PARTISAN REVIEW
615
What Skinner cannot ignore, he misstates. Thus he defines "empathy" as
"the attribution of feelings to others," though any dictionary would have told
him otherwise. The false definition enables him to duck the problem of
explaining how men, as we all know,
can share
the emotions ofothers. The topic
of imagination-not even listed in the index-is disposed of by such dicta as
"to see a person in one's imagination simply means behaving as we behaved in
his presence upon some earlier occasion." This is, of course, nonsense; a
person who habitually behaves toward imagined individuals as he did toward
them in the flesh is generally deemed to be mentally deranged.
The book is replete with logical fallacies. The non-sequitur: "Gambling
can be demonstrated in many other species, and is explained by a special
schedule of reinforcement"--ergo, the same type of reinforcement "explains"
gambling
in
man. The false analogy: "A completely independent science of
subjective experience would have no more bearing on a science of behavior
than a science of what people feel about fire would have on the science of
combustion"-which ignores the rather essential difference that in one case
the same person is both feeling and behaving, while in the other the feeling
person is not-as a rule-the burning one. And, not least, flat self–
contradiction: Thinking is "completed behavior which occurs on a scale so
small that it cannot be detected by others." Yet only a paragraph later we are
told that such "covert" behavior is "easily observed."
Skinner's attempt to defend the indefensible leads him into blatant mis–
statements of fact. Thus in denying the existence of the mind, he declares that
"we cannot change a person's behavior by changing his mind or his brain."
But of course we can do precisely that through, e.g., drugs or brain surgery;
Lashley wrote extensively on the latter topic nearly 50 years ago. Would
anyone care to bet that Skinner's own behavior would not be radically
changed if he ingested a pint of whiskey
in
half an hour?
In another attempt to downgrade the significance of thinking, Skinner
alleges that "an algebraic equation is solved by finding the value of
X,"
when
most college freshmen are aware that the value ofX is obtained by solving the
equation. Indeed it is perfectly possible to find the value ofX--e.g., in the back
of the book-without solving the equation at all.
To the charge that Behaviorism is simplistic, Skinner declares that "We
no longer find it hard to believe that a bacterium or a virus can explain the
devastation of a plague." Personally, I find it not merely hard but impossible
to believe. Skinner's attempt to explain an epidemic simplistically in terms
merely of microbes, ignoring such key factors as sanitation, nutrition and the
presence of animal vectors that may transmit the microbes, merely demon–
strates his ignorance of medical science.
Skinner's ultimate argument for Behaviorism is the success of the "tech–
nology" it has begotten-the technique of psychiatric manipulation known as
