BF Skinner had HUGE BALLS

BF Skinner, in 1990, seven months before his death:
"Cognitive psychology was left as the scientific companion of a profession and as the scientific underpinning of educational, clinical, developmental, social, and many other fields of psychology. The help it has given them has not been conspicuous."

For those of you who don't know, Skinner was the guy who would put pigeons in a box and train them to spin around in circles. He advanced the notion that reinforcement and punishment were sufficient to explain all behavior, human or otherwise. He treated the mind as a "black box" - it does what it does, but its contents warrant no scrutiny. Skinner, along with the behaviorist tradition he represents, has been a favorite straw man of cognitive psychologists for half a century. And here he is, thumbing his nose at the zeitgeist, issuing in no uncertain terms a comprehensive "fuck off" to the institution that disdains him, yet still admires him enough to call him an idiot half a century after his heyday.

RESPECT