Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
B. F. SKINNERAt this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It’s a question of what’s to be done from now on.
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A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
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Your liberals and radicals all want to govern. They want to try it their way- to show that people will be happier if the power is wielded in a different way or for different purposes. But how do they know? Have they ever tried it? No, it’s merely their guess.
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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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If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.
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Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.
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A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
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No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn’t die out, it’s wiped out.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It’s a question of what’s to be done from now on.
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The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.
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The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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Unable 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.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
B. F. SKINNER