ABSTRACT
Yet it is important to recall what roused my admiration as a student, and does to no less a degree today. Professor Skinner will be remembered, and deservedly so, in the histories of psychology that come to be written, for the penetrating thought, and the careful and assiduous research, which led to The Behavior of Organisms (1938), Schedules of Reinforcement (Ferster and Skinner, 1957), and perhaps for the orientation though not the detail of Verbal Behavior (1957). The first two have their monuments in the everyday usage of working psychologists: it is easy to forget, now that the terms are part of the psychologist’s stock in trade, that ‘operant conditioning’ and ‘variable ratio’ schedules were concepts that needed thinking out and defending.
