What Has Happened to Skinner's Empirical Epistemology?

The papers by Palmer (2013) and Schlinger (2013) center on Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior, especially those aspects of the analysis that touch on scientific and logical behavior. Skinner conceived of science as the collective activity of scientists behaving in socially coordinated ways. These collective activities are behavioral acts (observing, describing, measuring, analyzing, interpreting, etc.) that occur in context and produce consequences. Thus, scientific behavior (and its product, scientific knowledge) is itself amenable to a scientific analysis. This scientific approach to understanding science, what Skinner termed an empirical epistemology, can be found in several of Skinner’s writings throughout his career, but it is a largely unfinished project. The present two papers further this project by considering some functional characteristics of scientific and logical behavior inspired by a Skinnerian analysis. Schlinger reminds us of some of Skinner’s most revolutionary ideas about verbal behavior and science and extends it to some troublesome terms in contemporary behavior analysis. Palmer pushes the analysis into the realm of logical and mathematical behavior, and offers a nuanced view that extends the analysis in new and important directions. I will offer some thoughts about these two interesting papers and the more general approach they represent. I will also suggest a few promising inroads for behavior analysis in the burgeoning field of science studies.