"Some Pow'r did us the giftie grant/ To see oursels as others can't." With that play on Burns' famous line as a preface, Willard Van Orman Quine sets out to spin the yarn of his life so far. And it is a gift indeed to see one of the world's most famous philosophers as no one else has seen him before. To catch an intimate glimpse of his seminal and controversial theories of philosophy, logic, and language as they evolved, and (...) to hear his warm and often amusing comments on famous contemporary philosophers.From his beginnings in Akron, Ohio in the early 1900s, Quine takes us on a tour of over 100 countries over three-quarters of a century, including close observations of the Depression and two world wars. Far from a philosophical tract, it is an ebullient, folksy account of a richly varied and rounded life. When he does dip into philosophy, it is generally of the armchair sort, and laced with a gentle good humor: "There is that which one wants to do for the glory of having done it, and there is that which one wants to do for the joy of doing it. One can want to be a scientist because he wants to see himself as a Darwin or an Einstein, and one can want to be a scientist because he is curious about what makes things tick.... In normal cases the two kinds of motivation are in time brought to terms.... In me the glory motive lingered......In this book, Quine approaches the details of his life the way he has always approached them with a sharp sense of interest, adventure and fun. And he has a skill for picking a word that is just off-center enough to pull an ordinary event out of the humdrum of daily life and evoke its personal meaning. The result is a book of memories that is utterly mesmerizing.Willard Van Orman Quine is the author of numerous books, including Word and Object, published by The MIT Press in 1960.A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Much writing on scientific biography focuses on the legitimacy and utility of this genre. In contrast, this essay discusses a variety of genre conventions and imperatives which continue to exert a powerful influence on the selection of biographical subjects, and to control the plot and structure of the ensuing biographies. These imperatives include the following: the plot templates of the Bildungsroman (the realistic novel of individual self-development), the life trajectories of Weberian ideal types, and the functional elements and personae of (...) the folkloric tale of the "hero's quest." The essay discusses the nature and application of these genre conventions in some detail, with the conclusion that biography, however useful, exerts a powerfully distorting influence on the image of how most science gets done. (shrink)

To a greater extent than any other behavioral formulation, Radical Behaviorism has abandoned mechanistic explanation. Like Darwin, B.F. Skinner adopted selection as a causal mode. He applied that mode himself to the behavior of the individual, pointing out but leaving it to others to unravel the causal role of selection in the behavior of a social culture. Also, Radical Behaviorism parts company with traditional behaviorists who pronounce private experience and thinking to be outside the domain of science. Misconceptions, misinterpretations, and (...) misrepresentations have kept the humanity and the promise of this approach to behavioral science from those who would have welcomed and used it if they had been properly informed. (shrink)

The present article is the second in a series of three that outlines the historical and conceptual background of B.F. Skinner’s radical behaviorism as a philosophy of science. Of special interest in this article are Skinner’s academic and research experiences between 1928, when he entered graduate school at Harvard, and the late 1930s, when he had assumed his first academic position. The article also examines the intellectual climate that emerged during the second quarter of the twentieth century, which is the (...) context out of which radical behaviorism developed as a unique position. Overall, the views for which Skinner is recognized were significantly influenced by such figures as Francis Bacon, Percy Bridgman, William Crozier, Jacques Loeb, Ernst Mach, Ivan Pavlov, Bertrand Russell, and John B. Watson. (shrink)

The present article is the first in a series of three that outlines the historical and conceptual background of B.F. Skinner’s radical behaviorism. The series seeks to identify milestones in the development of Skinner’s position, as well as assess the impact of particular factors and events on Skinner himself. Of special interest in this article are the biographical details of Skinner’s life between June, 1926, when he received his undergraduate degree, and September, 1928, when he entered graduate school. The article (...) also examines the intellectual climate at the start of the second quarter of the twentieth century that led Skinner to become interested in the empirical study of behavior. Overall, Skinner’s views during this period were significantly influenced by such literary figures in the modernist tradition as H.G. Wells and Sinclair Lewis; and such scientific/philosophical figures as Francis Bacon, Jacques Loeb, Ivan Pavlov, Bertrand Russell, and John B. Watson. (shrink)

The present article is the third in a series of three that outlines the historical and conceptual background of B.F. Skinner’s radical behaviorism as a philosophy of science. Of special interest in this article is the intellectual context of a paper on operationism Skinner published in 1945, in which he first used the term “radical behaviorism” in print. Overall, Skinner’s radical behaviorism was a thoroughgoing behaviorism that provided a naturalistic account of the full range of human functioning, including the influence (...) on both verbal and nonverbal behavior of phenomena identified as "subjective.". (shrink)