Skinner’s Quote of the Day

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.…

Attempts to derive a symbolic function from the principle of conditioning (or association) have been characterized by a very superficial analysis. It is simply not true that an organism reacts…

The doctrine that words are used to express or convey meanings merely substitutes “meaning” for “idea” (in the hope that meanings can then somehow be got outside the skin) and…

The weakness of current theories of language may be traced to the fact that an objective conception of human behavior is still incomplete. (p. 417)

We are told that a concept is to be defined “in terms of” certain operations, that propositions are to be “based upon” operations, that a term denotes something only when…

Definition is a key term but is not rigorously defined. Bridgman’s original contention that the “concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations” cannot be taken literally, and no…

No very important positive advances have been made in connection with the first three provisions [talking about (1) one’s observations, (2) the manipulative and calculational procedures involved in making them,…

Operationism may be defined as the practice of talking about (1) one’s observations, (2) the manipulative and calculational procedures involved in making them, (3) the logical and mathematical steps which…

There is no reason to restrict operational analysis to high-order constructs; the principle applies to all definitions. This means that we must explicate an operational definition for every term unless…

And now my labor is over. I have had my lecture. I have no sense of fatherhood. If my genetic and personal histories had been different, I should have come…

By analyzing the genetic and individual histories responsible for our behavior, we may learn how to be more original. The task is not to think of new forms of behavior…

Why not continue to believe in our creative powers if the belief gives us satisfaction? . . . To accept a wrong explanation because it flatters us is to run…

For the second time in a little more than a century a theory of selection by consequences is threatening a traditional belief in a creative mind. And is it not…

To deny a creative contribution does not destroy man qua man or woman qua woman any more than Butler’s phrase [“A hen is only an egg's way of making another…

Selection is a special kind of causality, much less conspicuous than the push-pull causality of nineteenth-century physics, and Darwin’s discovery may have appeared so late in the history of human…

The key term in Darwin’s title is Origin. Novelty could be explained without appeal to prior design if random changes in structure were selected by their consequences. It was the…

A biologist has no difficulty in describing the role of the mother. She is a place, a locus in which a very important biological process takes place . . .…

Something does seem to be taken away from the poet when his behavior is traced to his genetic and personal histories. Only a person who truly initiates his behavior can…

Does the poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories? (p. 397)

. . . I agreed to participate [in a BBC television discussion with Chomsky] only if the moderator could guarantee equal time. I suggested that we use chess clocks. My…

Eventually the question was asked, why had I not answered Chomsky? . . . No doubt I was shirking a responsibility in not replying to Chomsky, and I am glad…

. . . Chomsky’s review began to be widely cited and reprinted and became, in fact, much better known than my book. (p. 391)

Let me tell you about Chomsky. I published Verbal Behavior in 1957. In 1958 I received a 55-page typewritten review by someone I had never heard of named Noam Chomsky.…

I intend to raise the question of whether I am responsible for what I am saying, whether I am actually originating anything, and to what extent I deserve credit or…

A person who, as we say, lives for art, for whom art is the most important thing in the world, is not so much one who finds art reinforcing as…

Mutation must . . . be followed by selection . . . The picture eventually left on the canvas is only one product of the combined processes of mutation and…

We may not like to credit any aspect of a successful painting to chance, but, if we are willing to admit that chance does make a contribution, we can take…

The word “origin” in The Origin of Species is important, for the book is essentially a study of originality. The multiplicity of living forms is accounted for in terms of…

Novelty or originality can occur in a wholly deterministic system. A convenient archetypal pattern is the theory of evolution. The living forms on the earth show a variety far beyond…

For Koestler a behavioral analysis of creativity is not only impossible but ludicrous, since novelty cannot arise in a “mechanistic” system. A creative mind must be at work. But a…