Here are
some quotes from two of the more influential and radical behaviorists
beginning with the "father" of behaviorism, John B.
Watson.
John B. Watson, Behaviorism. 1924
Chapter Title:
"Chapter X. Talking and
Thinking which, when rightly understood, go far in breaking down
the fiction that there is any such thing as a "mental"
life"
"The behaviorist advances
the view that what the psychologists have hitherto called thought
is in short nothing but talking to ourselves."
"My theory does hold that
the muscular habits learned in overt speech are responsible for
implicit or internal speech (thought)."
B. F.
Skinner, About Behaviorism. 1974
"The
present argument is this: mental life and the world in which
it is lived are inventions. They have been invented on the analogy
of external behavior occurring under external contingencies.
Thinking is behavior. The mistake is in allocating the behavior
to the mind."