Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.
B. F. SKINNERScience, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.
B. F. SKINNERThe alphabet was a great invention, which enabled men to store and to learn with little effort what others had learned the hard way-that is, to learn from books rather than from direct, possibly painful, contact with the real world.
B. F. SKINNERUnable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
B. F. SKINNERA permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
B. F. SKINNERI’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
B. F. SKINNERThe real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
B. F. SKINNERDeath does not trouble me. I have no fear of supernatural punishments, of course, nor could I enjoy an eternal life in which there would be nothing left for me to do, the task of living having been accomplished.
B. F. SKINNERA 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.
B. F. SKINNERWe do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
B. F. SKINNERA first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
B. F. SKINNERWe are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
B. F. SKINNERWe have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.
B. F. SKINNERWhat is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
B. F. SKINNERProblem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
B. F. SKINNERWhen we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
B. F. SKINNERA first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
B. F. SKINNER