Skinner, B. F. (1987). Upon further reflection

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BOOK REVIEWS 256 
NOTES 
1 . An example is E. W. Norris, A History of the London Hospital, 2nd ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1910). 
2. A Davison, “An Early 18th Century Artist Looks at Medicine,” Proceedings of the Scottish Social History 
of Medicine, (1969.1970): 10-13. 
3 . An appreciation of the difficulties of the current strict control of length of hospital stay (and problems 
with modern diagnostic semantics) can be obtained from a paper by L. I. Lezzoni and M. A. Moskowitz, 
“Clinical Overlap Among Medical Diagnosis-Related Groups,” Journal of the American Medical Associa- 
tion, 255 (1986): 927-942. 
4. S. Muller, chair, Physicians for the Twenty-First Century: The GPEP Report. Report of the Panel on 
the General Professional Education of the Physician and College Preparation for Medicine (Washington, 
D.C.: Association of American Medical Colleges, 1984). 
5. G . B. Morgagni, De Sedibus et Causis Morborurnper Anatomen Indiagatis Libri Quinque, 2 vols. (Venetis, 
typog., Remondiniana, 1761). 
6. The frustration in searching for pre-nationalization hospital records is evident in an article by D. N. Thomp- 
son, “Wirral Hospital Records,” Journal of Social Archivists 7 (1985): 421-442. 
Journaf of the History of rhe Behavioral Sciences 
Volume 24, Juiy 1988 
B. F. Skinner. Upon Further Reflection. Englewood Cliffs, N . J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987. 
viii + 214 pp. $27.95 (cloth) (Reviewed by Fred S. Keller) 
The chapters of this book are fourteen of the author’s papers (thirteen published) 
from the period 1981-1986. Part One (three papers) deals with “Global Issues”; Part 
Two (three papers), with “The Origins of Behavior”; Part Three (two papers), with “Cur- 
rent Issues in Psychology and Education”; Part Four (two papers), with “Behavioral 
Self-Management”; and Part Five (four papers) is called “For Behavior Analysts Only.” 
According to the author, the book possesses “no central theme beyond the commitment 
to an experimental analysis of behavior and its use in the interpretation of human affairs.” 
Much more than this, however, is reflected in its pages-to wit, the major integrants 
of B. F. Skinner’s professional life. Here is Skinner the experimentalist, Skinner the 
technologist, Skinner the humanitarian, and Skinner the complete behaviorist. 
The experimental factor is represented best in Part Four, especially in the final 
chapter, wherein the author points specifically to five “fields of operant research that 
I would look at closely if I were to return to the laboratory.” This is the Skinner of 
The Behavior of Organisms (1 938) and the Ferster-Skinner Schedules of Rein forcement 
(1957). New developments are suggested in the areas of Choice, Stimulus Control, Reac- 
tion Time, Multiple Operants, and Schedules of Reinforcement - developments that 
should bring within surveillance aspects of stimulus and behavioral control that are cur- 
rently unexplored. 
The technologist appears in several papers of this book, but most obviously in 
Chapter 8, “The Shame of American Education.” The current disgraceful state of that 
institution is attributed by the author to “a conspiracy of silence about teaching as a 
skill.” He points to the teaching machine and programmed instruction as technological 
contributions that were ignored for years despite their demonstrated virtues. This 
disregard is traced in turn to our teachers’ colleges and schools of education, which have 
adhered to an outmoded view of human conduct, recently revived and promoted by 
BOOK REVIEWS 257 
psychologists of the cognitive persuasion. (The present reviewer can only agree with 
this assessment, but would add that any change as great as that suggested by the author 
will be resisted by almost everyone within the schoolhouse or outside, not because of 
its intrinsic nature, but of its implications for the function of everyone involved- 
teachers, administrators, and supporting cast, even alumni and alumnae.) 
The cognitivists themselves receive incisive and exhaustive treatment in Chapter 7, 
“Cognitive Science and Behaviorism”- a point-by-point coverage of their claims, end- 
ing with six accusations in the manner of Emile Zola’s denunciation of the enemies of 
Alfred Dreyfus. It is unlikely, however, that this author will be tried for libel! 
Skinner the humanitarian (“having concern for or helping to improve the welfare 
of mankind”) comes through impressively in several portions of this book, particularly 
in the chapters of Part One: “Why We Are Not Acting to Save the World”; “What Is 
Wrong With Daily Life in the Western World?”; and “News From Nowhere, 1984” an 
update on the author’s “Walden Two.” Burris’s report that teaching machines, in com- 
puter form, are now employed in that community leads this reviewer to point out that, 
in the Mexican real-life Walden Two (Communidad Los Horcones), all instruction of 
the children is carried out with PSI, a special form of programmed teaching, in the 
absence of machinery of any sort, and with general satisfaction! 
Frazier’s feeling with respect to work, in Walden Two of 1984, is akin to that of 
Thomas Carlyle, whom he mentions. Carlyle, in Past and Present (1843): “For there 
is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were he never so benighted, 
. . . there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone 
is there perpetual despair.” And Frazier: “At the heart of doing anything is something 
worth keeping. . . . Welfare is a form of leisure and it raises the same problems. Help- 
ing those who cannot help themselves strengthens a culture, but helping those who can 
help themselves destroys it. . . . Welfare payments are not effectively contingent on 
behavior. The health-giving side of operant reinforcement is missing.” 
Most behaviorists are incompletely so. They are behaviorists in the laboratory, in 
their reading and reporting of research, in their discussions with co-workers. Not often 
do we find one who carries his analyses into everyday interpretations of his own or others’ 
actions, or who looks at various institutions and different disciplines (biology and 
linguistics, for example) with an eye to the contingencies that prevail within them. 
Every aspect of the human condition seems to catch the eye of Skinner the com- 
plete behaviorist. They may not be as obvious in Upon Further Reflection as it was M 
his Notebooks (1980), but the variety is there, including the kind of self-management 
needed in writing a paper (Chapter 9) or coping with old age (Chapter 10); the use of 
“contrived reinforcers” in education, behavior therapy, industry, and government 
(Chapter 12); the processes of cultural evolution (Chapter 5) ; and the origins of verbal 
behavior (Chapter 6). 
Some readers of Upon Further Reflection will liken the book to its predecessor, 
Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (1978), with which it has some common features. 
Both books might better be compared with The Behavior of Organisms, written by the 
author fifty years ago. By virtue of a new experimental method, a body of related data, 
and the outline of a system, there emerged within this period a new behavior science. 
A comparison of the first book with the last one should dramatize the magnitude of 
change involved.