Summary
Contents
Subject index
Behaviorists, or more precisely Skinnerians, commonly consider Skinner's work to have been misrepresented, misunderstood, and to some extent defamed. In this book, the author clarifies the work of B F Skinner, and puts it into historical and philosophical context. Though not a biography, the book discusses Skinner himself, in brief. But the bulk of the book illuminats Skinner's contributions to psychology, his philosophy of science, his experimental research program (logical positivism) and the behavioral principles that emerged from it, and applied aspects of his work. It also rebuts criticism of Skinner's work, including radical behaviorism, and discusses key developments by others that have derived from it.
Skinner on Cognition
Skinner on Cognition
Various behavioral approaches (e.g., Watson's, Hull's, Skinner's) dominated psychology from approximately the 1920s to the 1960s. Many psychologists believe that in the 1960s a “cognitive revolution” occurred in psychology (Baars, 1986). In this revolution, experimental psychologists who studied humans began to argue that the behaviorists' views of the legitimate subject matter of psychology were wrong. They proposed that cognitive constructs such as information processing, memory storage, and executive functioning would provide a fuller, more accurate understanding of human activity. An important part of their argument was that, although behavior must make up the actual data of psychology, it is legitimate and even necessary to make inferences from these data to unobserved constructs that serve to better explain the behavior. For ...
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