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Who, What, and When: Skinner’s Critiques of Neuroscience and His Main Targets

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Abstract

Skinner is commonly accused of being against neurophysiological explanations of behavior. However, in his writings, he did not criticize neuroscience itself as an important independent field from behavior analysis. The problem was in how some authors were using a pseudo-physiology in the explanation of behavior. Skinner was explicit in showing which authors and theories were using physiology incorrectly. Therefore, my goal is to present an analysis of the main targets of Skinner’s critiques against neurophysiological explanations of behavior. This analysis will be divided as follows: (a) the targets of Skinner’s critiques, (b) when the critiques were presented, and (c) the specific critiques that were made. The analysis was based upon 73 papers written by Skinner that were selected through keywords related to the issue. When placed in proper historical context, Skinner did not criticize neuroscience, but the misuse of pseudo-physiological theories in the explanation of behavior.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. Skinner used different terms such as physiology, neurology, and neural science when referring to the sciences dedicated to studying the physiological mechanisms related to behavior. I chose to use neuroscience here because it is the most common term used in contemporary literature on the subject.

  2. It is important to note that I only used the material present in the bibliography section of Morris et al. (2004). Although their analysis started with 289 texts, only a part of this material was selected for analysis and therefore mentioned in the bibliography. That is the reason why the present analysis was conducted with a smaller number (148) of texts.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by FAPESP–São Paulo Research Foundation (2009/18324-1, 2013/17950-1).

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Correspondence to Diego Zilio.

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Zilio, D. Who, What, and When: Skinner’s Critiques of Neuroscience and His Main Targets. BEHAV ANALYST 39, 197–218 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-016-0053-x

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