RESPONSES TO STADDON, SHIMP, MALONE, AND DONAHOE

Abstract

I stand by my review.I documented all of my observations with quotations from the book.My speculations about motives were only in keeping with my wonder at the meanness of the treatment of Skinner.If the review contains some ad hominem elements, the ad hominem character of Staddon's attacks on Skinner invited them.If his goal was a presentation of behaviorism to nonbehaviorists, as he claims, he went about it in a strange way, devoting most of the book, not to ''setting a context,'' but to trashing Skinner's writings and then presenting briefly his own idiosyncratic view, which I again say is indistinguishable from the tradition begun by Hull and Tolman and embraced by cognitive psychology today.What happened to constructive approaches like: Skinner made conceptual contributions that took the science of behavior so far, many contributions have been made since, and here is the spectrum of views that one may find in contemporary behaviorism?The book is far from a balanced presentation, but is a piece of advocacy, pushing a regressive version of behavior analysis.Worst, even here in this response, Staddon tells us that behaviorism has in no way advanced since Skinner.With this, he denies the contributions of thinkers like Howard Rachlin (1994), Philip Hineline (1984), Mecca Chiesa (1994), Vicki Lee (1988), and myself (Baum, 2003/1994), who have disagreed with Skinner and worked to take behaviorism beyond Skinner's narrow and ambiguous conception.Although Staddon claims to ''set a context'' by criticizing Skinner's popular writings, much of the book is devoted to remonstrating about Skinner's views on theory, which, seen in historical perspective, were appropriate for their time.Staddon refuses to acknowledge this because he paints himself as an ''iconoclast.''He would save behavior analysis from irrelevance by reinstating a proper emphasis on theory.

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