The Role of Theory in Behavior Analysis: A Response to Unfinished Business, Travis Thompson's Review of Staddon's New Behaviorism (2nd edition)

Travis Thompson's lengthy review of Staddon's The New Behaviorism requires several corrections and extensions. This response discusses Staddon's analysis of Hermstein's matching law and concludes that Thompson misinterprets a gentle critique as a paean. The response goes on to defend the utility of models and 'internal states' (i.e., postulated processes that are not directly measurable) as 'formal representation[s] of the data reduced to a minimal number of terms,' a position similar to one of B. F. Skinner's statements. The response ends with a defense of Skinner's empirical brilliance, but a critique of his sweeping societal prescriptions. Keywords Skinner * Superstition * Frustration Effect * Choice * Timing * Unconscious Processes
It's painful to criticize a long, thoughtful article. But Travis Thompson's review of The New Behaviorism (TNB) contains too many mistakes and misunderstandings to let it pass. First, a couple [...]