On the question of what BF Skinner actually believed: you obviously know more about it than I do. Feel free to suggest something I could read to better appreciate the value of Skinner and radical behaviorism (but no promises that I would actually read it anytime soon).
Anyway, I was not trying to attribute any particular position to BF Skinner or anyone else; this is not a post about the history of academic psychology :) In footnote 3, I say that, when I was picking the terminology “behaviorist”, I was trying to invoke a “caricatured” notion of behaviorism, not necessarily a historically-accurate one. Anyway, I wanted to talk about a certain thing, and needed to make up a term for it, and “behaviorist” seemed like an OK choice, and that’s all there is to it.
Thanks for your response! I don’t think you need to read any Skinner for now; the work you are doing is more important. But if you wanted to, Science and Human Behavior is a classic text, and Verbal Behavior is another (some say Chomsky was more correct about how we learn language, but that’s not true). I mention Skinner because I see the behavioral principles coming to light in some of what I read about RL and other forms of training, and I wanted to give him credit for describing these principles of learning so eloquently long ago.
Thanks!
On the question of what BF Skinner actually believed: you obviously know more about it than I do. Feel free to suggest something I could read to better appreciate the value of Skinner and radical behaviorism (but no promises that I would actually read it anytime soon).
Anyway, I was not trying to attribute any particular position to BF Skinner or anyone else; this is not a post about the history of academic psychology :) In footnote 3, I say that, when I was picking the terminology “behaviorist”, I was trying to invoke a “caricatured” notion of behaviorism, not necessarily a historically-accurate one. Anyway, I wanted to talk about a certain thing, and needed to make up a term for it, and “behaviorist” seemed like an OK choice, and that’s all there is to it.
Thanks for your response! I don’t think you need to read any Skinner for now; the work you are doing is more important. But if you wanted to, Science and Human Behavior is a classic text, and Verbal Behavior is another (some say Chomsky was more correct about how we learn language, but that’s not true). I mention Skinner because I see the behavioral principles coming to light in some of what I read about RL and other forms of training, and I wanted to give him credit for describing these principles of learning so eloquently long ago.