"On August 10th, 1990 in Boston, Massachusetts, BF Skinner received the American Psychological

Association's special Presidential Citation for lifetime contributions to psychology. On this occasion, he
delivered the keynote address for the 98th annual convention of the APA.

'This association has always been very good to me,' Skinner began. 'I went to my first meeting in 1932.
Most of you were not yet born. I suppose my paper was on schedules of reinforcement, believe it or not,
and it was at the very end of the program and almost everyone had gone home. But one person instead
was Richard M. Elliot who four years later gave me my first job at the University of Minnesota. Later, the
Association provided space for a conference on the experimental analysis of behavior that some of my
friends and I had organized, and that became of course division 25. Somewhere along the line, I also
received your distinguished scientific contribution award. And now this. But really, the greatest honor in
my life. I am extremely grateful.'

'It has been suggested that I might make a few remarks in return. Psychologists, following the
philosophers, have looked inside themselves for explanations of their behavior. They have felt their
feelings and observed their states of mind and mental processes through introspection. Introspection,
however, has never been a very satisfactory process. Philosophers have acknowledged its defects but
argued that nevertheless, it is the only way to self-knowledge. The psychologists tried to improve it.
Wundt, Titchener, and Pfitzner, particularly, invented 'brass instruments,' as William James called them,
to present stimuli the effects of which were to be inspected by trained observers. A trained observer, for
example, could see red without seeing it as a red object. That was a stimulus error. Watson, of course,
attacked introspection in his manifesto of 1913. And I suppose you could say he was successful because
many bright psychologists have stopped introspecting almost entirely.

How did the cognitive psychologists probably see the representations of reality they talk about? In fact,
they say that's all you possibly can say. But I don't think they claim to see themselves processing them,
storing them in memory, retrieving them, and so on. Instead, they have resorted to theories. Theories
about what is going on in the head or the mind. But theories have to be confirmed and the question is,
how can you be sure a theory is right until you can see what is this theory about? Well, as you know,
most of them have turned for that - brain science. The mind is what the brain does, and the brain can be
inspected, whether the next introspected like any other organ. But does the brain really initiate the
'Hey' as the mind or self was said to do? The brain is part of an organism and what it does is simply part
of what the organism does. It is part of what is to be explained.

Now, that explanation I think can only be found by looking outside the organism, the individual rather
than within, and it is found in three kinds of variation and selection. The first, it is natural selection
which explains why we have a body in the brain at all. But there was a difficulty with that. It prepares a
species only for a future that resembles the selecting past. That fault was corrected by a further
evolutionary step, the evolution of operant conditioning, which enabled the environment of the
individual to select behavior with contingencies that were not stable enough to work through natural
selection. However, one can learn very little in a solitary world by operant conditioning. But unless you
have a social environment which is a rich set of contingencies of reinforcement and responsible for the
elaborate repertoires we all acquire, cultures also evolve, and that is the third type of variation and
selection.

Now, just these three external kinds of circumstances explain what the body does. Then what is this
mind or self supposed to be doing? Does it exist? There seems to be no room for it in a scientific
account. You can say it is explained by contingencies of selection and in turn explains behavior, but that
isn't necessary. You can skip the thing entirely. Well, let's just start again and we'll start a long way off.
Everyone talks about behavior and did so long before there were philosophers or scientists of any kind.
We all speak. It's in vernacular. We call it's a proper word to call it, and vernacular is not a pejorative. It
means, as the root meant for the Romans, the language of the household of daily life. We all speak it. It
is a language in which newspapers, magazines, and books are published. It's the language of radio,
television when they are talking about the individual. It is a language used by psychologists, sociologists,
anthropologists, political scientists, and economists, all the behavioral sciences. It is the language used
by professionals when they deal with their clients for a very simple reason. It is the only language the
clients understand.

