However, both logical positivism and neobehaviorism modified their views and came to accept partial definitions, albeit for different reasons.
Readers will recall that according to much of contemporary cognitive psychology, logical empiricism and operationism underlie neobehaviorism, and all three are inadequate.
Clearly, then, neither the later form of neobehaviorism nor of logical empiricism necessarily reduced mental things to types of behavioral things, as cognitive psychology assumes they did.
The bottom line is that according to the thesis of partial definitions, the unobservable mediators of neobehaviorism are actually quite compatible with the unobservable mental acts, states, and processes of cognitive psychology.
However, he never embraced the S-O-R model of mediational neobehaviorism
in his explanations of behavior.
As a prelude to reviewing how neobehaviorism addresses questions about mental terms, the following is a summary of the background and features of this form, taken from Moore (in press-a).
The distinctive feature of mediational neobehaviorism is the insertion of inferred mediating organismic variables between stimulus and response in theoretical explanations of behavior.
Readers may note that this concern in much of cognitive psychology is similar to the earlier concern in mediational neobehaviorism with how to accommodate the nominal spontaneity and variability of behavior while retaining a commitment to an S-R framework.
The theories differed in certain details but often subscribed to the tenets of mediational neobehaviorism and the interpretation of operationism described above.
This fundamental principle was at considerable variance with logical empiricism and, therefore, set Skinner's radical behaviorism apart from logical empiricism as well as forms of mediational neobehaviorism that appealed to logical empiricist tenets, however obliquely.
Possibility 2: "Value" as an Organismic Theoretical Term That Mediates the Relation Between S and R in the Tradition of Mediational S-O-R Neobehaviorism
The newer form of behaviorism is here called mediational S-O-R neobehaviorism.