Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!rutgers!njin!princeton!pucc!PSYCH@TCSVM From: harnad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad) Newsgroups: sci.psychology.digest Subject: PSYCOLOQUY V1 #13 (Skinner : 265 lines) Message-ID: <9009160520.AA14160@psycho.Princeton.EDU> Date: 15 Sep 90 18:47:22 GMT Sender: VMNNPOST@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Listserv to Netnews Gateway) Organization: Listserv to Netnews Gateway at pucc.Princeton.EDU Lines: 260 Approved: PSYCH@TCSVM PSYCOLOQUY Sat, 15 Sep 90 Volume 1 : Issue 13 B.F. Skinner Obituary - Kurt Salzinger (line 12) B.F. Skinner Article for Discussion - Lewis Lipsitt, APA (line 146) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Kurt Salzinger KSALZING@POLYVM@.bitnet Subject: Skinner Obituary The following obituary was written by Kurt Salzinger, Professor of Psychology at the Polytechnic University and Principal Research Scientist at the New York Stat Psychiatric Institute. He is a past President of the New York Academy of Scienc and of Division 25 of the APA, the Division for the Experimental Analsysis of Behavior. B. F. Skinner Kurt Salzinger Polytechnic University and New York State Psychiatric Institute Controversy enveloped Skinner, but it failed to shackle him. For years, attracting the largest audiences of any psychologist, he was, nevertheless, treated to the repeated seemingly obligatory pronouncement by cognitive psychologists that behaviorism is dead. When, in his last address to his fellow psychologists -- a mere matter of days before his death -- Skinner likened cognitive psychologists to creationists, he did not choose a vague calumny, nor even merely a term that means nonscientist to most of us; he carefully selected a term that described the critics of Charles Darwin. Darwin also formulated a theory that troubled people. According to him, as everyone now knows, the ancestry of human beings makes them less than unique. Skinner, with his theory, added to this injury the insult of the elimination of an inner agent -- an inner homunculus -- and replaced it with the assertion that the environment selects our behavior. The latter provides still another similarity of Skinner to Darwin; both speak of selection -- Darwin of species, Skinner of responses. Finally, both men were similar in being misunderstood and misinterpreted. When asked recently by Hans Eysenck how he could bear the strain of being so misunderstood, Skinner was said to have replied that he needed to be understood but three to four times a year. I believe, however, that we should try to produce a better record of understanding by reviewing what he said and what he discovered over a period of some 60 years. That, I believe, would be a greater tribute to B. F. Skinner than a listing of the manifold honors bestowed on him over his lifetime.* First we should say outright that he was neither Watson nor Pavlov, though influenced by both. He was like Watson in believing that we must study behavior for its own sake, but he rejected no inner stimuli, just inner mental mechanisms. Although emulating Pavlov in the precision of control of experimental procedure, he eschewed physiological theorizing, believing firmly that behavior must be explained on its own level. Skinner did not oppose relating physiology to behavior; indeed, he believed that as behavior analysts we should define the physiologist's task. Finally, while Pavlov studied classical conditioning, Skinner concentrated on the operant kind. Skinner discovered intermittent reinforcement, thereby doing much to bring the psychology of learning in touch with the real world. He then studied extinction more thoroughly than had been done before him. He found it useful to advocate the concept of probability of response, while abandoning the concept of the reflex. It is important to note that when he abandoned that concept, he ceased being a stimulus-response psychologist. The same is true of the area of behavior analysis which bears his stamp. Put another way, Skinner's behaviorism did not view organisms, including human beings, as robots desperately waiting for the environment to elicit behavior from them. According to Skinner, organisms emit behavior and the environment selects some of it through its consequences. Skinner never rejected thinking or what is sometimes called higher mental processes. Indeed, he has written much on this topic. What he did reject was the mentalistic explanations that buried thinking inside an unexplained concept of mind. Skinner never rejected individual differences. On the contrary, individual differences have always been the hallmark of his approach as is evident from inspection of his long-term operant conditioning studies of single animals. He never denied feelings, just the idea that they are the causes of behavior; he preferred to think of feelings and other states of mind as collateral effects of the real causes; according to him, it is not the feeling of pain that causes one to pull one's hand from a hot stove; the hot stove causes both the behavior and the feeling. When he gave up S-R psychology, he substituted therefore the concept of the reinforcement