"Chemistry suggests ways in which living things could have emerged from nonliving, and biologists explain the origin of species, including homo sapiens, through natural selection. There is less for a…
". . . we have only begun to construct a science needed to analyze the complex interactions between the environment and the body and the behavior to which it gives…
". . . people’s answers to questions about how they feel or what they are thinking often tell us something about what has happened to them or what they have…
"Verbal contingencies of reinforcement explain why we report what we feel or introspectively observe. The verbal culture that arranges such contingencies would not have evolved if it had not been…
"The analysis of behavior need not wait until brain science has done its part. The behavioral facts will not be changed, and they suffice for both a science and a…
"Human behavior will eventually be explained, because it can only be explained by the cooperative action of ethology, brain science, and behavior analysis." (p. 25) Subscribe to RSS feed…
"There are two unavoidable gaps in any behavioral account: one between the stimulating action of the environment and the response of the organism, and one between consequences and the resulting…
"We can trace a small part of human behavior, and a much larger part of the behavior of other species, to natural selection and the evolution of the species, but…
"No account of what is happening inside the human body, no matter how complete, will explain the origins of human behavior. What happens inside the body is not a beginning."…
"Whether or not the cognitive revolution has restored mind as the proper subject matter of psychology, it has not restored introspection as the proper way of looking at it. The…
"Unfortunately, we cannot report any internal event, physical or metaphysical, accurately. The words we use are words we learned from people who did not know precisely what we were talking…
"To think is to do something that makes other behavior possible. Solving a problem is an example. A problem is a situation that does not evoke an effective response; we…
"In a behavioral analysis, contingencies of reinforcement change the way we respond to stimuli. It is a changed person, not a memory, that has been “stored.” (p. 16) Subscribe…
"Like pre-Darwinian evolution (where to evolve meant to unroll as one unrolled a scroll), developmentalism is a form of creationism." (p. 16) Subscribe to RSS feed here
"Since the observable effects of reinforcement are usually not immediate, we often overlook the connection. Behavior is then often said to grow or develop. Develop originally meant to unfold, as…
"Since behavior analysts deal only with complete instances of behavior, the sensing part is out of reach of their instruments and methods and must . . . be left to…
"The world takes control of behavior when either survival or reinforcement has been contingent upon it." (p. 16) Subscribe to RSS feed here
"We do what we do because of what has happened, not what will happen. Unfortunately, what has happened leaves few observable traces, and why we do what we do and…
"As an experimental analysis has shown, behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences, but only by consequences that lie in the past." (p. 15) Subscribe to RSS feed…
"What is felt when one has a feeling is a condition of one’s body, and the word used to describe it almost always comes from the word for the cause…
"The inspection or introspection of one’s own body is a kind of behavior that needs to be analyzed, but as the source of data for a science it is largely…
"Physiologists, and especially neurologists, look at the same body [as philosophers and psychologists] in a different and potentially successful way, but even when they have seen it more clearly, they…