For much of his career, B. F. Skinner displayed the optimism that is often attributed to behaviorists. With time, however, he became less and less sanguine about the power of behavior science to solve the major problems facing humanity. Near the end of his life he concluded that a fair consideration of principles revealed by the scientific…

Chomsky's (1959) review of "Verbal Behavior" (Skinner, 1957) has been hailed as the most influential document in the history of psychology. Although many rejoinders to Chomsky's review have been published, their impact has been minimal. Moreover, Chomsky has not answered them in detail. To invite Chomsky to revisit a number of matters concerning…

Bloomfield's "Linguistics as a Science" (1930/1970), "Language" (1933/1961), and "Language or Ideas?" (1936a/1970), and Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" (1957) and "Science and Human Behavior" (1953) were analyzed in regard to their respective perspectives on science and scientific method, the verbal episode, meaning, and subject matter. Similarities…

The present paper comments on and extends the citation analysis of verbal operant publications based on Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" (1957) by Dymond, O'Hora, Whelan, and O'Donovan (2006). Variations in population parameters were evaluated for only those studies that Dymond et al. categorized as empirical. Preliminary results indicate that the…

This paper brings some data to bear on the criticisms, claims, and arguments that Skinner (a) denied or dismissed biological participation in behavior, (b) addressed it only late in his career or more often later than earlier, or (c) addressed it only because of the overwhelming evidence for it or the criticisms that he had overlooked it. For…

Ernst Mach is most closely associated with a positivism that demanded a language of close contact with reality. Mach linked this view with the tradition of the quest for an ideal language in which meaning is a property of a word. Logical positivism and the S-R psychology of the early B. F. Skinner also participated in this ideal-language…

Our paper reviews and analyzes B. F. Skinner's contributions to applied behavior analysis in order to assess his role as the field's originator and founder. We found, first, that his contributions fall into five categorizes: the style and content of his science, his interpretations of typical and atypical human behavior, the implications he drew…

Michael (1975) reviewed efforts to classify reinforcing events in terms of whether stimuli are added (positive reinforcement) or removed (negative reinforcement). He concluded that distinctions in these terms are confusing and ambiguous. Of necessity, adding a stimulus requires its previous absence and removing a stimulus its previous presence.…