ABSTRACT
Skinner is not usually viewed as an expert on problem-solving and other higher order cognitive processes. His contribution to psychology is felt to end at the point where intelligence begins. If his work on elementary learning in animals is recognised, he is not generally credited with any significant advance in the field of human thought. This judgement is often expressed, of course, by cognitivists who discard his non-mentalistic approach as irrelevant to the understanding of intellectual activities, today more fashionably labelled cognition. But it is more widely shared by many psychologists who simply note that Skinner does not offer much empirical work in that particular area. It is true that Skinner did not engage in experimental research on problem-solving and similar issues. His contribution has been, in the same vein as for verbal behaviour, at the level of interpretation. It went equally unrecognised, although it was not as strongly attacked as Verbal behavior was by Chomsky; it was simply left aside by specialists in the field, presumably because they already had an impressive bunch of experimental data to deal with and to incorporate in theoretical constructs, and also—as quite correctly noted by Hunt 1 commenting in 1984 on a paper delivered in 1965—because Skinner did not use the right metaphor for thought. He extrapolated from animal studies, which implicitly meant using the animal organism as a model, at a time when the computer metaphor was already the unanimously adopted reference.
