An Existential Look at B. F.
Skinner
Daniel Fallon
Perhaps surprisingly, radical behaviorism has much in
common with the modern rebellion against classical phi-
losophy known as existentialism. Similarities could have
been shaped by a verbal community that included Skinner.
Radical behaviorism is seen as part of a discussion be-
coming increasingly reliable in its treatment of human
behavior, and as an effective philosophy of science. The
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concept of despair is discussed, followed by a consideration
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of modernist thinking in general. Six dimensions of in-
quiry on which radical behaviorism and existentialism
share similar positions are treated, and the concept of
freedom is discussed. Skinner's lifelong devotion to writing
is viewed as a bridge linking science with art.
"An existentialist?"
"Yes," I'll reply, "I view much of my thinking as
consistent with the existentialist point of view."
"But you just said you were a radical behaviorist,"
my interlocutor will respond, "and, a devotee of B. F.
Skinner!"
"Of course."
This opening characterizes dozens of conversations
I have pursued fruitfully during my career. For years I
believed that I was the only radical behaviorist existen-
tialist in the world, although there were clues that an in-
triguing similarity of these two points of view was occa-
sionally apparent to others.
For example, T. W. Wann invited "phenomenolo-
gists" and "behaviorists" to a symposium at Rice Uni-
versity in the spring of 1963, intending to highlight a
stark conflict. Skinner's (1964) contribution, however,
disoriented the participants and resulted, as Wann (1964)
put it, in "the blunting rather than the sharpening of con-
trasts" (p. vii). The impact of the symposium was still
being felt years later in important papers that related rad-
ical behaviorism to phenomenology (Day, 1969b) and
Skinner to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Kvale & Grenness,
1967). Still, my guess is that the society of radical be-
haviorist existentialists is rather small.
The juxtaposition of Skinner's work alongside ex-
istential philosophy occurred naturally to me, because I
had independently found each of them a useful way of
organizing my thinking. In due course, as I worked
through the premises and implications of the two points
of view, I was first surprised and then amused by how
easily they could coexist. I found the courage to bring
this strange coupling forward in conversation, however,
only after I learned its value for teaching uninformed
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Vol. 47, No. 11, 1433-1440
Texas A&M University
audiences about the virtue and accomplishments of rad-
ical behaviorism.
For many intellectuals, existentialism, if not exactly
popular, is nonetheless an acceptable mainstream topic
of conversation. For the same people, on the other hand,
B. F. Skinner is often persona non grata, certainly never
to be placed on the same hallowed ground as those who
pursue the existential struggle for freedom. By blithely
asserting a comfortable compatibility of the two, I found
that I could gain the attention of an otherwise hostile
listener and, by careful exploitation of the moment, score
a few points for the radical behaviorist position and for
the brilliance of Skinner's contribution to human un-
derstanding of the world.
In pointing to a similarity between Skinner's science
and a stimulating philosophical formulation, I do not as-
sert that Skinner was an existentialist. Neither would I
say that radical behaviorism and existential philosophy
are much the same. Rather, the value of noting their fun-
damental similarities lies in the recognition that, as Skin-
ner (1974) put it, "No one steps outside the causal stream"
(p. 206). In other words, Skinner was part of the same
verbal environment as others who spoke, listened, wrote,
and read in the 20th centurya simple fact with impor-
tant implications.
If radical behaviorism and existentialism are similar,
then we should be able to see that the growth in our
knowledge of human affairs is the product of the behavior
of a large verbal community. Individuals in the com-
munity act reciprocally with a gradual but cumulative
effect of improving the reliability of how we think about
the behavior of organisms. Skinner's behavior is affected
by the factors affecting the existentialists, and his behavior
affects them, and so on. If relationships within the lan-
guage systems called existentialism and radical behav-
iorism are fundamentally alike, then existentialists should
be able to profit from a serious study of radical behav-
iorism, and vice versa. Perhaps more important, seeing
a similar pattern in these two contemporary modes of
thinking implies that existentialism is but one of many
that could share common conceptualizations with radical
behaviorism at a basic level. A comparison among several
could prove productive. It might demonstrate clearly, for
example, the special efficiency of radical behaviorism as
a philosophy of science.
I thank Ludy T. Benjamin, Daniel Bjork, Manuel Davenport, Craig C.
