ABSTRACT
Skinner vacillated in his views on the nature and causal efficacy of events that occur inside an organism. In his reply to Blanshard he stated that ‘ideas, motives and feelings have no part in determining conduct and therefore no part in explaining it’ (Blanshard and Skinner, 1967, p. 325), and several years later ‘the mental laws of physiological psychologists like Wundt, the stream of consciousness of William James, the mental apparatus of Sigmund Freud have no useful place in the understanding of human behavior’ (Skinner, 1972, p. 19). Why then do thoughts and feelings seem to cause behavior? ‘They usually occur in just the place that would be occupied by a cause…. For example, we often feel a state of deprivation or emotion before we act in an appropriate way. If we say something to ourselves before saying it aloud, what we say aloud seems the expression of an inner thought’ (1972, p. 19). For some reason Skinner never considered that through classical conditioning such precursors to action might come to elicit it.
