On the premise proposed by James that our values and preferences -- our goods and bads -- are of our own creation, we must look then to hypotheses as to how those preferences are created.  Skinnerian theory would say that those values are created by a never ending series of a combination of behavioral reinforcements and failures to reinforce (extinctions).

In this chapter of Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner says that our common view of attributing human behavior to our inner intentions, purposes, aims, and goals is a pre-scientific (unscientific?) way of determining the cause of interactions in human affairs.  He proposes that it is a false premise to believe that all things begin in the minds of people; that our work is to change attitudes, sense of responsibility and delusions;  that we see behavior as merely symptomatic of the great dramas staged within our minds; that we see behavior as merely "the material from which one infers attitudes, intentions, needs and so on."

Instead, he says, we need to look at the relationship between behavior and the environment, and that we can safely -- and must -- ignore states of mind.  Behavior, in his view, can be analyzed scientifically without looking at "personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions or other perquisites of autonomous man."  We have, according to Skinner, explained and created our "inner man" in the image of the "outer man" whose behavior is observable.  He contends that our "mentalistic explanations" don't fit with what the sciences of physics and biology have learned.

Skinner says we have to take into account what the environment does to an organism before and after it responds because behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences.  If we will look to the behavioral patterns of reinforcement, and extinction, and the contingencies therein which can be corrected, we can resolve a person's inner dis - ease with his life with appropriate changes in the reinforcements and extinctions that affect that person's behavior.  Further to this -- and to the point of a discussion of this chapter in considering our values and preferences -- the problems and difficulties of our culture can likewise only be resolved, in Skinner's view, by a science of behavior.  It is the only hope we have, in his view, for relief from the large scale societal problems that have arisen in the purportedly autonomous man's struggle to attain freedom, dignity and value.  Our claims for the right to these things, he says,  cause us to fight against the very external controls that would solve our problems as he states in this ominous prediction:
 

This [our insistance on freedom, dignity and autonomous, albeit inconspicuous, cultural control] could be a lethal cultural mutation.  Our culture has produced the science and technology it needs to save itself.  It has the wealth it needs for effective action.  It has, to a considerable extent, a concern for its own future.  But if it continues to value freedom and dignity rather than its own survival as its principal value, then possibly some other culture will make a greater contribution to the future.
 

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