Skinner’s Quote of the Day

According to [the traditional] explanation [of behavior problems], our task is to correct disturbed personalities, change troubled states of mind, make people feel wanted, give them purpose or a sense…

I shall argue, in short, that the social sciences are not more effective precisely because they are not fully behavioral, and for that reason not really scientific, and for that…

An expanding population will exhaust our resources and pollute the environment and sooner or later (sooner if we suffer a nuclear holocaust) put an end to the kind of world…

The first guess in a series of five, as in the Zenith experiments, is apparently controlled by an abiding preference, by biased preliminary conditions, or by trivial circumstances which cancel…

Guessing is a special kind of (usually verbal) behavior in which two or more responses are about equally likely to be emitted. (p. 455)

To speak of a series of five guesses as a single organized act is perhaps in line with one trend in modern psychology, but a possible alternative view, in which…

The confusion which seems to have arisen from a principle which is supposed to eliminate confusion is discouraging. (p. 430)

The irony ... is that, while Boring must confine himself to an account of my external behavior, I am still interested in what might be called Boring-from-within. (p. 430)

... I contend that my toothache is just as physical as my typewriter, though not public, and I see no reason why an objective and operational science cannot consider the…

The distinction between public and private is by no means the same as that between physical and mental. That is why methodological behaviorism (which adopts the first) is very different…

The ultimate criterion for the goodness of a concept is not whether two people are brought into agreement but whether the scientist who uses the concept can operate successfully upon…

It is agreed that the data of psychology must be behavioral rather than mental if psychology is to be a member of the United Sciences, but the position taken [by…

There was no more reason to make a permanent place for “consciousness,” “will,” “feeling,” and so on, than for “phlogiston” or “vis anima.” On the contrary, redefined concepts proved to…

. . . by the time Bridgman’s book was published, most of the early behaviorists, as well as those of us just coming along who claimed some systematic continuity, had…

If it turns out that our final view of verbal behavior invalidates our scientific structure from the point of view of logic and truth-value, then so much the worse for…

. . . talking about talking is no more circular than thinking about thinking or knowing about knowing. Whether or not we are lifting ourselves by our own bootstraps, the…

To be consistent the psychologist must deal with his own verbal practices by developing an empirical science of verbal behavior. He cannot, unfortunately, join the logician in defining a definition,…

The individual becomes aware of what he is doing only after society has reinforced verbal responses with respect to his behavior as the source of discriminative stimuli . . .…

. . . being conscious, as a form of reacting to one’s own behavior, is a social product. Verbal behavior may be distinguished, and conveniently defined, by the fact that…

In a rigorous scientific vocabulary private effects are practically eliminated. The converse does not hold. There is apparently no way of basing a response entirely upon the private part of…

When public manifestations survive, the extent to which the private stimulus takes over is never certain. In the case of a toothache, the private event is no doubt dominant, but…

“I am hungry” may . . . be variously translated as “I have not eaten for a long time” (1), or “That food makes my mouth water” (2), or “I…

Statements about private events may be under control of the drives associated with their consequences rather than antecedent stimuli. (p. 423)

None of the conditions which we have examined permits the sharpening of reference which is achieved, in the case of public stimuli, by a precise contingency of reinforcement . .…

In summary, a verbal response to a private stimulus may be maintained in strength through appropriate reinforcement based upon public accompaniments or consequences, . . . , or through appropriate…

The principle of transfer or stimulus induction supplies a fourth explanation of how a response to private stimuli may be maintained by public reinforcement. A response which is acquired and…

Suppose, now, that a given response recedes to the level of covert or merely incipient behavior. How shall we explain the vocabulary which deals with this private world? . .…

A commoner basis for the verbal reinforcement of a response to a private stimulus is provided by collateral responses to the same stimulus. Although a dentist may occasionally be able…

. . . in the case of private stimuli, one may teach a child to say “That hurts” in agreement with the usage of the community by making the reinforcement…

It is not strictly true that the stimuli which control the response must be available to the community. Any reasonably regular accompaniment will suffice. Consider, for example, a blind man…

There are at least four ways in which a verbal community which has no access to a private stimulus may generate verbal behavior in response to it . . .…

How is the response “toothache” appropriately reinforced if the reinforcing agent has no contact with the tooth? There is, of course, no question of whether responses to private stimuli are…

. . . the problem of privacy cannot be wholly solved by instrumental invasion. No matter how clearly these internal events may be exposed in the laboratory, the fact remains…

So far as we know, [the speaker’s] reactions to these [private stimuli] are quite like his reactions to external events. Nevertheless the privacy gives rise to two problems. The first…

The response “My tooth aches” is partly under the control of a state of affairs to which the speaker alone is able to react, since no one else can establish…

The problem of subjective terms does not coincide exactly with that of private stimuli, but there is a close connection. We must know the characteristics of verbal responses to private…

This scheme presupposes that the stimulus act upon both the speaker and the reinforcing community; otherwise the proper contingency cannot be maintained by the community. But this provision is lacking…

There are three important terms: a stimulus, a response, and a reinforcement supplied by the verbal community. (All of these need more careful definitions than are implied by current usage,…

We may generalize the conditions responsible for the standard “semantic” relation between a verbal response and a particular stimulus without going into reinforcement theory in detail ... . The reinforcement…

The individual acquires language from society, but the reinforcing action of the verbal community continues to play an important role in maintaining the specific relations between responses and stimuli which…

What we want to know in the case of many traditional psychological terms is, first, the specific stimulating conditions under which they are emitted (this corresponds to “finding the referents”)…

The question “What is length?” would appear to be satisfactorily answered by listing the circumstances under which the response “length” is emitted (or, better, by giving some general description of…

Meanings, contents, and references are to be found among the determiners, not among the properties, of response. (p. 418)

A considerable advantage is gained from dealing with terms, concepts, constructs, and so on, quite frankly in the form in which they are observed—namely, as verbal responses. (p. 418)

. . . behaviorism, too, stopped short of a decisive positive contribution—and for the same reason: it never finished an acceptable formulation of the “verbal report.” The conception of behavior…

The early papers on the problem of consciousness by Watson, Weiss, Tolman, Hunter, Lashley, and many others, were . . . highly sophisticated examples of operational inquiry . . .…

. . . behaviorism has been (at least to most behaviorists) nothing more than a thoroughgoing operational analysis of traditional mentalistic concepts. (p. 418)

The operational attitude, in spite of its shortcomings, is a good thing in any science but especially in psychology because of the presence there of a vast vocabulary of ancient…

Modern logic, as a formalization of “real” languages, retains and extends this dualistic theory of meaning and can scarcely be appealed to by the psychologist who recognizes his own responsibility…

Only in a very limited area (mainly in the case of autonomic responses) is it possible to regard the sign as a simple substitute stimulus in the Pavlovian sense. (p.…