Jensen, John J. McDermott, Jack R. Nation, Wayne Shebilske, and Ste-
phen Worchel for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Daniel Fallon, Office of the Dean, College of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M
University, College Station, TX 77843-4223.
1433
 It should not be surprising to be able to find sub-
stantial similarities between existential philosophy and
the work of B. F. Skinner. Existentialism is a modern
development, arising in the 19th century and having its
principal influence in the 20th. Although Skinner was an
idiosyncratic student, growing up with modest cultural
resources in an American small town, he steeped himself
in the important ideas of his time, reading as much serious
material as he could organize into his regimen. At Ham-
ilton College, he took a major course of study in English
language and literature and a minor in Romance lan-
guages, and he sought a career as a writer.
The verbal environment that Skinner encountered
through his reading, writing, speaking, and listening was
part of the verbal community of many leading intellec-
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tuals discussing the nature of humankind. His verbal be-
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havior thus came under control of the same ideas that
influenced such contemporary existentialists as Heidegger,
Ortega y Gasset, Jaspers, Tillich, Merleau-Ponty, and
Sartre. Perhaps reflecting the contingencies that shaped
what has been called the modern period in Western ideas,
Skinner himself experienced a modernist crisis of the kind
existential philosophers call despair. To this extent, Skin-
ner's early adulthood could be considered a case study
in existential development.
Despair
At the heart of most existential theory is the notion of
despair. A human being struggles in the search for purpose
and place within a system only to encounter chaos and
anxiety. A tenet of existentialism is that in the modern
world it is inevitable that a conscientious, intelligent
searcher will in the end confront despair. The masterful
contribution of existential philosophy to finding a way of
coming to terms with this world is through a sophisticated
treatment of the importance of faith. The "leap of faith"
acknowledges the world as it is and asserts that a person
must nonetheless move forward. One can do so by choos-
ing to believe in something.
Existentialists are a diverse bunch. In fact, most of
them object to being placed in the same classification
with the others. The main reason they can be so different
from one another is that it is the act of faith that is im-
portant, rather than its object. The statement of faith is
arbitrary; that is, one is not required to believe in God,
money, or love, but rather to recognize that faith in some-
thing is necessary for one to make decisions and get on
with living. A faith statement could be as simple as "Na-
ture is orderly and will reveal its secrets to the patient
observer."
Throughout his life, Skinner repeatedly referred to
the year after his graduation from Hamilton College as
"the Dark Year." The account of this excruciating period
that he provided in his three-volume autobiography reads
like a classic example of existential despair. Settled into
a solitary room in his parents' home, Skinner was tor-
mented by his lack of purpose. He abandoned the idea
of making a living as a writer and considered landscape
gardening, only to be thwarted by a debilitating grass al-
1434
lergy. Succeeding as a legal writer, on contract from his
father, he learned principally that he could not bear the
thought of becoming a lawyer. Even when he began to
consider psychology, with which he had no experience in
college or elsewhere, he faltered. As Skinner (1976) related
his thinking, "I was floundering in a stormy sea and per-
ilously close to drowning" (p. 298).
The leap of faith that then organized his life occurred
seemingly miraculously. Bolles (1979) commented, "That
metamorphosis is inexplicable; it happens all at once . . .
when the young man happens upon works of Bertrand
Russell and John Watson" (p. 1073). Skinner was an avid
reader of Dial magazine, to which Russell often contrib-
uted, and which led Skinner to Russell's book, Philosophy.
It contained an extensive and generally approving account
of the work of John B. Watson. Skinner's faith was ce-
mented by an article in the New York Times Magazine,
which is the likely source of his drowning metaphor. The
author of the article, H. G. Wells, imagined standing on
a pier with one life preserver and seeing I. P. Pavlov
drowning on one side and G. B. Shaw drowning on the
other. Wells does not hesitate to throw the life preserver
to Pavlov, thereby choosing science over literature. This
was apparently the key encouragement that brought
Skinner to a decision. "And why should I hesitate?,"
Skinner (1976) agreed with Wells enthusiastically, "There
was no reason at all. It was to be graduate study in psy-
chology (p. 301). Furthermore, Skinner (1989) elabo-
rated, "Although I had never had a course in psychology,
I became an instant behaviorist" (pp. 121-122).