contingency in which behavior emitted in the presence of a discriminative stimulus is reinforced. This is a three-term contingency. Because he dealt with behavior without an eliciting stimulus, he developed and refined the concept of shaping, the reinforcement of ever closer approximations to a desired new response. New (creative) behavior is selected by the environment because behavior is variable and creative behavior sometimes survives. Although some of Skinner's students use contrived reinforcers, Skinner's first foray into human behavior, albeit through his novel, Walden Two, made use of natural and social reinforcement contingencies. The caricature of the machine-like behaviorist reinforcing people never applied to Skinner, or even to a significant number of psychologists who understand behavior analysis. Skinner believed his book, Verbal Behavior, to be his most important contribution to psychology. In recent years, that book has had something of a revival in inspiring research. Those that know of Verbal Behavior only through Chomsky's book review are in for a surprise when they finally read the book. Skinner was a radical, not a methodological, behaviorist and, therefore, he was able to deal with private events, a concept not well known even though he first enunciated it in 1945. For a methodological behaviorist only those events that are currently observable can be considered. For the radical behaviorist a potentially measurable stimulus is not left out of consideration and, therefore, Skinner's behaviorism was more all encompassing than the others'. Recently, it has become possible to study private events experimentally through the use of drugs allowing the experimenter to specify the stimulus potentially controlling the organism. Psychopharmacology is greatly indebted to Skinner, not only because he first studied the effect of drugs on conditioned behavior, but also because of his emphasis on the maintenance of behavior, a stable baseline can be used to gauge drug effects. Skinner respected species-specific behavior and he inspired the study of imprinting through the concept of reinforcement, thus shedding light on a class of behavior ethologists said he rejected. Skinner was not an effective public relations person, as witness his book title, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, but he never opposed either. He was in favor of freeing people from aversive control. When he said, "beyond freedom and dignity," he meant that people are not in a scientific sense free or possessed of dignity, but he favored promoting the conditions in which people felt that way. More important, Skinner believed in improving the world, in part by substituting positive reinforcement for the aversive control usually practiced. Although the accusation of narrowness is often directed at his radical behaviorism, a more justified accusation might address his refusal to limit its applicability. He applied behavior analysis to: the scientific study of conditioning, improvement of education (the teaching machine and programmed instruction), the betterment of behavior (behavior modification applied to both complex and simple behaviors, raising of children, management of companies, all kinds of abnormalities), language, perception, thinking, psychopharmacology, culture, government, and finally, when he got there, old age. It is customary on occasions such as these to say that the deceased now belongs to history. This pre-eminent psychologist surely does, but I believe that we will most honor him by aiding history to examine what he accomplished and by building upon that for a better science and practice of psychology. * Among other awards, he received the National Medal of Science (1968), and, shortly before his death he accepted the APS William James Fellow Award, and received APA's Presidential Citation for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology. ------------------------------ From: Lewis Lipsitt, APA Science Directorate Subject: Skinner Article for Discussion B.F. Skinner's death, just eight days after receiving a succession of standing ovations in an overflow ballroom at the APA convention in Boston, has prompted vigorous discussion about his life, his accomplishments, his friends and enemies, and his lasting influences on the field he loved so much. On receiving the award from his APA peers for life-long contributions to psychology, he said that this was probably the greatest honor of his life. In due time, everyone who wants it will have his or her say on B.F. Skinner. I'll take my pleasure now. Skinner's many and diverse influences on the field of psychology caused some psychologists, not to mention many non-psychologists, rather considerable consternation. He had to fight misperceptions and ugly rumors most of his life, so intent were others on creating the impression that Skinner was a cold manipulator of human beings, a "narrow behaviorist," and even (even!) a child abuser because he dared to design a better environment in which to rear children. His innovative thinking -- and acting -- and his expressed disenchantments with certain historical trends in the field he loved always put him at