Critics have argued that behaviorism must necessarily be inadequate to account for complex human behavior whereas cognitive psychology is adequate to account for such behavior. Recently, Fodor has focused this criticism on certain situations in which humans choose among a set of alternatives. We argue that this criticism applies to forms of behaviorism that are reductionistic but not to non-reductionistic behaviorisms like that of Skinner. Non-reductionistic behaviorism can be used to interpret human choice situations of varying degrees of complexity. Such (...) interpretations run into difficulty in accounting for certain aspects of verbal behavior, but so do cognitive theories. Although nothing, in principle, prohibits either type of theory from accounting for complex human behavior, neither current behavioral theory nor current cognitive theory is developed enough at the present time to do so. (shrink)

An organism's individual act may apparently be placed in three kinds of context: overt behavior occurring before and after the act (Context OB); the internal mental state of the actor (Context M); the internal cognitive/physiological state of the actor (Context CP). But contexts OB and CP are sufficient to describe the organism's mental state (if any). Context M is superfluous. Contexts OB and CP are contrasted with respect to their views of pigeons' and people's concepts of probability, delay and rate (...) of environmental events. Focus on Context OB leads to theories of the long-term patterns of behavioral/environmental interaction while focus on Context CP leads to theories of internal mechanisms. This dichotomy of theoretical interest is extended from probability to other abstract and mentalistic concepts, to the function of language as an expander of context hence as an aid to self-control and to Ainslie's (1992) analogy between the relationship of a particular person to other people (social context) and the relationship of a person's particular act either to a pattern of acts by that person extended in time (Context OB) or to that person's internal state (Context CP). (shrink)