Much later, from the vantage point of the radical
behaviorism to which he contributed so greatly, Skinner
(1974) would most likely have described despair in lan-
guage like this: "Pessimism and a loss of self-confidence,
hope, and faith are associated with a lack of strong positive
reinforcement" (p. 146; cf. Ferster, 1973). Such a descrip-
tion could be applied to the events in his life during the
Dark Year. The situation must have been aversive, judging
from the instant relief that escape from it provided, once
a course of action to become a behaviorist had been set.
Skinner (1974) described faith as "a matter of the
strength of behavior resulting from contingencies which
have not been analyzed" (p. 133). In large measure, Skin-
ner's autobiography sketched in general form the outlines
of an analysis of the contingencies that occasioned and
sustained his faith in behaviorism. The escape from aver-
sive stimulation that in part shaped his becoming an in-
stant behaviorist and the positive reinforcers accruing
from his commitment to behaviorism throughout his life
are evident in a careful reading of his autobiographical
writings. In the language of behaviorism, a leap of faith
is verbal acknowledgment of acquiescence in a particular
broad and long-term program of positive reinforcement.
From the turning point of his decision, a seemingly
inexhaustible energy carried Skinner through his re-
markable years as a graduate student at Harvard Uni-
versity. Swimming upstream in an antibehaviorist envi-
ronment, he completed his PhD in a little more than two
years, stayed on as a junior fellow, and in that time pub-
November 1992 American Psychologist
 lished a stream of seminal papers. Among these were the
two unprecedented essays of discovery that changed our
thinking and made a science of behavior possible: "The
Concept of the Reflex in the Description of Behavior"
(Skinner, 1931) and "The Generic Nature of the Concepts
of Stimulus and Response" (Skinner, 1935).
Radical Behaviorism, Existentialism,
and Modernism
The similarity of Skinner's intellectual life with that of
the existentialists is not limited to his experience with
despair, but is played out along a number of dimensions
on which an uncanny resemblance exists. This is just one
way to demonstrate how clearly Skinner can be seen to
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have been influenced by the modernist ideas that swept
the early 20th century, and to have contributed to them.
Positivism and pragmatism were important antecedents.
Smith (1986, pp. 264-275) pointed to the powerful
influence of Ernst Mach on Skinner's scientific thinking,
highlighting the historical, evolutionary, and biological
character of the positivist position developed by Mach.
Smith carefully distinguished this from the later devel-
opment of logical positivism, which Skinner vigorously
rejected (pp. 278-280). Reinforcing this distinction in a
subtle way, Skinner (1987a) wrote about his debt to
Mach's empiricism, and then went on to tie logical pos-
itivism to the methodological behaviorism he so consis-
tently found to be alien to the radical behaviorism he
espoused.
Existentialism is largely a European philosophical
development, but it would be possible to argue that its
American counterpart arises from pragmatism (May,
1958, p. 15). Indeed, William James's (1897) formulation
of what he called "the will to believe" is similar in most
respects to the existential leap of faith, which is reason
to consider James as among those holding existential views
of the world. But both James and Skinner are also easily
viewed as being strongly pragmatic, accommodating
themselves to the world as it is.
Positivism, pragmatism, and existentialism are ways
of describing the thinking of Western intellectuals in the
first half of the 20th century, often referred to as the mod-
ern period. More than anyone else, Skinner made it pos-
sible to consider radical behaviorism as a mode of mod-
ernist thinking, perhaps even the most efficient and pow-
erful. I have identified six dimensions on which Skinner's
position is similar to that of existential philosophy. The
dimensions themselves create arbitrary distinctions of the
kind Skinner would likely reject as unscientific. After all,
what was most important to Skinner was simply what
was happening, and analytic a priori distinctions tended
to get in the way. The dimensions could be viewed as the
outcome of an exercise in inductive observation, however,
revealing the products of one verbal community of 20th
century intellectuals. The framework creates a lattice,
putting on view the affinity of modernist thinking inherent
in both existentialism and radical behaviorism.
