Diego asked:

B.F. SKinner wrote a book called Science and Human behavior.I understood this as a philosophy
book and not a psychology book. Skinner's ideas seem copies of the pragmatist theory. Any
thoughts?

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Simon Laplace wrote a book called The Mechanical Heavens,in which the philosophical principles of
determinism are singularly well exhibited. But that does not make it a philosophy book. Laplace was a
physicist and his book is a work of science. Ernest Mayr wrote a book This is Biology,in which a
great deal of scientific philosophy is evaluated, but this does not make it a philosophy book. Mayr was
a biologist and his book is a work of science. Both James Jeans and Werner Heisenberg wrote books
entitled Physics and Philosophy,where the scientific ideas of philosophers are discussed; but neither
of these books escapes being classifiable as a work of science.

The situation is more difficult to define when you come to academic and scholarly texts which occupy
the shelves in the philosophy sections of libraries and bookshops. Are these philosophy books? One
could put the argument that they are not; that instead we should call them 'works of scholarship' and
reserve the title 'philosophy books' to those where an original and/or authentic philosophy is given.
This may be too stringent a requirement, but the question is worth putting, in order to illustrate how
tenuous a classification can be. So (as a final example) the works of Frege are nowadays listed as
philosophy books, and there can be no doubt that Frege contributed fundamental and authentic
ideas. But he was a mathematician, not a philosopher. So you might well ask your librarian and/or
philosophy teacher to justify this strange rubrication.

And thus to return to Skinner: no, his book is not philosophy. Not by the most generous margin of
permissibility can this book (or any of his writings) be allocated to philosophy. It is strictly the writing of
a professional on his profession, and as you already stated yourself, that profession is (clinical and
experimental) psychology.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney