Baum, W. M. (2000).
Alive and kicking: A review of Handbook of Behaviorism, edited by William O'Donohue and Richard Kitchener.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,
33, 263-270.
Behaviorists have struggled and continue to struggle
with basic questions about behavior, such as how to define
behavior, how to talk about behavior in relation to environment,
and what constitutes an adequate explanation of behavior.
Skinner made huge progress on these questions, because of
his emphasis on the generic character of stimuli and responses,
his advocacy of rate as a datum, his introduction of stimulus
control, and his reliance on selection by consequences as a
mode of explanation. By no means, however, did he provide
final answers. In particular, Skinner fell short because he
never escaped from the limitations imposed by thinking in terms of
contiguity and discrete events and because he never specified a
useful role for theory. The 14 chapters in this book offer varying
degrees of clarity on the ways in which behaviorists and behaviorally
oriented philosophers dealt with basic questions in the past and are
dealing with them in the present, post-Skinner. They are reviewed
individually, because they are uneven in quality. Overall, the
book is a useful tool for gaining historical and philosophical
background to behaviorism and for getting some idea of
behaviorist" current directions.
DESCRIPTORS: behaviorism, history of behaviorism, philosophical
behaviorism, psychological behaviorism