November 1992 American Psychologist
Six Dimensions of Inquiry
Abstract-Rational Versus Primary-Inferential
Rather than develop an abstract-rational system, the ex-
istential philosophers insisted on the validity of reliance
on primary experience. They constructed reality from
what their senses told them, and inferred from that what
the world was like. Heidegger (1962) coined the phrase
"being-in-the-world," characterizing the human being as
one who exists and acts directly in the world. Merleau-
Ponty (1962) asserted that "Truth does not 'inhabit' only
the 'inner man,' or more accurately, there is no inner
man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he
know himself" (p. xi). This is a description remarkably
similar to Skinner's (1959) admonition against "The flight
to the inner man" (p. 252).
Skinner also rejected abstract argument, believing
only what can be observed or reasonably inferred, be it
private or public. For example, he decried the view of
cognitive scientists who "argue that the rules are in the
contingencies" and thus feel "free to take the easier path
and study rule-governed behavior" (Skinner, 1987b, p.
99). Instead, he advocated an analysis of verbal behavior
that can demonstrate how contingencies of reinforcement
shape what we call rules. Furthermore, he was quick to
abandon his own rational plan, ignoring the "right" way
of proceeding, to follow a primary observation, listening
closely to what nature had to tell him. Skinner (1956)
promoted a "principle not formally recognized by sci-
entific methodologists: When you run onto something
interesting, drop everything else and study it" (p. 223).
Skinner's emphasis on primary experience grew di-
rectly from his rejection of dualistic conceptions of be-
havioral science that, in his view, permit the reintroduc-
tion of mentalistic forms of explanation. "I don't believe
I coined the term radical behaviorism," Skinner (1989,
p. 122) wrote, "but when asked what I mean by it, I have
always said, 'the philosophy of a science of behavior
treated as a subject matter in its own right apart from
internal explanations, mental or physiological.' " He made
clear the futility of assuming a mental world that itself
would have to be explained: "It is most convenient, for
both organism and psychophysiologist, if the external
world is never copiedif the world we know is simply
the world around us" (Skinner, 1964, p. 87). The exis-
tentialists agreed. Merleau-Ponty (1965) wrote, "It is the
thing itself which I reach in perception" (p. 199), and
Sartre ("An Interview," 1956) echoed, "A table is not in
consciousnessnot even in the capacity of a represen-
tation. A table is in space, beside the window, etc."
(P. H).
By rejecting a priori abstractions, Skinner insisted
on a scientific claim to consider private as well as public
events, to the point of making this consideration the key
to distinguishing between methodological behaviorism
and radical behaviorism. "The public-private distinction
emphasizes the arid philosophy of 'truth by agreement,' "
Skinner argued, pointing out that "The solitary inhabitant
1435
 of a desert isle could arrive at operational definitions,"
and that "What matters to Robinson Crusoe is not
whether he is agreeing with himself but whether he is
getting anywhere with his control over nature" (1945, pp.
293-294). He concluded by asserting that "The distinc-
tion between public and private is by no means the same
as that between physical and mental. That is why meth-
odological behaviorism (which adopts the first) is very
different from radical behaviorism (which lops off the lat-
ter term in the second)" (p. 294).
His emphasis on primary observation led Skinner
to one of his most interesting descriptions, the scientist
as behaving organism. "The scientific study of behavior,"
Skinner (1961) said, does not take "the scientist out of
the causal stream. The scientist also is the product of a
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genetic endowment and an environmental history. He also
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is controlled by the culture or cultures to which he be-
longs" (pp. 542-543). The fact that he operated on the
environment, and it selected his behavior, allows us to
see Skinner behaving in what the existentialists would say
was a dialectical approach to the world, especially with
respect to the verbal community.
Theory Versus Decision-Action
Existentialists are impatient with theory, finding it de-
bilitating, and instead rely on direct action, often called
decision, as a means of constructing a philosophy. Kvale
and Grenness (1967) stressed that existential "phenom-
enologists unequivocally consider behavior as meaningful,
human action. Intentional behavior is directed toward
the world, it acts upon the world and reveals the world
to man" (p. 137).
Skinner would have recognized that the kind of ac-
tion described by Kvale and Grenness (1967) is behavior,
and thus for him it was the primary stuff of his scientific
analysis. His distaste for armchair philosophers is well
known and was just as great as the antipathy shown by
the existentialists. "Much useless experimentation results
from theories," Skinner (1950) wrote, "and much energy
and skill are absorbed by them. Most theories are even-
tually overthrown, and the greater part of the associated
research is discarded" (p. 194).