Now, there's a very curious thing about that language. The vernacular refers very richly to feelings and
states of mind so that there is some reason to suspect that we are back with what psychologists have
been looking for. However, if you examine the terms in the vernacular, you'll find that each one has a
double meaning. I say I'm hungry and I think I'll get something to eat. Now, what am I saying? Am I
mentioning a feeling, hunger, and am I talking about some cognitive process called thinking? Or am I
conveying to someone something about my personal history? To say I am hungry just to say, among
other things, I haven't eaten for some time. To say I'm hungry, among other things, says if you'll give me
some food, I'll probably eat it. The determiners in the vernacular which seem to refer to feelings and
states of mind are really talking about contingencies of reinforcements, about the world and about its
effect on people.

Three years ago, I published a paper in the American psychologist. I've had much too much, I've had too
greater share of that journal, and I'm afraid, but it was called the origins of cognitive stars. In it, I
considered perhaps 70 or 80 words, each of which referred, on the one hand, to a mental process of
some kind, but on the other, to a purely physical kind of thing, either to the kind of situation in which a
person finds himself or herself, or to contingencies which are operating to select behavior appropriate
to that situation. There are, in my own experience, some 1500 words that have that double meaning.
Now, what has happened, I think, is that psychology has split in two ways, one part going in the
direction of finding out the essence of the feeling, the essence of the cognitive process, and the other
going in the direction of references to contingencies, a reinforcement.

The psychologist who is a professional, who is a practitioner, uses the vernacular of his or her clients to
find out more about what has happened to them and what they are probably going to do. The
psychologist who claims to be a scientist, investigating, searching for an inner originating creative,
originated in initiating self, is quite different. It's doing quite different things. What has happened, I
think, is as psychology has advanced as a practice, as a profession, far more rapidly than as a science. It
began as a science, that is, it began as an effort to discover what was going on inside the mind or the
self. But as the membership of this organization shows, it was the people who were interested in that
particular topic, soon became the minority, they're not only replaced by the professionals, but by a
psychologist who didn't care too much about what was going on inside, but were interested in behavior,
not necessarily as behaviors and teaching psychology, the clinical psychology, developmental
psychology, and so on, and those became important sciences quite apart from an effort to isolate an
originating mind or self.
The notion of selection by consequences seems extremely difficult to understand. We've seen what has
happened in evolution. It is still true that biology cannot be properly taught in America because those
who call themselves creationists or creation scientists opposes some kind of script. If I say that
psychologists in searching for this inner self or mom have wasted their time, you may feel that I am
being arrogant. If I say that the philosophers who over the centuries have tried to discover themselves in
that sense, that I am being arrogant. But I would call your attention to the fact that equally or even more
brilliant men and women over a much longer period of time have been trying to establish the existence
of and the nature of a different creator, or in this case, spelled with a capital C.

Oh, that is a very great problem and you know how difficult it has been for natural selection to be
accepted. Imagine how difficult it is going to be for the individual selection by consequences of operant
behavior over the other and evolution of cultures and the other kinds of selection which take over the
role of a creative self or mind. So far as I'm concerned, cognitive science is the creationism of
psychology. It is an effort, it is an effort to reinstate that inner initiating originating creative self or mind
which in a scientific analysis simply does not exist.

I think this association has been through a recent trial just because of this difference. It has, as you
know, suffered a kind of secession by cognitive psychologists who are unhappy. But when I associate
with so many practitioners and I would regard it not as a secession but as an improvement. I think I think
I think it is time for psychology as a profession and as a science in such fields as psychotherapy,
education, developmental psychology, and all the roads it is trying to realize that the science which it
will be most helpful is not cognitive science searching for the inner mind or self but selection by
consequences represented by behavior analysis.

Looking back, looking back on my life, 62 years as a psychologist, I would say that what I've tried to do,
what I've been doing is to make that point. So how selection by consequences in the individual can be
demonstrated in the laboratory with animals and with human subjects and their shoulders the
implications of that for the world at large in not only a profession of psychology but in consideration of
what is going to happen to the world unless the very vital changes are made. Any evidence what I have
been successful in that is what I should like to be remembered by.

Once again, thank you for this award and for your attention."