Roughly half a century has passed since the cognitive revolution declared behaviorism dead and promised solutions to long-standing problems of philosophy and psychology. Carruthers provides an opportunity to assess the progress that has taken place. Mind remains central in his account, and its hierarchical structure is illustrated in the pivotal roles of metarepresentations and metacognitions. In place of behavior and events in the world, the action takes place in the dynamics of their surrogates, such as perceptions and intentions and beliefs and concepts and attitudes, none of which lend themselves to measurement in the units of the physical or biological sciences. Most of the entities in Carruthers' account existed in the vocabularies of the mid-1950s, though typically more closely anchored to their origins in colloquial talk, which since then has sometimes been called folk psychology.

What has most obviously changed are the linkages among the mentalistic terms. Carruthers deals with the particular priorities of mindreading and metacognition. Are they independent mechanisms or a single mechanism with two modes of access? Is one a prerequisite for the other? Carruthers concludes that metacognition is grounded in mindreading. If one argues that judgments about oneself must be distinguished from judgments about others, his conclusion is sound. But this conclusion is one that a variety of behaviorism reached long before the advent of the cognitive revolution. In his “Behaviorism at 50,” Skinner (Reference Skinner1963) recounted the history of Watsonian methodological behaviorism in the early decades of the twentieth century and its rejection of introspection (see also Catania Reference Catania1993), but he also noted the unnecessary constraints that Watson's account had imposed on theory.

Skinner's later radical behaviorism rejected the Watsonian constraints and extended his approach to the origins of the language of private events. As a contribution to a symposium organized by his advisor, E. G. Boring, Skinner (Reference Skinner1945) made explicit his interest in “Boring from Within.” The 1945 paper, “The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms,” was a renunciation of operationism, but, more important, it provided an account of how a vocabulary of private events (feelings, emotions, etc.) could be created even though those who taught the words and maintained consistencies of usage had access only to shared public accompaniments of those private events.Footnote ¹ Given these origins of the private or introspective language, Skinner's resolution of the issue in terms of the public practices of the verbal community is the only feasible way of dealing with the problem that Carruthers has so aptly described in terms of his mindreading system, which never has access to what others are imagining or feeling. To the extent that it does have access to what one feels or imagines oneself, one can speak of those events only in a vocabulary that is anchored in public correlates. Carruthers' point that instances of self-attributed unsymbolized thought occur in circumstances in which a third party might have made the same attribution is perfectly consistent with this argument.

The irony, then, is that with respect to introspection, judgments about the behavior of others (mindreading) and judgments about one's own behavior (metacognition), Carruthers has reached conclusions that are consistent with Skinner's. One can guess that he took so long only because of the complexity of the terms that entered into his account. Skinner's account is far more parsimonious. Skinner does not begin with something called discriminating and follow it with differential responding; the differential responding is itself the discriminating. He does not say that perceiving and sensing and thinking are something different from behaving; they are kinds of behavior, defined not by whether they involve movement but rather by whether they are involved in contingent relations with environmental events (for this reason, Carruthers notwithstanding, a lot of behavior goes on even when one is sitting quiet and motionless, and one has just as much access to this behavior as to that of standing or walking). There is no more need to appeal to seeing and hearing as prerequisite concepts than there is to say that we cannot sit or stand or walk without concepts of sitting or standing or walking; these are all names for things we do. To invoke them as explanations does not serve our theories well.

Carruthers' account also converges on other concepts that have been elaborated by Skinner. For example, his System 1 and System 2 have features that are closely paralleled by what Skinner (Reference Skinner and Skinner1969) respectively called rule-governed and contingency-shaped behavior, and Carruthers is surely on the right track in saying that speech is an action that does not begin with metacognitive representations of thought (a more detailed account is beyond the scope of this commentary, but see Catania 2006, Chs. 14 and 15). Furthermore, in considering the different environmental contingencies that operate on verbal and nonverbal classes of behavior, the behavioral account has no trouble dealing with the various confabulations that Carruthers has surveyed. Just as speech errors can tell us a lot about language structure, so confabulations may tell us a lot about the nature of our judgments about ourselves and others.

It is good to see cognitive science at last converging on conclusions that had once been reached in behavioral accounts. If that were the only point, this commentary would serve little but a historical purpose. But there is extensive behavior analytic research relevant to these issues (in particular, see Wixted & Gaitan Reference Wixted and Gaitan2002), and some of it may prove useful to those of any theoretical orientation. Of course, it would be not at all surprising if the suggestions here are not well received. That likelihood is enhanced by the fact that this has been a necessarily brief and superficial presentation of the behavioral case. But the literature is there, so perhaps a few will check it out.