B. F. Skinner and the cognitive revolution

Abstract

The behaviorism that cognitive scientists attack is a caricature, drawn primarily from the more polemical writings of J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. In this brief commentary, I discuss the fact that these writings, and especially Skinner's, offered the neocognitivists such a polar difference from their own position, that it was easier to ignore the distinction between behaviorism and neobehaviorism than to recognize it. I point out that there are factors in Skinner's intellectual history that may account for the emergence of his more radical behaviorism out of what was essentially his own theoretical, neobehavioristic approach to the study of conditioning and learning.