the forefront of people's thinking about human and professional affairs. He was surely the best known psychologist in the United States, possibly in the world, at the time of his death. There will be much written and spoken. There will be memorial symposia and there will be volumes. There will be those who will criticize Skinner in death as they did during his life. That is the nature of dialogue, and this is how the roots of any scientific field are cultivated, particularly one that has such vast implications for human development in the largest sense, including public policy, politics and warfare, as well as for prosocial features of human relationships. Fred Skinner was particularly concerned about, and voiced his annoyance with, the apparent defection of cognitive psychologists from "mainstream psychology." He saw advances in cognitive psychology as stemming directly from their historical precedents in the field, and denied that there was a discontinuity or a need to conceptualize a paradigmatic shift to understand thought and memory processes. I believe that Skinner was more worried about the cognitive separatists than about any family quarrels among clinicians and researchers. He saw the founding of new departments of cognition as divisive and misguided. On the other hand, he was always ready to debate clinical psychologists regarding their conceptualizations, their way of looking at people's problems -- in which he had a great interest. He attempted often to reframe these problems in behavioral and specifically (of course) operant terms. Psychologists are a complicated and, in our way, an ecumenical lot. What an evening that was on the 10th of August! There was experimental psychologist B.F. Skinner on the stage to be cited for his life-long work in advancing psychology as a science -- the citation to be read by the clinical psychologist President of APA, and calling attention to Skinner's feats of behavioral engineering, his educational innovations, his literary talent and, in the end, his service to humanity. And there was George Miller, too, to receive a citation of his own -- as founder with Jerome Bruner of perhaps the first cognitive science center in the United States, at Harvard -- and against the advice and with the dissent of Fred Skinner! When Miller got his award, he said something like: "I like reinforcement, too." Fred Skinner approached the lectern looking frail, fragile and humble. He stood at the microphone with neither manuscript nor notes, looking directly at the audience, and told of his perception of his own contributions to the field. He took the opportunity to speak against those whom he thought were trying to split the field, conceptually and politically. He had had little patience for a long time with psychologists who would resort to what he calls mentalistic conceptions, and less with those who believe that cognitive psychology is a field apart from, and with little continuity deriving from, classical experimental psychology. Many think that Skinner denied thought processes. He did not. Skinner was too much in touch with reality to suppose that people could get along without thinking, or mental attributes. He simply spoke of and characterized these processes differently. He knew that people have self- concepts. He believed that self-conceptualizations are responses that people make -- often to themselves only -- about themselves. Covert behavior was not beyond his understanding. But he insisted on antecedents. He argued forcefully that the major task of scientific psychology is to understand the full breadth of behavior, wherever it occurs, and from whatever it springs. Behavior has causes or historical origins. Most importantly in his view, the consequences of previous behavior are among those causes and promote the recurrence of behavior patterns, some of which we eventually characterize as stemming from the individual's "personality." In his final statement at the APA convention, as well as in other public statements of the past year -- including a marvelous interview by Michelle Trudeau on National Public Radio -- Skinner made plain that he considered his major contribution to be not the skillful training of pigeons to play ping-pong, but his insistence on, and systematic study of, the proposition that all behavior is caused and that the natural selection of behavior by consequences is a rudimentary law of nature and evolution. Lewis P. Lipsitt Executive Director for Science American Psychological Association ------------------------------ PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the Science Directorate of the American Psychological Association (202) 955-7653 Co-Editors: (scientific discussion) (professional/clinical discussion) Stevan Harnad Perry London, Dean, Cary Cherniss (Assoc Ed.) Psychology Department Graduate School of Applied Graduate School of Applied Princeton University and Professional Psychology and Professional Psychology Rutgers University Rutgers University Assistant Editors: Malcolm Bauer John Pizutelli Psychology Department Psychology Department Princeton University Rutgers University End of PSYCOLOQUY Digest ******************************