Skinner Burrhus Frederic - B.F. Skinner: a reappraisal

B. F. Skinner
A Reappraisal

Marc N. Richelle

University of Lige, Belgium

First published 1993 by Psychology Press

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 1993 Marc N. Richelle

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ISBN: 978-0-863-77391-4 (pbk)

A large part of this book was written during a sabbatic leave spent in Spanish Universities, with the support of the Fonds National de La Recherche Scientifique of Belgium. I am most grateful to them and to the Rector of the University of Lige, Professor Arthur Bodson, for providing me with a fruitful break in my academic activities.

I am especially grateful to the numerous host universities and individuals in Spain, but their part in my reflection deserves special mention with respect to the content, and is therefore evoked at the end of the Preface.

Some material included has been adapted from a book in French published earlier by Pierre Mardaga, Publisher in Brussels-Liege, under the title Skinner ou le pril behavioriste (1976). I thank Pierre Mardaga, who took over the publishing house started by another friend, the late Charles Dessart, for his permission, and also for having contributed to the propagation of Skinners writings in French.

I have abundantly quoted from Skinners writings, because this is the best way to provide the reader with objective evidence of his thought, which has been so frequently misrepresented. Quotations from Skinner, 1938, 1957, 1968, 1972, are reproduced with permission given by the B. F. Skinner Foundation (Mrs Julie Vargas, President), which I thank for its courtesy. Quotations from Skinner, 1953, are reproduced with permission courteously granted by Macmillan Publishing Co, and quotations from Skinner 1948 with permission by the same publisher.

I am grateful to Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, England, for welcoming one more continental author, with all its implications for editorial work load : in spite of my efforts, the text cannot really compare with the standard of native Englishspeakers. I am most grateful to the publisher and to the anonymous referee for their valuable assistance in improving my style. Remaining imperfections are, of course, my own.

Finally, the requirements made by modern publishers could not have been met without the help of my secretary, Mrs Andree Houyoux. I thank her for her patient and expert exploitation of the word processor.

M. R.
October, 1992

When this book was in the process of being written, in the summer of 1990, Burrhus Frederic Skinner died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday 18 August, at the age of 86. He had been informed, several months earlier, that he suffered from leukaemia. He continued to work serenely on his manuscripts until the day before he died.

Skinners career as a psychologist had covered almost 60 years. He had gained exceptional influence, and had been named among the few most prominent psychologists of our century. He had also been by far the most controversial. He has been attacked from the most opposed sides of psychology, of science at large and of political ideologies. He has often been depicted as the last representative of the behaviourist school, and as such, presented as a sort of fossil, or, in the last 25 years of his life, as the obsolete and unique surviving specimen of an otherwise extinct species, now replaced by the new phylum known as cognitivism. He has been made responsible for keeping psychology, over more than 50 years, in the long and boring night of behaviourism, as one famous philosopher put it.

Echoing characterisations often heard in scientific circles, Skinners obituaries have, once again, pictured him as the fancy experimenter who would waste his time teaching pigeons how to play ping-pong or as the dangerous scientific dictator who would have ruled society by coercion and punishment, had he been offered the chance to enter political practice. Fortunately, he was not offered such an opportunity, and new trends in psychology arrived in due time to neutralise the dragon.

Why, in that context, a book on Skinner? Can the man and his work be of any interest, except to historians of psychology?

It might be enough to answer: for the sake of truth, since any contributor to scientific or philosophical thought deserves an honest reading of his words, and if they have been widely misrepresented, the reasons should be analysed and a more correct appraisal should eventually be reached. The issue, however, is not just a matter of giving justice to an unjustly decried author. It has relevance to the current debates within psychology. By discovering or rediscovering Skinner and Skinners views as they really are, psychologists could also put their own current reflections in proper perspective: that is, correctly appraise the roots of present research and theorising in the past, identify the problems that have remained unsolved in spite of the change in paradigmas the cognitivist school is often thought ofand perceive those seminal aspects of Skinners work which open new avenues of research or converge with most promising contemporary approaches. For some reason, psychologists tend to think of the history of their science as a sequence of revolutions rather than evolution: they like to emphasise ruptures rather than build on continuities. They seem concerned to attach their name to a theory that will replace previous views, and, to that end, they occasionally indulge in the strategy of building a straw man. Skinner has been a favoured target of that strategy. But in misrepresenting his ideas, his opponents have missed most of his genuine contributions to psychology, and have completely overlooked the fact that in many areas of theory and of practice, he was indeed a forerunner.

This book is about Skinner, not about the Skinnerians. The difference is an important one, since most of the controversies surrounding Skinner involve a permanent confusion between the two. As a school of thought, as an organised movement, often identified with the behaviour analysts, the disciples of Skinner, or some of them, have had a quite distinct history in American psychology. Among other things, they have isolated themselves from the rest of scientific psychology by creating their own journals and societies, by closing themselves to open dialogue with other trends and developing a sense of orthodoxy, which has never proved to be fruitful in the progress of a science or in the dissemination of a theory.

Nor is it intended to give an historical presentation of Skinners life and work. I leave to other people the honour of linking their name to Skinners as his recognised biographer, as Ernest Jones' is linked to Freud. Although I shall have to put some of Skinners ideas into adequate historical context, in order to appraise their relevance to scientific debate as it progresses through time, the organisation of this book does not obey the historical course. It is, on the contrary, a selection of themes, which appear to me as most illustrative of Skinners contribution, or as especially misunderstood although crucial in his theory, or as generally neglected, because other, less important points have, for some reason, been emphasised.