An existential philosopher would not deny that con-
sistencies in the way that actions and decisions occur could
be described by theory, but that is not the kind of theory
that is rejected. The objection is rather to mental exercise
that puts a premium on logical rules at the expense of
direct experience. Skinner (1950) made the same point:
"A theoretical construction may yield greater generality
than any assemblage of facts. But such a construction
will not refer to another dimensional system . . . it will
arise only after relevant variables have been found and
studied" (p. 216).
Deduction Versus Induction
The existential philosophers preferred an inductive ap-
proach of understanding the world to the hypothetico-
deductive system that characterizes much of classic phi-
losophy. Similarly, Skinner's respect for Sir Francis Bacon
1436
and his use of the inductive method is well known. Skin-
ner (1956) wrote, "I never faced a Problem which was
more than the eternal problem of finding order. I never
attacked a problem by constructing a Hypothesis. I never
deduced Theorems or submitted them to Experimental
Check" (p. 227).
In his autobiography, Skinner related the story of
how he hoped to please his grandmother by writing an
article proving the value of the Presbyterian religion by
showing that many great composers had been Presbyter-
ians. "When I began to check biographies, however, I
could not find any composer who had been Presbyterian.
Worse still, many had been Catholics" (Skinner, 1976, p.
112). In an early unpublished sketch for his autobiography
(Skinner, n.d.), he ended this account with a conclusion:
"I have since learned that facts should come before hy-
potheses" (p. 6).
Grand Design Versus Individual Reality
The existentialist position repudiates grand systems of
philosophy that aspire to account for all knowledge in a
universal scheme. Existentialists see such grand designs
as based on the largely a priori logic of classical philosophy
rather than on the world as it is. Instead, existentialists
assert the primacy of the individual, and insist on a phi-
losophy relevant to people as they are.
One of Skinner's greatest contributions was the de-
velopment of a science based on study of the individual
organism. He moved cautiously toward this position only
as experimental data confirmed that his analytical per-
spective was sound. Thus, his early work was based on
groups of animals. In The Behavior of Organisms, Skinner
(1938) presented arithmetic means for 8 rats in a group;
he subsequently published work based on means for as
many as 24 rats in a group (Heron & Skinner, 1939) and
brought his doctoral student, W. K. Estes, to use similarly
sized groups in their pioneering studies on anxiety (Estes
& Skinner, 1941). Through his Baconian analysis, how-
ever, in "The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus
and Response" (Skinner, 1935), he had already pointed
the way toward the study of individuals.
The choice of a reflex is not entirely arbitrary, be-
cause any given reflex is defined only by the orderly pro-
cesses that emerge at the point of natural fracture between
organism and environment. The dynamic laws governing
reflexes are the same, however, so it is acceptable to study
just a few reflexes in depth. These two sophisticated sci-
entific observations make unnecessary any premise of
equipotentiality of response. The order that is revealed
through experimental analysis demonstrates the dynamic
laws so clearly that establishing their inductive generality
becomes a simple matter of an occasional prudent check.
Therefore, the selection for study of a particular reflex,
even of a species, is largely a matter of convenience. Fur-
thermore, as long as an organism is healthy and repre-
sentative, a single individual will suffice.
Skinner was amazed at the power of the laws of the
reflex revealed through study of individual organisms.
Describing the performance of a pigeon at a meeting of
November 1992 American Psychologist
 the American Psychological Association, Skinner (1956)
wrote,
Here, in a single organism, three different schedules of rein-
forcement are yielding corresponding performances with great
uniformity under appropriate stimuli alternating at random.
One does not reach this kind of order through the application
of statistical methods, (p. 229)
Understanding how the laws of the reflex operate in
individuals also makes possible a genuinely useful science
of psychology. Early in his career, Skinner (1938) had
made this point through reason, not yet knowing through
experimental analysis how profound it was: "The phy-
sician who is trying to determine whether his patient will
die before morning can make little use of actuarial tables"
(p. 443).
