Hence, it is useful to widen the perspective and examine other approaches to the understanding of human behavior. The position of cognitive science is often overstated because its genesis was a reaction to previous overstatements of behaviorist methodologies that disallowed consideration of mental processes as part of a science of psychology. Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent on the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.
Radical behaviorism restores some kind of balance.
It does not insist on truth by agreement and can therefore consider events taking place in the private world within the skin. It does not call these events unobservable, and it does not dismiss them as subjective. It simply questions the nature of the object observed and the reliability of the observations. From this perspective, cognitive science does not involve a revolutionary overthrow of behaviorism but rather a redressing of the balance so that information flows both within and without the organism are considered as parts of an overall model. Operant conditioning is a major phenomenon in human learning and its status as a predictive model of many major phenomena cannot be overthrown.