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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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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


227

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.