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Tradition Versus Rebellion
The dimension of tradition versus rebellion might also
be called integration versus alienation, as the concepts
are closely aligned. Rollo May (1958) described existen-
tialism as "the endeavor to understand man by cutting
below the cleavage between subject and object which has
bedeviled Western thought and science since shortly after
the Renaissance" (p. 11). Walter Kaufmann (1956)
maintained that the heart of existentialism is "a marked
dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial,
academic, and remote from life" (p. 12). In short, exis-
tentialism is often defined simply as a revolt against clas-
sical philosophy. Furthermore, existentialism did not
create a school of philosophy, but rather promoted a way
of understanding the world.
Similarly, Skinner's career can be seen as a revolt
against the traditionalists in psychology, who sought to
create a science by emulating successful scientists in other
fields rather than by studying nature. From the moment
in graduate school when he began to comprehend that a
science of behavior was possible, Skinner's anger at those
in authority who could not hear what he was saying was
intense (Skinner, 1979, pp. 93-94). It remained with him
throughout his life. The colleague he most trusted in
graduate school was a fellow student, Fred Keller, with
whom he joked mercilessly about the faculty.
Bolles (1979) was offended by what he called Skin-
ner's "I did it all by myself" attitude, misunderstanding
that Skinner responded naturally to the world around
him in ways that led others to see him as a rebel. A few
weeks before he died, Skinner said in an interview:
I am not a creator. I am not an initiator. I am a locus in which
a lot of very lucky accidents have come together to make me
productive. . . . I've enjoyed my work. It's been accepted by
enough people to make me think that it will go on. That's
enough, I think, for you don't need to feel that you did it yourself.
It was done through you, and you were lucky to be the one who
executed it because of the forces acting upon you. ("National
Public Radio's," 1990, pp. 34-35)
Skinner's attitude was consistent with his reliance
on primary observation rather than on the opinions of
others, counsel that he consistently passed on to his stu-
November 1992 American Psychologist
dents. Like the existentialists, Skinner reflected modern
ideas in rebelling against received authority, seeking an
unencumbered description of the world, and promoting
understanding rather than the founding of a new school.
Science Versus Art
In general, existentialists are hostile to science and, in
reaction, embrace art. They see in science grand systems
that limit rather than liberate existence, and they see in
art a form of direct expression that illuminates under-
standing. As a psychologist, Skinner could not see science
and art as polar opposites. Indeed, by using science to
examine art, and by using art to explain science, Skinner
demonstrated the common bases of behavior that produce
these products.
Skinner began his adult life believing that he was an
artist, and he sought to make his living as one. He re-
counted with pride the favorable impact his early work
had on Robert Frost, and he found his stay as apprentice
artist at The Middlebury School of English at Breadloaf,
Vermont, so reinforcing that he returned there to write
the legal history his father had commissioned from him
(Skinner, 1976, pp. 248-249, 286).
During the "Dark Year" of his despair, Skinner ex-
perienced what could reasonably be called an epiphany
while visiting his college friend, Alf Evers, in Greenwich
Village. Evers was on the way to becoming a successful
artist and Skinner was about to abandon art, but Evers
told him "science is the art of the twentieth century"
(Skinner, 1976, p. 291). There is a sense in which Skinner
took this dictum literally.
As soon as he had developed the rigor of observation
that led to successful experimental analysis of behavior,
Skinner turned his attention to literary art. A series of
early papers on Gertrude Stein (Skinner, 1934), Shake-
speare's sonnets (Skinner, 1939), and sound patterning
in poetry (Skinner, 1941) cast him in the role of a be-
haviorist literary critic.
Skinner's treatment of the scientist as a behaving
organism helps us to see the similarity of science and art
as products of behavior. Both science and art result from
complex operants under the control of context and con-
sequences. Skinner (1969) pointed out that "Artists,
composers, writers, and scientists characteristically max-
imize the quality and quantity of their work by isolating
themselves from unrelated features of the world about
them" (p. 102), and thus come under a particular kind
of environmental control. "The conditions under which
Renoir was reinforced as he painted The Boating Party"
Skinner wrote, "must have been as real as those under
which a mathematician or scientist is reinforced for solv-
ing a set problem, but much less could have been said
about them in advance" (p. 155).
Skinner conscientiously sought to rid his own writing
of mentalistic expressions and of imputed motives that
could not be traced to environmental histories. During
the course of his career his carefully crafted writing be-
came the most important element of his science. Through
it, he brought science and art together.
