ABSTRACT
When I was a boy I remember my grandmother saying, in the midst of some bother, ‘When I think, I get confused’; and perhaps that thought should be taken more seriously than its notorious cousin, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ For if there is a common thread to modern epistemological orthodoxy it is that the problem of knowledge will be resolved in thinking about thought. But if there is one bit of advice in the work of B.F.Skinner, one insight that runs contrary to the mainstream, it is that something is badly muddled in this whole history of thought about thought. One can imagine Descartes, for instance, lying abed at dawn in a Stockholm winter pondering on the reality of his existence, and wondering if the world is genuine or if a demon has created a phantasm before his senses, and how he can come to know if any of that is true or not; but then the reverie is broken as Queen Christina summons him, and ruefully he departs from the warmth of his bedclothes for the frigid dressing room, where well he knows how to pull up his trousers and button his waistcoat, and how to frown imperiously at his manservant, and a few moments later how to show just the proper balance of authority and obsequiousness to maintain the Queen’s favor. Descartes is not confused at all about the management of his practical life. But unfortunately he has failed to recognize that his practical life is full of certainty and it is only when he thinks that, like my Gram, he too becomes confused. Skinner, almost alone among those who have thought seriously about the problem of knowledge, finds the fundamentals of human knowledge to be founded on the realities of practical life. The certainties of life are sticks and stones; thought derives from them; life in the external world is primary; the world of the mind is a pale and imperfect shadow. We can learn immensely more about ‘knowing’ through observation of the prac tical life of ordinary people than through study of the ruminations of learned scholars. That is where Skinner’s views that could be called epistemological begin.
