Plans and the Structure of Behavior

The book's central claim is that human action is controlled by hierarchical internal representations called "plans," which operate through cybernetic feedback loops rather than through chains of stimulus-response associations. The authors explicitly reject the behaviorist reflex arc as the fundamental unit of behavior. Instead, they propose the TOTE unit—Test, Operate, Test, Exit—as a replacement. A TOTE unit consists of testing whether a goal state has been achieved, operating to reduce any discrepancy, testing again, and exiting when the goal is met. Crucially, these units can be nested within larger TOTE units, producing a hierarchy of action from simple motor routines to complex plans. This framework reintroduces purpose and intention into scientific psychology without invoking mysterious teleology .

The book introduced the TOTE unit, an acronym for Test-Operate-Test-Exit. This was proposed as the fundamental building block of behavior, replacing the reflex arc. The TOTE unit describes a feedback loop: a system tests its current state against a goal, operates to reduce any discrepancy, tests again, and exits when the goal is achieved . Today, the TOTE concept remains influential in hierarchical models of behavior and prefrontal function. A 2008 review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences notes that the book's emphasis on hierarchical structure in human action was "one of the founding insights of the cognitive revolution" and that the TOTE model inspired decades of computational work on hierarchical reinforcement learning and the neural representation of behavioral hierarchies in the prefrontal cortex .

Plans and the Structure of Behavior is widely regarded as one of the founding documents of the cognitive revolution. A 2015 obituary for co-author Karl Pribram in Deutsches Ärzteblatt states that the book "had an outstanding significance for the development of psychology, marking a departure from the previously dominant behaviorism" and is credited with initiating the cognitive turn in Western psychology . Similarly, philosopher Maury Silver traces the treatment of "purpose" from Watson through to Miller, Galanter, and Pribram's book, describing it as "one image of the new cognitive science" . The book demonstrated that mentalistic concepts—plans, goals, intentions—could be studied scientifically using the computer as a model of the mind.

Miller, Galanter, and Pribram explicitly position their work as a "reaction against or correction of reinforcement theory" . Where Skinner's behaviorism treats behavior as a function of environmental contingencies and reinforcement histories, Plans argues that behavior is controlled by internal representations—plans and images of the world. The TOTE unit replaces the reflex arc, introducing feedback and hierarchical organization where behaviorism saw only linear stimulus-response connections. However, one reviewer noted that despite this theoretical opposition, the book shares a structural similarity with works like Skinner's Verbal Behavior: both use a simple model to "handle" a wide variety of complex psychological phenomena without always rigorous or detailed treatment . The break is theoretical, not methodological.

A philosophical critique argues that the book's model of mind, built on Plans and Images operating over symbolic representations, replicates Descartes's mind-body dualism rather than overcoming it. The criticism holds that Miller, Pribram, and Galanter reduce the "effect of will" to subvocal inner speech, effectively making the Plan itself the agent—but a plan cannot do anything without a machine to execute it. The separation of Plan and machine "seems to parallel Descartes's division between mind and body, and to fail equally in representing the sense in which we are our bodies" . The critic also notes the authors appeal to "the nature of life itself" as a motive force, leaving unanswered the question of who or what chooses among plans.

Plans and the Structure of Behavior represents an early phase of Miller's thinking about internal representations, which he later developed in different directions. While the 1960 book focuses on plans as programs for action, Miller's subsequent work—Language and Perception (1976) and The Science of Words (1991)—turns to the mental lexicon and the representation of word meanings. However, a common thread runs through all of them: the conviction that mental structures can be described formally and that the computer provides a legitimate model for psychological theory. The 1960 book's emphasis on internal representation and hierarchical organization anticipates later cognitive science work on semantic memory and knowledge representation.