CRITICISM AND RESPONSE IN THE SKINNER CONTROVERSIES

Abstract

Twentieth-century historians and philosophers of generally agree that controversy is integral to scientific method and development (see Kuhn, 1962; Toulmin, 1972). Psychologists, too, have recognized the role of controversy in scientific progress. Edwin G. Boring, for instance, wrote in 1929, The history of science, like Hegel's view of the history of thought, is one long series of theses, set off by ardently advocated antitheses, with ultimate syntheses terminating controversy and marking a step forward. This picture, it seems to me, holds, not only for speculative, philosophical psychology, but also for the most rigorously observational work. Controversy has always been part of the method of science (Boring, 1929/1963, p. 68). Discipline-wide controversies among scientists most frequently develop when strategic intellectual agreements in a discipline are questioned or when these strategic agreements have significant implications for social policy. In the sciences, strategic agreements concern elements in what historian of Thomas Kuhn calls the dominant paradigm or matrix of a discipline. Disagreements about metaphysical or cosmological assumptions, research methodologies and explanatory models, and values and goals are at the heart of major scientific debates. Because permanent theoretical plurality characterizes (see Hesse, 1980), disagreements about these issues cannot be resolved through appeal to formal logic or empirical evidence. Instead, choice between these options requires judgment on the basis of both scientific and nonscientific values and purposes. Philosopher of Stephen Toulmin writes, for instance, A dispute over intellectual strategies is thus a dispute for which no established decision pro-