When B.F. Skinner Became a Joke

William F. Buckley begins an interview of B.F. Skinner by noting that Skinner has "just written a book announcing that we will have to do away with individual freedoms and throw away the 'superstition' of the dignity of man."

B.F. Skinner himself is right there and does not deny that this is his thesis in Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

Of course, by this time Skinner was on the fast track to becoming a punchline.

Overly-lauded for training pigeons, rats and a few chickens to do a few simple tricks in the 1930s, his ego had swollen to the size of a Macy's Parade float, and he began to over-generalize and pontificate on things he knew absolutely nothing about, writing a Utopian novel (Walden II) shortly after WWII, and then capping that with Beyond Freedom and Dignity in 1971.

And the result? Behaviorism became a bit of a joke.

Where did Skinner go wrong? Right at the beginning. Skinner decided, based on his work with pigeons, rats and chickens, that all animals were little more than empty boxes with external inputs. According to Skinner, living things were simply a fleshy response system to stimuli. Since every animal is little more than an empty black box, no animal should be given credit or blame for choices and behaviors, as no animal has real free will or real choice. According to Skinner, animals are simply automatons programmed by outside stimuli.

Of course this is not entirely true, as anyone who has worked with instinctive traits knows, but by the mid-1960s Skinner did not really care if it was entirely true. What did it matter that his provocative-sounding pseudo-scientific statements about human behavior were not backed up by actual science? Skinner's work was now in the philosophy and fiction sections of the book stores -- that was what he was selling!

 Beyond Freedom and Dignity was one of Skinner's last bits of prattle, and it was effectively eviscerated by Noam Chomsky who noted in The New York Review of Books ( December 30, 1971) that: 

Skinner's science of human behavior, being quite vacuous, is as congenial to the libertarian as to the fascist. If certain of his remarks suggest one or another interpretation, these, it must be stressed, do not follow from his "science" any more than their opposites do. I think it would be more accurate to regard Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity as a kind of Rorschach test. 

Chomsky goes on to note that Skinner offers no evidence to support his Olympian pronouncements about people, nor does he even bother to try to ground his claims in science. 

Claims... must be evaluated according to the evidence presented for them. In the present instance, this is a simple task, since no evidence is presented, as will become clear when we turn to more specific examples. In fact, the question of evidence is beside the point, since the claims dissolve into triviality or incoherence under analysis. 

Chomsky goes on to note that "behavioralism" had already become somewhat of a joke, with almost everyone moving to separate themselves from the Utopian ramblings of Skinner who, by now, had inflated mere trivia to significance, even as he waved off all true science such as as physics, chemistry, and molecular biology: 

It is important to bear in mind that Skinner's strictures do not define the practice of behavioral science. In fact, those who call themselves "behavioral scientists" or even "behaviorists" vary widely in the kinds of theoretical constructions that they are willing to admit. W. V. O. Quine, who on other occasions has attempted to work within Skinner's framework, goes so far as to define "behaviorism" simply as the insistence that conjectures and conclusions must eventually be verified by observations. As he points out, any reasonable person is a "behaviorist" in this sense. Quine's proposal signifies the demise of behaviorism as a substantive point of view, which is just as well. Whatever function "behaviorism" may have served in the past, it has become nothing more than a set of arbitrary restrictions on "legitimate" theory construction, and there is no reason why someone who investigates man and society should accept the kind of intellectual shackles that physical scientists would surely not tolerate and that condemn any intellectual pursuit to insignificance. 

And so, in the end, Skinner became a caricature of himself -- an ego-besotted egg-head who fell in love with his own reflection; a man who codified a few important points about training rats and pigeons, but who then tried to blow those points up into a unifying truth for man that eclipsed all other truths, and with himself as the God Head deserving (of course) a three-volume autobiography.


The result was almost a cartoon. As Chomsky notes: 

Skinner confuses "science" with terminology. He apparently believes that if he rephrases commonplace "mentalistic" expressions with terminology derived from the laboratory study of behavior, but deprived of whatever content this terminology has within this discipline, then he has achieved a scientific analysis of behavior. It would be hard to conceive of a more striking failure to comprehend even the rudiments of scientific thinking. 

Bingo. Wrapping a few simple ideas in words devoid of common-place meaning is not science, it's nonsense. 

Yes, under the nonsense there may actually be some substance (timing, consequences, consistency), but when stripped down to simple terms, how often do we we that find that the prize inside is quite a bit smaller than the box in which it was delivered? 

And so it is with Skinner. 

 His work in the 1930s with rats and pigeons was important and illuminating, but what came out of it was something less than a unifying truth for all mankind.  In the end, Skinner was less science than science fiction; less prize inside and more designer box.