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Appeal regarding use of land as goods vehicle operating centre.
In 1934, at the age of 30, B. F. Skinner found himself at a dinner sitting next to Professor Alfred North Whitehead. Never one to lose an opportunity to promote behaviorism, Skinner expounded its main tenets to the distinguished philosopher. Whitehead acknowledged that science might account for most of human behavior but he would not include verbal behavior. He ended the discussion with a challenge: "Let me see you," he said, "account for my behavior as I sit here saying, 'No black scorpion is falling upon this table.'" The next morning Skinner began this book. It took him over twenty years to complete. This book extends the laboratory-based principles of selection by consequences to account...
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The contingent relationship between actions and their consequences lies at the heart of Skinner’s experimental analysis of behavior. Particular patterns of behavior emerge depending upon the contingencies established. Ferster and Skinner examined the effects of different schedules of reinforcement on behavior. An extraordinary work, Schedules of Reinforcement represents over 70,000 hours of research primarily with pigeons, though the principles have now been experimentally verified with many species including human beings. At first glance, the book appears to be an atlas of schedules. And so it is, the most exhaustive in existence. But it is also a reminder of the power of describing and explaining behavior through an analysis of measurable and manipulative behavior-environment relations without appealing to physiological mechanisms in the brain. As en exemplar and source for the further study of behavioral phenomena, the book illustrates the scientific philosophy that Skinner and Ferster adopted: that a science is best built from the ground up, from a firm foundation of facts that can eventually be summarized as scientific laws.