Word: skinners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...been said that no man is better than his worst ideas. And B.F. Skinner has come up with some real lulus, or so his critics (and they're abundant) claim. They are adjectives like "evil", "fantastic" and "dangerous" when describing him. Their machine gun attacks would probably render most men impotent. They say that his psychology is "vacuous," "unscientific," "irresponsible," "without a psyche" and that it "necessitates an atrophy of consciousness." And many of them are distinguished figures: Noam Chomsky, Thomas Szasz, Rollo May, Carl Rogers and Stephen Spender--to name...
...Skinner's deterministic philosophy of radical behaviorism allows no room for free will, and that's downright threatening to most of us who adhere to the notion of an inner experience of choice. He insists that behavior is controlled by one's environment, particularly by, "contingencies of reinforcement" that bring about more of one kind of behavior and less of another. For Skinner, the autonomy of inner man is a myth. "There is no place," he writes, "in the scientific position for a self as a true originator or initiator of action." He sees emotion as a matter...
...above all, the key to the Skinnerian doctrine is "operant conditioning," or the selection of behavior by its consequences. According to Skinner, behavior can be controlled by controlling the environment through behavioral technology--though it is not clear just who would control that technology. Survival, he says, is really the only value worth upholding...
Committed to cracking down on official corruption when he took the job, Thompson was well aware that such cases often present complicated proof problems. Bribery, conflict-of-interest and conspiracy prosecutions usually contain gray areas easily exploited by defense attorneys. Then Samuel Skinner, now Thompson's chief deputy, came across a 1941 case in Louisiana in which a federal mail-fraud statute was used to prosecute former associates of Huey Long. The defendants had happened to use the mail in the collection of inflated fees for a bond deal. Thompson's men looked closely and with growing delight...
...gone, get Skinner's boxes...