Charlie Fridays 6.10.2016

I was reading an article written by A.C. Catania (1992), noteworthy behaviorist and a colleague of Skinner's for many years, and came across a passage that I absolutely love. I have had many arguments with those that declare that cognitive processes are independent of behavior, that suggest that whatever one is doing when they are thinking is different than what they do when they are acting. I have tried, with varying success, to dissuade them of this position. This passage puts it better than I ever have.

Most processes called 'cognitive' (e.g., imagining or visualizing) are private events. We cannot see what someone else is imagining, but imagining, like walking or talking, is something we do. Some might argue that these private events should not be called behavior. Yet behavior is not limited to movements. It is plausible to assume that imagining shares something with the behavior of looking at things (we can discriminate our imagining from our seeing; when we fail to do so, we are said to have hallucinations; cf. Skinner, 1953).