The Old Behaviorism: a Response to William Baum's Review of the New Behaviorism
Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: It is hard to know how to respond gracefully to a review as incomplete, inaccurate, and just plain ad-hominem grumpy as Baum's, but I will try.The review is ad hominem because Baum imputes motives-dishonorable ones-to me.It is inaccurate in numerous ways that I shall document.And it is incomplete because it fails to tell the reader what the book is about.First, Staddon's evil motives: ''As I read through his diatribe against Skinner . . .I wondered why Staddon would write this. . . .Most likely, it is a political move; he wants to distance himself from Skinner and to curry favor with the anti-Skinner psychologists and philosophers'' (p.76).A response is hardly necessar y, but I remind the reader that smearing the messenger if you can't deal with the message is a standard ''political move.''As for currying favor with the anti-Skinnerians, perhaps Baum missed the section in The New Behaviorism (TNB) headed Philosophical Objections to Cognitive Psychology, roughly half of chapter 6, which discussed several problems with the cognitive approach, including the homunculus fallacy, the competence-performance distinction (due to the anti-Skinnerian-in-chief, Noam Chomsky), lack of attention to motivation (Guthrie's objection to Tolman), and overinterpretation of straightforward experimental results, illustrated by Schachter and Wagner's (1999) imaginative comments on a brain-recording experiment published in Science.Or chapter 8, which refutes several cognitive accounts of phenomena related to consciousness.Or perhaps Baum failed to notice in this very journal the unenthusiastic reaction of cognitivists Gallistel and Gibbon to our critical treatment of scalar timing theory (Gallistel, 1999;Gibbon,
Author: J. E. R. Staddon
Institution: Duke University
Language: English
Subfield: General Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1970920256