Cognitivist or behaviourist ‐ Who can tell the difference? The case of implicit and explicit knowledge

Abstract

Radical behaviourism has long defined mental or ‘private’ events as behaviour, and therefore legitimate objects of research. It is shown that to attack the complexities of human action, behaviour analysts have also had to postulate theories concerning the interaction of mental events and public behaviour, and so, in effect do cognitive psychology. It is argued that when researchers from the two schools of thought deal with similar problems, such as the relation between implicit and explicit knowledge, there are no fundamental differences between cognitive psychology and Skinnerian, or radical behaviourism.