The Analysis of Behavior: A Program for Self-Instruction

We can distinguish between principles of content and principles of procedure. The principles of content within any system supply us with the empirical laws and theories about the subject matter within the area of scientific concern. The principles of procedure provide us with the operations in terms of which we may discover these principles of content. Systems in psychology and social science have not always lined up principles of procedure with principles of content. The behavior theory of Clark Hull, for instance, contains a modified version of the Thorndikian notion that learning arises out of trial-and-error behavior. Hullians learn about such a principle of learning by the procedural use of a hypothetico-deductive system, however. They, thus, exempt them? selves from their own principles of content that they discover governs others who are learning. Holistic principles have been advanced by the gestalt psychologists to explain perceptual functioning. Recent re? search, nonetheless* suggests that their own perceptions of perception were not governed by the required holism they advocated as a content principle, since the factor of motivation, discovered to be a significant component in the total map of perceptual functioning, was not included in their theoretical principles of perception. It is the singular self-reflexiveness present in The Analysis of Behavior that makes it so interesting. The principles of the programming procedure themselves arose out of the principles of content to which the program is applied in this book. One experiences the principle of con? tent of Skinner's system in the procedure of learning about them. One of the curiosities of this outcome is that Professor Skinner is not particu? larly interested in "experience" or in what is "inside" an organism psychologically. He is interested in practices, not perspectives, of people, in discovering lawful stimulus-response connections. Yet, not? withstanding this radical operationalism, he has provided us with an experience of his principles of content in the very method he uses to teach us about them. The accomplishment is not a small one, although