Resource: Behavioural Interpretation of Cognition
It is not commonly appreciated that the behaviorist distinguishes the interpretation of behavior from the experimental analysis of behavior. Only the latter enterprise requires that variables be public, measurable, and reliable; the interpretation of beha…
Resource: The Speaker as Listener: The Interpretation of Struct…
Regularities in word order not specifically addressed by Skinner require behavioral interpretation if our field is to become more influential among students of language. It is argued that the variables controlling such regularities derive from the speaker…
Resource: The Long Good-Bye: Why B. F. Skinner’s Verbal …
The year 2007 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, a book that by Skinner's own account was his most important. The received view, however, is that a devastating review by a young linguist not only rendered Sk…
Resource: Behavior and Philosophy, 38, 61-81 (2010). REPLY TO C…
Six of the seven commentaries expressed basic agreement with our characterization of dispositioning as a typically unacknowledged, pervasive, and often problematic explanatory practice. One of these (Glenn) situated our own interpretive activity within th…
Resource: Behavior and Philosophy, 37, 3-19 (2009). THE ROLE O…
Like most other sciences, behavior analysis adopts an assumption of uniformity, namely that principles discovered under controlled conditions apply outside the laboratory as well. Since the boundary between public and private depends on the vantage point …
Resource: Behavior and Philosophy, 37, 59-85 (2009). AGAINST PA…
This paper is a rejection of parsimonious behaviorism (PB). PB was proposed by Stemmer (2003) to avoid certain problems with radical behaviorism's (RB) appeal to covert behavior to account for mental phenomena. According to Stemmer, covert behavior was no…
Item: Radical Behaviorism:The Philosophy and the Science
Radical Behaviorism: The Philosophy and the ScienceBy Mecca ChiesaTo a greater extent than any other behavioral formulation, Radical Behaviorism has abandoned mechanistic explanation. Like Darwin, B.F. Skinner adopted selection as a causal mode. He applie…
