DIALOGUE WITH B. F. SKINNER

This is another one of Mr. Evans' teletyped Dialogues (cf. Jung, Fromm and Erikson) which conveys comprehensibly the thinking, and to some extent the personality, of today's foremost behaviorist. For thirty years the Harvard Pavlovian has dominated the scene though often challenged (most recently by MIT'S Noam Chemsky). Skinner is basically an optimist who believes that one can ultimately deal with the human condition. An innovator, he is also one of the immutables in the field who has critically killed off many sacred cows; (""If an idea has survived unchanged, it only shows how bad it was. It wasn't strong enough to produce a better idea""). His own scientific canons have not been refuted and this book will serve as an antipasto prefatory to the autobiography he is now planning to write.