5. B. F. Skinner.
Skinner is the last survivor of the
great men of the behaviorist era,
but in many ways
he is the most old-fashioned of all of them in his
methodology; for in Skinner we encounter the pure
strain of the inductivist
doctrine of scientific method.
Skinner believes that a scientist must start
from empir-
ical data and gradually move
towards making inductive
generalizations or laws. Then, at some later
stage, he
may be in a position to formulate a theory which unites
the
laws. He must therefore be very careful to start
from reliable public data.
Skinner admits that men
have “inner lives” which are
of importance to them
as well as to novelists, as Skinner himself
portrayed
in his novel Walden Two. But data drawn
from this
source can never form a reliable basis for a science.
Skinner's polemics against other psychologists, such as
Freudians, who
based generalizations on data drawn
from this inner realm, have been as
forceful as Watson's
polemics against the introspectionists.
Skinner has also accepted the inductivist warning
that a scientist must
never go beyond the observable
in order to explain the observed. He has had
no more
use for physiological speculation about what goes on
inside
the organism than he has had for mentalistic
constructs. He accords a
limited importance to
Tolman's intervening variables such as
“drive” pro-
vided that
it is clearly understood that such terms are
shorthand symbols for
designating the operations by
which the rate of responses can be measured.
To speak
of hunger as a drive, for instance, is to pick out the
effects of operations such as deprivation on the proba-
bility of eating behavior.
Another significant feature of Skinner's approach is
his operationalism,
which has recently been fashionable
as a theory about the language of
science. (See I, 5
above and Peters, 1951.) To Skinner
this meant “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 intervene
between earlier and later statements,
and (4) nothing else”
(Skinner [1945], p. 270). This
doctrine maintained that a term like
“length” or
“hunger” refers not
to a characteristic of an object or
to a state of an organism but to the
experimenter's
operations of observing, manipulating, and measuring
it. It was an offshoot of positivism and of the verifica-
tionist theory of meaning which
came to the fore
during the period between the two World Wars.
This theory of meaning has now been abandoned
by most philosophers. But it
lives on in the meth-
odology of Skinner and
some other behaviorists, where
it has the added appeal of being in line
with the em-
phasis on control and manipulation
of the environment
which was so characteristic of behaviorism in the
Watsonian tradition. Behaviorism was in many respects
an offshoot of
American pragmatism. The experimenter
has not got to trouble his head with
theoretical ques-
tions about why organisms
behave as they do, espe-
cially if reference
might be made to recondite inner
causes in order to answer them. It is
sufficient to see
what forms of behavior develop if one environmental
variable is manipulated rather than another. This will
lead to predictions
which will eventually enable the
experimenter to
“shape” behavior.
Skinner claims that he has no “theory” of behavior
but
only notes correlations. But this, of course, is either
naive or a matter
of stipulation about the use of the
term “theory.” In
fact his work has presupposed a
biological theory of a Darwinian type in
which condi-
tioned reflexes are postulated
as having survival value.
In formulating the laws in accordance with which
these
“reflexes” are built up Skinner in fact revived
many
of the established principles of associationist theory.
In formulating these laws Skinner made an important
distinction between
“respondent” and “operant” be-
havior. This was facilitated by his
introduction of the
Skinner box, which enabled him to study
instrumental
conditioning in a much more controlled way than had
been
possible in Thorndike's puzzle box. In a respond-
ent reaction there is a known stimulus, such as the
ticking of
the metronome, with which a reaction such
as salivation can be correlated
as in classical condition-
ing. In an
operant response, however, such as lever
pressing, there are no known
stimuli with which the
response can be correlated in this way. There
may,
of course, be some form of internal stimulation, but
such
speculations were ruled out by Skinner's opera-
tionalist approach. So operant responses must be re-
garded as functions of experimental conditions such as
food schedules which can be manipulated by the ex-
perimenter. As behavior consists largely of such oper-
ant responses, which are instrumental in obtaining a
variety of goals, Skinner thought that the study of
conditioned operants
and their extinction must provide
the basic laws which would enable
behavior to be
predicted and controlled. One day a theory might be
devised to unify these laws; but the scientist must
proceed to such
“interpretations” in a Baconian man-
ner. He must not “anticipate” Nature
by premature
theorizing—especially if this involves speculations
like
those of Hull about the internal workings of the orga-
nism. Thus Skinner rejected the peripheralist
approach
of Watson but has remained agnostic about the central
processes which mediate between stimuli and re-
sponses. Operant conditioning has been, in fact, an-
other way of reformulating Thorndike's Law of Effect,
in nonmentalistic terminology.
Like Watson, Skinner has not been averse to extend-
ing his conceptual scheme to cover other aspects of
behavior.
For instance in his Science and Human Be-
havior in 1953 Skinner made pronouncements
about
emotions, the names of which serve to classify behavior
with
respect to various circumstances which affect its
probability. In spite,
too, of his hardheaded positivistic
approach in his Verbal Behavior (1957), he outlined
an ambitious scheme for
including language within the
behavioristic framework. This work, however,
was just
about as programmatic as Hull's Principles of
Behavior,
and has been severely criticized by philosophers
and
linguists alike (Chomsky, 1959).
In recent times Skinner has been very much pre-
occupied with providing a technology of teaching in
which skills
and sequences of material are carefully
broken down and the path of
learning systematically
shaped by positive reinforcement. However, his
con-
cept of
“reinforcement,” which has always been criti-
cized for its obscurity and circularity,
has undergone
such changes that his recipes for teaching amount to
little more than injunctions that material should be
logically analyzed and
students should be taken
through it step by step in a way which minimizes
the
repetition of mistakes, and which supplies constant
rewards for
success. This type of procedure, as Skinner
himself has admitted, could be
devised without much
reference to his elaborate laws of operant behavior.
