Interesting points. Personally never thought of thoughts as respondent behavior — and that was an odd interpretation for a selectionist, I thought, as Skinner proposed thoughts are operant behavior, selected by consequences (essentially intraverbal chains evoked by something in the external environment), but nevertheless, you brought it to environment and went an interesting direction after that. Understanding thoughts as VB traceable to external sources is essential, in my experience with si.
Thanks Jennifer! You’re right and I didn’t want to get too technical about it. Although some like Michael Domjan and Tim Shahan have argued that there isn’t really a distinction between respondent and operant behaviour (which I lean towards myself) (:
Interesting points. Personally never thought of thoughts as respondent behavior — and that was an odd interpretation for a selectionist, I thought, as Skinner proposed thoughts are operant behavior, selected by consequences (essentially intraverbal chains evoked by something in the external environment), but nevertheless, you brought it to environment and went an interesting direction after that. Understanding thoughts as VB traceable to external sources is essential, in my experience with si.
Thanks Jennifer! You’re right and I didn’t want to get too technical about it. Although some like Michael Domjan and Tim Shahan have argued that there isn’t really a distinction between respondent and operant behaviour (which I lean towards myself) (:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26872681/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6701236/
Ooh, interesting! Will check these out.
Hope you like them! Tim Shahan’s paper has had the most profound effect on how I think about behaviour.