1437
 Freedom
We are left with the mischievous construct of freedom.
Most existentialists revel in the notion of freedom,
whereas Skinner publicly proclaimed the value to society
of going beyond it. Yet, even here there is common
ground. Skinner (1971, p. 31) recognized the positive
contribution made by what he called the "literature of
freedom" in removing many societal uses of aversive con-
trol. His point was simply that, to continue this process,
it will be necessary to take a science of behavior seriously.
The existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre ac-
knowledged late in his life the pervasiveness of condi-
tioning. In an interview, Sartre ("An Interview," 1970)
described how he created a character in one of his stories
who "is totally conditioned by his situation" (p. 22). Sartre
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went on to say, "This is the limit I would today accord
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to freedom: the small movement which makes of a totally
conditioned social being someone who does not render
back completely what his conditioning has given him"
(p. 22). Sartre thus attempted to salvage some vestige of
a vanishing free will, but he also thereby acknowledged
the encroachment made on this concept by an increasing
understanding of action as behavior. Such an account
leaves open the prospect that freedom as Sartre described
it will one day be reduced to zero, once all of the con-
trolling conditions are known.
One problem in discussing freedom, as Skinner was
acutely aware, is that it involves talking about feelings.
As he pointed out in his 1945 paper on "The Operational
Analysis of Psychological Terms," it is very difficult for
people to talk reliably about private events such as feel-
ings. Skinner (1971, p. 37) noted that the feeling of free-
dom is for most people the only freedom of any conse-
quence. Salzinger (1990) underscored this fact by em-
phasizing that Skinner
was in favor of freeing people from aversive control. When he
said, "beyond freedom and dignity," he meant that people are
not in a scientific sense free or possessed of dignity, but he favored
promoting the conditions in which people felt that way. (p. 4)
Skinner (1948) expressed himself most clearly about
freedom when he spoke through the persona of Frazier
in Walden Two:
By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior,
but the inclination to behavethe motives, the desires, the
wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of
freedom never arises, (p. 262)
Discussion and Summary
One dimension on which Skinner indisputably differed
from the existential philosophers is that existentialism
was almost exclusively a European phenomenon. Al-
though Skinner was comfortably familiar with European
intellectual life of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
he was quintessential^ American. Referring to Skinner's
characterization of himself as a "social inventor," Bjork
(1991) linked Skinner to the American tradition of in-
vention that includes Benjamin Franklin and Thomas
1438
Edison, and also placed him within a staunch American
Utopian culture. Smith (1992) arrived at a similar con-
clusion by showing how Skinner was part of an Anglo-
American scientific tradition stemming from Bacon and
focused on control, and thus on technology. In contrast,
Smith argued, European science is more comfortable with
description and with a less demanding sense of under-
standing that does not require control.
Skinner, however, a dedicated New World scientist,
surprisingly manifested many of the approaches of the
modern rebellion in philosophy that took place in his
lifetime in the Old World. It is likely that the similarity
between radical behaviorism and existentialism was the
result of a particular verbal community that operated
during Skinner's lifetime, and of which he was a part.
This community included such persons as Mach, Russell,
H. G. Wells, and many French writers whose works Skin-
ner mastered. Verbal communities are reciprocally rein-
forcing systems, and Skinner's writing affected other
modernists, of whom Arthur Koestler (1968) and Joseph
Wood Krutch (1954) are notorious examples. There is
thus surely a possibility that the Western verbal com-
munity discussing humankind may have been shaping an
increasingly reliable way to think about human behavior.
If radical behaviorism and existentialism are at some
level similar ways of approaching human behavior, then
Skinner's science might easily be extended into, for ex-
ample, existential psychotherapy. The therapist's goals for
the client to be (feel?) free to make healthy choices in the
face of adverse conditions are amenable to the technology
constructed from an experimental analysis. What radical
behaviorism brings to existentialism is an emphasis on
specifying the conditions under which human beings
come to feel free. Skinner (e.g., 1953, 1974, 1989) also
discussed such existential concepts as consciousness, self,
being, and meaning in the interesting technical language
of radical behaviorism.
Language, of course, has to be the principal way in
which radical behaviorism distinguishes itself from less
scientific formulations of human behavior. Behaving like
any group of scientists, the specific verbal community of
radical behaviorists has shaped a careful technical lan-
guage that allows it to talk with precision about the phe-
nomena it treats. The general verbal community contains
many other subgroups with special languages, but all share
words that are used to describe human behavior. When
these words are used technically by behavioral scientists
they take on specific meaning, just as the word force has
a different meaning when physicists use it in professional
journals than when they engage in casual discourse with
the general community. This is a point that Skinner made
repeatedly.
"The English language is heavy-laden with mental-
ism," Skinner (1974, pp. 19-20) acknowledged. He went
on to distinguish between vernacular and technical lan-
guage:
For purposes of casual discourse I see no reason to avoid such
an expression as "I have chosen to discuss . . ." (though I ques-
tion the possibility of free choice).. . . The neophyte behaviorist
November 1992 American Psychologist
 is sometimes embarrassed when hefindshimself using mental-
istic terms, but the punishment of which his embarrassment is
one effect is justified only when the terms are used in a technical
discussion. When it is important to be clear about an issue,
nothing but a technical vocabulary will suffice, (p. 20)
Several discussions about human behavior, such as
existentialism and radical behaviorism, may be ap-
proaching it in generally the same way. When the differ-
ence in language is understood, however, one can see more
clearly how the verbal communities engaged in these dis-
cussions may be largely unaware of the similarities in
their approaches. The different levels of precision in their
languages limit their ability to talk with and understand
one another. A more general formulation, such as exis-
tentialism, may be accessible to larger audiences because
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
its language is under the control of a general verbal com-
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
munity of intellectuals that does not control the language
in the same way as the special verbal community of be-
havioral scientists. Thus, radical behaviorism can be seen
as the most precise way of speaking about phenomena
and concepts that are being developed in a different, even
though related, way by such philosophies as existentialism.
Another implication of Skinner's participation in a
larger verbal community is the likelihood that other
modern conceptualizations bear resemblance to radical
behaviorism. Day (1969a) persuasively demonstrated one
such case in showing a similarity between Skinner's views
and those that Ludwig Wittgenstein developed toward
the end of his life. Radical behaviorism could be the phi-
losophy of science that advances much of the productive
thought about humankind in recent history.
Skinner (1983) wrote that
I am convinced that my effect on the world will be greatest (and
there's my reinforcement!) if I minimize all personal blandish-
ments. . . . By tracing what I have done to my environmental
history rather than assigning it to a mysterious, creative process,
I have relinquished all chance of being called a Great Thinker,
(p. 411)
A behaviorist can understand this declaration and can
appreciate the scientific value of the biographical record
that Skinner has provided.
Nonetheless, those of us who still use the conven-
tional vernacular that Skinner sought to identify and iso-
late throughout his career will have a hard time not con-
sidering him a great thinker. His approach was a major
break with tradition in psychology. Because this dramatic
change occurred without an immediate and equally dra-
matic change in terminology, there was a lag of a full
generation before its impact began fully to be appreciated.
Psychologists in the 1930s read Skinner casuallywhich
with such breakthrough achievement cannot be done
and thus missed the force of the reorientation that he
demanded. It was the psychologists after World War II
who began to understand, and undertook to move the
program forward. There is still much in Skinner's writing
that is not widely understood.
Late in 1985, I sent Skinner a simple thank you
letter. I expressed appreciation for his achievement in
November 1992 American Psychologist
opening the way to a science of behavior. Encouraging
him to relax, I reminded him of how he found poetry in
Asa Gray's description of the radish and assured Skinner
that his own work provided the nourishment by which
the next season's growth had already begun. He responded
immediately (B. F. Skinner, personal communication,
December 17, 1985), saying, "I do not plan to relax
just yet."
In his autobiography, Skinner (1976) noted, "I had
apparently failed as a writer but was it not possible that
literature had failed me as a method?" (p. 291). His life
aim was to understand human behavior, but literature
was the wrong field of investigation. During an adult life-
time as a psychologist, he gained confidence in his un-
derstanding of behavior and at the same time worked in-
creasingly to perfect his writing. Using it to build a bridge
linking art with science, the full circle of his life brought
him back to his youthful ambition to be a writer. He told
me in his letter, "Writing is the thing I most enjoy and I
would be very unhappy to give it up."
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