Philosophical behaviorism: a review of things that happen because they should: a teleological approach to action, by Rowland Stout.
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Mentalistic terms such as belief and desire have been rejected by behavior analysts because they are traditionally held to refer to unobservable events inside the organism. Behavior analysis has consequently been viewed by philosophers to be at best irrelevant to psychology, understood as a science of the mind. In this book, the philosopher Rowland Stout argues cogently that beliefs and desires (like operants such as rats' lever presses) are best understood in terms of an interaction over time between overt behavior and its overt consequences (a viewpoint called teleological behaviorism). This book is important because it identifies the science of the mind with the science of overt behavior and implies that the psychologists best equipped to study mental life are not those who purport to do so but those who focus on the experimental analysis of behavior. (+info)
The philosophical terrain of behavior analysis: a review of B. A. Thyer (Ed.), The Philosophical Legacy of Behaviorism.
(2/27)
The Philosophical Legacy of Behaviorism, edited by Bruce A. Thyer, is a set of original contributions, each dealing, from a behavioral stance, with one of the following major topics of philosophy: epistemology, ethics, consciousness, language, free will and determinism, and self-control. Confusions about radical behaviorism and its similarities to, and differences from, other behavioral and non-behavioral approaches are described in the book, which provides a state-of-the-art description of the philosophical underpinnings of behavior analysis. (+info)
Science and Human Behavior: a tutorial in behavior analysis.
(3/27)
B. F. Skinner's Science and Human Behavior (1953) became the main source of my understanding of behavior during my first semester as a college professor in 1955 at Kansas University. It has continued to exert a major influence throughout my career as the basis for a completely deterministic science of behavior, as a handbook to be consulted as a first step in dealing with any issue in behavior analysis, and as a tutorial in behavioral interpretive analysis--in the use of a small number of behavioral concepts and principles to understand behavior of all degrees of complexity. I describe four general interpretive orientations or maxims that are of broad significance for behavior analysis, and also two underappreciated major theoretical contributions. (+info)
Science and Human Behavior translated into Portuguese: Ciencia e Comportamento Humano.
(4/27)
Science and Human Behavior was translated to Portuguese as part of the effort to begin a psychology course at the University of Brasilia 40 years ago; one of the many results of the first visit of Fred S. Keller to Brazil. The book has been used continuously in undergraduate courses in Brazil since 1967. (+info)
Science and Human Behavior, dualism, and conceptual modification.
(5/27)
Skinner's Science and Human Behavior is in part an attempt to solve psychology's problem with mind-body dualism by revising our everyday mentalistic conceptual scheme. In the case of descriptive mentalism (the use of mentalistic terms to describe behavior), Skinner offers behavioral "translations." In contrast, Skinner rejects explanatory mentalism (the use of mental concepts to explain behavior) and suggests how to replace it with a behaviorist explanatory framework. For experiential mentalism, Skinner presents a theory of verbal behavior that integrates the use of mentalistic language in first-person reports of phenomenal experience into a scientific framework. (+info)
A day of great illumination: B. F. Skinner's discovery of shaping.
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Despite the seminal studies of response differentiation by the method of successive approximation detailed in chapter 8 of The Behavior of Organisms (1938), B. F. Skinner never actually shaped an operant response by hand until a memorable incident of startling serendipity on the top floor of a flour mill in Minneapolis in 1943. That occasion appears to have been a genuine eureka experience for Skinner, causing him to appreciate as never before the significance of reinforcement mediated by biological connections with the animate social environment, as opposed to purely mechanical connections with the inanimate physical environment. This insight stimulated him to coin a new term (shaping), and also led directly to a shift in his perspective on verbal behavior from an emphasis on antecedents and molecular topographical details to an emphasis on consequences and more molar, functional properties in which the social dyad inherent to the shaping process became the definitive property of verbal behavior. Moreover, the insight seems to have emboldened Skinner to explore the greater implications of his behaviorism for human behavior writ large, an enterprise that characterized the bulk of his post-World War II scholarship. (+info)
Steps and pips in the history of the cumulative recorder.
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From its inception in the 1930s until very recent times, the cumulative recorder was the most widely used measurement instrument in the experimental analysis of behavior. It was an essential instrument in the discovery and analysis of schedules of reinforcement, providing the first real-time analysis of operant response rates and patterns. This review traces the evolution of the cumulative recorder from Skinner's early modified kymographs through various models developed by Skinner and his colleagues to its perfection in the 1950s, and then into the 1960s when it proliferated as different scientific instrument companies began marketing their own models of the cumulative recorder. With the rise of digital computers, the demise of the cumulative recorder as a scientific instrument was inevitable; however, the value of the cumulative record as a monitoring device to assess schedule control of behavior continues. The cumulative recorder remains, along with the operant conditioning chamber, an icon of Skinner's approach to psychology. (+info)
On the origin and preservation of cumulative record in its struggle for life as a favored term.
(8/27)
This paper offers a case study of the origins, emergence, and evolution of the term cumulative record as the name for the means by which B. F. Skinner brought his behavior under the control of his subject matter. Our methods included on-line searches, reviews of Skinner's publications, and journal codings and counts. The results reveal that the term is not originally attributable to Skinner, but emerged earlier in ordinary language and in another discipline--education. It was not even original to Skinner in print in his own science. Still, the term was once original to him, which we address with additional analyses of his having originated and advanced it. We conclude with a discussion the constraints of our methods, suggestions for future research, and the variable appreciation of technology and terminology in science studies. (+info)