive behavior and was, indeed one of the first ethologists in the modern spirit, but he was greatly impressed by new evidence of…

"The first explicit behaviorist was John B. Watson, who in 1913 issued a kind of manifesto called Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It. As the title shows, he was not…

"Human behavior is the most familiar feature of the world in which people live, and more must have been said about it than about any other thing; how much of…

"Some of the questions [behaviorism] asks are these: Is such a science really possible? Can it account for every aspect of human behavior? What methods can it use? Are its…

"Behaviorism is not the science of human behavior; it is the philosophy of that science." (p. 3) Subscribe to RSS feed here

A good tradition of starting on January 4th of the New Year to publish daily quotations from Skinner's publications continues today. We start 2017 with the first quote from About…

"By distributing scientific knowledge as widely as possible, we gain some assurance that it will not be impounded by any one agency for its own aggrandizement." (p. 442) "Science is…