ABSTRACT
Skinner's view of thinking and consciousness is what distinguishes his radical behaviourism from methodological behaviourism and from cognitive psychology: Methodological behaviourism and certain versions of logical positivism could be said to ignore consciousness, feelings and states of mind. Skinner prefers to label something like "seeing an object" or "hearing a tune" as a "response" rather than as a stimulus or a state. This allows him to deal with "images" and "hallucinations" as "responses", different from seeing real objects only in that the objects happen to be absent: After hearing a piece of music several times, a person may hear it when it is not being played, though probably not as richly or as clearly. So far as we know, he is simply doing in the absence of the music some of the things he did in its presence. There is a problem with Skinner's alternative, identifying a "mental image" as a "response".
