Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology

5. The Behaviorist as Philosopher: B. F. Skinner

5 The Behaviorist as Philosopher B. F. Skinner Behavioral science reached its highest and most complete development in Skinner’s writings. No behavioral scientist had a greater influence (both direct and indirect) on the discipline than he. But even though nobody disputes the extent of his influence, assessing its nature is a different matter. To quote Winston Churchill, he was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. I will analyze three themes in Skinner’s intellectual life: the conflict between his incorpo­ ration into animal science and his desire to be a technologist of be­ havior; the contrast between his self­presentation as a polemicist and his apparent wish to be taken seriously as a scholar, especially a philosopher of mind; and the disjunction between his love of art and culture and his apparent brusque, indeed crude, dismissal of human­ istic values and virtues. My three themes did not control Skinner’s thinking in some sort of determinative sense but should be seen as evanescent but recurring motifs in his work. The first theme manifests itself in Skinner’s career path. He showed psychologists what it meant to be a creative scientist. Working entirely on his own, he created a unique version of behaviorism that, within the rather stringent limits imposed by its presuppositions, solved the problems involved in generalizing work from the animal laboratory to human life. More to the point, Skinner’s version of positivism ap­ peared to be both scientifically satisfactory and also applicable to the concrete issues of life, whether animal or human. Yet Skinner himself seemed to have had a lowly estimation of his achievements as a scien­ tist. No sooner had he expressed his ideas in the form of his first book than he launched himself into Project Pigeon, a lengthy piece of ap­ plied work. To Skinner, Project Pigeon was a chance to explore unre­ alized potentials, not a distraction from his true work. In part because Skinner neglected pure research from about 1950 onward one has to 123 124 | The Behaviorist as Philosopher say that his endowment to scientific psychology is exiguous. The prin­ ciples of operant conditioning, especially the various schedules of re­ inforcement, remain powerful methodological tools. But it is, in my view, impossible to give an instance of a substantive Skinnerian find­ ing whose truth would not be seriously contested. Skinner might have acted the part of a creative behavior scientist perfectly, but the lines he delivered have been consigned to psychology’s history. In regard to the second theme, one has to say that as a theory of mind, Skinner’s version of behaviorism has much to recommend it. According to Daniel Dennett, Skinner faced fairly and squarely the es­ sential problem confronting anyone who wishes to generate a scien­ tific account of mental life—namely, how to describe the life of the mind without using the language of mentalism.1 In his polemics against cognitive psychology and in his book on language Skinner tried to demonstrate how his terminology could completely replace a mental language. In common with Wittgenstein, Skinner scornfully rejected the ultimate authenticity of the subjective. He insisted that all statements about mental events be publicly verifiable. He claimed that public verifiability could be assured only if private and public events or objects were placed on exactly the same footing. Hence his fre­ quently reiterated statement that private events were merely public events occurring within the skin. He believed we should explain ac­ tions solely in terms of the history of past reinforcements. His philos­ ophy of mind was intimately linked to his work as a scientist. Skinner and his colleagues demonstrated, over and over again, that seemingly cognitively controlled behaviors could be patiently shaped in the Skin­ ner box. These examples, however, have always been much more persuasive within the Skinnerian camp than outside it. Skinner’s critics claim that in real­life situations we can seldom identify reinforcing events and give a precise, moment­to­moment account of how reinforcers shape behavior designed to achieve some specified goal. So, they say, Skin­ ner’s theory of action really amounts to no more than a propagandist exhortation to seek out plausible histories of reinforcement for any given action. It is certainly difficult not to characterize Skinner as a polemicist. He was fatuously coy about his sources. As a result, he could always claim that specific criticisms had no force because they...