gained his doctorate at Harvard and returned there to work in 1948. In his time one of the most influential of world psychologists, Skinner championed an uncompromising behaviourism. The mind is an unnecessary construct; science concerns itself with inputs and outputs: learning takes place because ‘behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organism’s tendency to repeat the behavior in the future.’ It is usually felt that this view of human learning was entirely destroyed by Noam Chomsky in his 1959 review of Skinner’s book Verbal Behaviour, while philosophically the rise of functionalism and cognitive science in general has superseded Skinner’s behaviourism.