ABSTRACT
In my opinion it is the abstract of Geoffrey Hall’s paper that is the key to what is forceful about the paper itself. As I read the paper, besides a number of relatively minor matters, Hall has basically two complaints to make in regard to Skinner’s stance as leader and public defender of the scientific study of behavior. One: it is wrong of Skinner to give the impression that the major achievement of the experimental investigation of behavior is the analysis of operant behavior in terms of the well-known three-term contingency of discriminative stimulus, response, and reinforcing stimulus. Second: it is misleading of Skinner to create the impression that the practical achievements of ‘applied behavior analysis’ constitute the bona fide application to human affairs of behavior principles determined experimentally in the laboratory; instead, what Skinner is really doing is no more than giving a ‘reinterpretation of known facts in the terminology of determinism and anti-mentalism.’ In what follows I will comment on each of these complaints in turn.
