Skinner was no kind of extremist. His beef with Psychoanalysis and the like boiled down to a distaste for hypothetical and untestable entities like ego, id, oral fixations, Oedipal complexes, etc. His basic idea was, 'Rather than entertaining notions about invisible, inaccessible figments, why don't we focus on what we CAN observe.'
The man never disavowed thoughts or mental processes. He wrote a long time ago that someday, neurological science would likely render most of his work obsolete. But not all of it. He also wrote, rightly, that we had yet an enormous amount to learn about behavioral conditioning that we'll only ever learn through long, slow slogging.
Skinner was no kind of extremist. His beef with Psychoanalysis and the like boiled down to a distaste for hypothetical and untestable entities like ego, id, oral fixations, Oedipal complexes, etc. His basic idea was, 'Rather than entertaining notions about invisible, inaccessible figments, why don't we focus on what we CAN observe.'
The man never disavowed thoughts or mental processes. He wrote a long time ago that someday, neurological science would likely render most of his work obsolete. But not all of it. He also wrote, rightly, that we had yet an enormous amount to learn about behavioral conditioning that we'll only ever learn through long, slow slogging.
Watson said crazy things. Doesn't matter