"Behaviorism is not the science of human behavior; it is the philosophy of that science. Some of the questions it asks are these: Is such a science really possible? Can it account for every apect of human behavior? What methods can it use? Are its laws as valid as those of physics and biology? Will it lead to a technology, and if so, what role will it play in human affairs? Particularly important is its bearing on earlier treatments of the same subject. Human behavior is the most familiar feature of the world in which people live, and more must have been said about it than about any other thing; how much of what has been said is worth saving?"
So begins B. F. Skinner's Introduction to his vitally important new book, About Behaviorism, his first major statement since Beyond Freedom and Dignity electrified the thinking community and aroused the most ardent support and the most violent attacks as it climbed every best-seller list in 1971. Beyond Freedom and Dignity was a brilliant and provocative argument. About Behaviorism is a strong and supremely lucid explanation--a basic book in which Dr. Skinner defines, analyzes, and defends the controversial philosophy that is today almost synonymous with his name.
Beginning with the crucial question "Why do people behave as they do?" Dr. Skinner leads the reader through his investigation of the causes of behavior, through his own concepts of innate behavior, operant behavior, and verbal behavior, of thinking and knowing, and finally into the most complicated questions of emotion and the sense of Self. Step by step he makes clear his own beliefs about the workings of the human animal--and always with his high purpose clearly in view: the hope of identifying and implementing a science to improve human life, to make our world better, to save us from our own mis-understood selves. And as he unfolds his thinking, he answers--but never contentiously--the arguments that have been made against the science of behavior in which he so passionately believes, and to which he has dedicated so great a portion of his life.
About Behaviorism will take its place at once as the bible of behaviorist thinking and teaching in America.
[From the jacket of About Behaviorism (1980). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.]
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