ABSTRACT
I was delighted to be asked to contribute to this volume in honor of George Miller. And I was very pleased about the theme of it too — the notion of having people from a wide range of disciplines discuss how they think the mind works. I’m sure that to most psychologists today that’s the most natural kind of topic imaginable for a psychology volume, but one of Miller’s biggest contributions is that he made it seem so natural that this is the question that psychologists ought to be asking. When I was an undergraduate, that wasn’t the question that psychologists thought they should be asking at all. It would have been considered eccentric and soft–headed to be asking, “How does the mind work?” The topic you were supposed to be studying was “What makes people — or rather organisms — behave as they do?” Behavior was supposed to be explained with reference to what came after it, namely, reinforcement, an external event. If absolutely necessary, one could resort to explaining behavior by what came before, namely, a stimulus. One was not supposed to be concerned with what the organism, let alone its mind, was doing in between.
