I doubt B.F. Skinner* would have been a fan of what I do. I'm interested in the self-concept--which is about as inner as inner states get. Because he didn't think a science of inner states was possible, and also didn't think they were important, he'd have told me to work on something else. Nevertheless, I am a big fan of his work.
One book of hisI particularly like is Science and Human Behavio(u)r, first published in 1953. Because it covers a lot of ground it's hard to summari(s)ze all of the ideas in it in a blog post. So I won't try: I'll just focus on the first two chapters.
In those chapters Skinner does two things. First, he defends science, which he explains has recently come under attack. Second, he argues that, if we try hard enough, a science of human affairs is possible and, moreover, desirable.
Now, there are many takes on this thing called science. For Popper, science was about falsifiable theories. For Lakatos, it was about spectacular prediction. For Kuhn, science was periods of dull tradition-bound work punctuated by periods of rapid changes in thinking and method. For Polanyi, science was essentially an art, involving indefinable powers of thought. Feyerabend gave up all together on the idea that science had a special essence and concluded that anything goes**.
But, what was Skinner's view?
Well, for Skinner, science was crucially a mindset: "first of all a set of attitudes. It is a disposition to deal with the facts rather than with what someone has said about them... a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes" (p. 12).
It was about honesty: "The result may confirm his theory, contradict it, or leave it in doubt. In spite of any inclination to the contrary, he must report a contradiction as readily as a confirmation. If he does not, someone else will... In the long run, the issue is not so much one of personal prestige as of effective procedure. Scientist have simply found that being honest--with oneself as much as with others--is essential to progress. Experiments do not always come out as one expects, but the facts must stand and the expectations fall" (p. 13).
It was about patience and a kind of intellectual chastity: "Scientists have also discovered the value of remaining without an answer until a satisfactory one can be found. This is a difficult lesson. It takes considerable training to avoid premature conclusions, to refrain from making statements on insufficient evidence, and to avoid explanations which are pure invention" (p. 13).
Science was about finding laws of nature: "It begins, as we all begin, by observing single episodes, but it quickly passes on to the general rule, to scientific law" (p. 13).
It was not concerned only with observation: "Science is not concerned just with "getting the facts", after which one may act with greater wisdom in an unscientific fashion... it leads to a new conception of a subject matter, a new way of thinking about that part of the world to which it has addressed itself" (p. 6).
It sought and assumed order: "it is an attempt to discover order, to show that certain events stand in lawful relations to other events... but order is not only a possible end product; it is a working assumption which must be adopted at the very start. We cannot apply the methods of science to a subject matter which is assumed to move about capriciously" (p. 6).
It predicted: "science not only describes, it predicts" (p. 6).
All in all, it was something special: "science is unique in showing a cumulative progress... a unique intellectual process which yields remarkable results" (p. 11).
* In this paper, recently identified by female psychologists as the psychologist with the most historical impact in psychology. For male psychologists he was the psychologist with the third greatest historical impact in psychology.
** Book-length philosophies of science, such as these, of course contain more nuanced visions of science than the sentence-long ones I have attributed to them. These are the core ideas or the ideas they are known best for.
