Verbal Behavior

Verbal Behavior (1957) is a book written by B.F. Skinner in which the author describes what has traditionally been called language. For Skinner, speech, along with other forms of communication, was simply a behavior. Skinner argued that each act of speech is an inevitable consequence of the speaker's current environment and his behavioral and sensory history, and derided mentalistic terms such as "idea", "plan" and "concept" as unscientific and of no use in the study of behavior. For Behaviorists, the proper object of study is behavior itself, analysed without reference to mental structure, but rather with reference to the structure and history of the environment in which particular behaviors occur.

Skinner however branched away from traditional Behaviorism by allowing for the analysis of thinking, creativity and other forms of difficult to observer behavior.

Skinner's is a functionalist approach describing the relationship between variables and behavior in rich detail. He describes the mand, the autoclitic, the tact and other classes of operant verbal behavior. The mand specifies its own reinforcer: "Food!" from a hungry person is a mand for food. The autoclitic is verbal behavior under the control of other verbal behavior. The tact "makes contact with" something, as a description: "the red apple" tacts the color of the object. Skinner cites dozens of works of literature and uses many examples of personal observation for things like alliteration and response strength. Known for his multiple revision style of writing Verbal Behavior shows it: it is dense and well written.

Verbal Behavior touches on many perennial issues in philosophy, most notably the issue of rationalism vs. empiricism. For rationalists, the structure of human knowledge comes from within and is largely innate: we may learn from experience, but the essence of human thought is the ability to reason — to acquire new knowledge through deduction and induction, and to reduce the clamour of information that reaches us through our senses to pure mathematical concepts such as "square" and "melody". In its extreme form, as espoused by Descartes, rationalism holds that virtually all knowledge may be arrived at by "pure reason", i.e. by logical reasoning from a set of self-evident first principles. From this perspective, the role of the senses in the formation of knowledge is merely that of a catalyst, accelerating a process which is internal to the mind/brain. In contrast, Skinner was an extreme empiricist, arguing that notions such as "reason", "idea", "knowledge" and "concept" have no scientific significance. For example, a speaker of English could not, according to Skinner, be said to have a "knowledge of English" in any well-defined sense — he would merely have acquired a set of behaviors which allowed him to respond appropriately during English conversations.

The book itself has been no less controversial than these broader philosophical issues, and is probably now more famous for the controversy surrounding it than for its actual contents. Particularly famous is Noam Chomsky's scathing review [1], which is said by many to have initiated a "cognitive revolution " in Psychology, a shift from the study of behaviour for its own sake to a study of the mental mechanisms which underly it. What is most interesting about Chomsky's attack on Skinner's work is that it is, in his own words, an attack on Empricism as much as Skinner whom he merely felt was the best example of this kind of work. Many of Chomsky's champions are perhaps unaware that they are jettisoning all of objective reality and the scientific method with the attack on empiricism. I would like to see them come to a logical conclusion about the efficacy of medicine without any empirical trials to back it up. Chomsky is, ironically, perhaps not the great Mao Tse Tung of the Cognitive Revolution that might be assumed. The authors of "Higher Superstition" describe the anti-science positions and actions of the so-called academic left which Chomsky is clearly a part of. "Higher Superstition" clearly outlines the so-called academic left's pursuit of postmodern relativism and the idea of "ways of knowing" and the rejection of objective reality, and thus scientific "ways of knowing" as being patriarchal, a construct of social class, or a vehicle for anti-environmental corporatism. Chomsky seems to have been on the cutting edge of this anti-science, anti-empirical "revolution" and squarely fits the description of the champions of this position: involved in 60s anti-war radicalism, not a hard scientist, willing to use the "moral highground" as a way to attack his opponents. If you're not with Chomsky then you must be a fascist. Skinner is not with Chomsky. Therefore, Skinner is a fascist. There's your proof!

It is not hard to see why Verbal Behavior would elicit such a strong reaction from Linguists and others. Skinner stomps all over their academic territory and fairly starts the book with a strong attack on linguistic methods and analysis.

Chomsky claims in his review that Skinner doesn't understand what the terms reinforcement and stimuli mean and cannot use them anywhere except in the lab. Skinner claims, simultaneously and contradictingly, that the good knowledge we have from this kind of research is being abused by Skinner in a non-scientific setting to give the prestige of science to idle speculation. This claim is most interesting since the prestigous work on reinforcement is largely Skinner's. Moreover, the use of the term reinforcement in it's technical sense was Skinner's. Thus Chomsky is accusing Skinner of stealing his own research's prestige and of not understanding words Skinner himself empiricised. Chomsky calls Skinner's work "scientistic" or attempting to emulate the sciences but lacking in scientific validity. He claims that Skinner's work is impossible to validate empirically or experimentally. Since making all of these claims Skinner's work has been validated empirically and scientifically and is being widely used in the treatment of autistic children among other areas. To my knowledge Chomsky has not retracted these statements but stands by them to this day. It is good to see that Chomsky's attack on empiricism are clearly being upheld in his life: he won't let reality get in the way of his wrong statements.

Empiricist ideas about behavior are still being explored, especially in the field of cognitive science known as connectionism.

External links

• Chomsky's Review of Verbal Behavior
• The Camel and the Arab