ABSTRACT
Skinner is clearly aware of the current sad state of psychology, as he showed in a recent and lively paper (Skinner, 1983). A ‘new’ cognitive orientation is indeed with us; unfortunately, it takes the form of new wrinkles on an old associationism and the positing of simple faculties, such as memory. One would think that Skinner’s (1963) ‘Behaviorism at Fifty’ had never been written. Along with cognition, the discovery that pigeons do not require careful training to learn to peck a key has led to the small science of autoshaping, a development that may puzzle posterity; and, if one judges from Mackintosh (1983), ‘blocking’ may emerge as the phenomenon of the decade. These and other ‘advances’ suggest that history and systems may better be taught in reverse chronological order if progress is to be shown.
