ABSTRACT
One of the problems with a dialogue such as the present one is that the schism between radical behaviorists and cognitive psychologists occurred several decades ago. In the ensuing years a great deal of work has been done within each area, but seldom has the same issue been studied with a similar paradigm nor are the same goals involved except in some broad sense of understanding behavior. Typically radical behaviorists plot learning curves representing how animals may learn to discriminate or categorize certain stimulus objects, but they would not bother to initiate questions about ‘natural categories’ and prototypes as Rosch (1973) so elegantly did. On the other hand, cognitive psychologists might plot the perceived similarity between items (Krumhansl, 1980; Shepard, 1957; Tversky, 1977) but neglect to ask how or even if environmental contingencies have anything to do with the observed relationship between items. Thus, there are few examples in which radical behaviorists and cognitive psychologists have worked on similar issues in similar ways. Perhaps this is because they are simply asking different questions. The radical behaviorist asks how behavior can be accounted for by the apparent history of the organism, and the cognitive psychologist asks how it can be accounted for by the structure and transformation of knowledge which the individual appears to possess.
