The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior – verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.
B. F. SKINNERIndeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word ‘admire’ then means ‘marvel at.’
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.
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Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
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I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.
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The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
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That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
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A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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A person’s genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
B. F. SKINNER