Happy birthday, BF Skinner

Today is the birthday of Burrhus Frederic Skinner. I have a soft spot for ol’ BF, because he was right about a lot of things and refused to let the man get him down. Behaviourism gets a bad rap these days, with cognitive people the world over rolling their eyes at the idea that all behaviour can be explained by stimulus-response associations of varying kinds. But Skinner was my kind of scientist: driven by the data and refusing to indulge in the theoretical excess he saw in others.

Skinner was, in part, responding to the Freudian school of thought, that saw all human behaviour as generated by unseen drives and urges. Skinner recognised that there was no scientific evidence for the existence of these particular kinds of internal mental states mediating between the environment and our behaviour. In fact, you could account for a lot of behaviour, human and otherwise, without ever assuming any internal states, simply by recognising that behaviours can be shaped and assembled by learning via schedules of reinforcement.