Melody Dye

“Cognitive psychology considers successive mediating events between the outer world of the organism (environmental input) and the behavior of the organism (response output). The gap between these two endpoints is reputed to be filled by various components (e.g., a complex memory system comprising several constituent parts, an information processing system also comprising several constituent parts, a “cognitive map,” or a symbol manipulation machine.”
― Mecca Chiesa, Radical Behaviorism: The Philosophy and the Science

“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“[Skinner] does not invoke other events, processes, or mechanisms which are hypothesized or invented for the purpose of mediating between behavior and its empirical determinants. This omission is sometimes misconstrued as a denial that mediating mechanisms exist; they obviously do, they are obviously neurological and they are also obviously themselves lawful. ...The argument [against employing them as part of scientific practice] is simplicity itself... [Skinner] considers such theoretical terms unnecessary; they may generate research whose only usefulness is to disconfirm the mediating entity or redefine it without increasing our knowledge of behavior's controlling variables; they can become the absorbing focus of an inquiry and so deflect attention from behavior itself; they can become a "refuge from the data".”
― Kenneth MacCorquodale

“Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor.”
― Norbert Wiener