Verbal Behaviour

Verbal Behaviour

Verbal Behavior is B. F. Skinner's 1957 attempt to bring language inside operant analysis: verbal communities select and fine-tune utterances by social reinforcement, and speech divides into functional classes. Noam Chomsky's 1959 review took it apart in public, Skinner never replied, and the review became better known than the book. The verdict has two halves that must be kept apart. As a general theory of how human language works, the operant account did not survive contact with the acquisition data. As a functional taxonomy of verbal operants it remains in daily use in applied behaviour analysis.

What it is

The book sits on the framework Skinner set out in Science and Human Behavior in 1953, in which mind is treated as a metaphysical anachronism and the object of study is behaviour under environmental control. Consciousness, on this account, is a social product emerging from verbal interaction.

Two of the functional classes carried furthest. A mand is an utterance under the control of what the speaker wants. A tact is one under the control of something in the world. Skinner's umbrella example is the compact illustration of the general method: the sentence that you ought to take an umbrella unpacks as the claim that you will be reinforced for taking one, with keeping dry reinforcing, an umbrella keeping you dry, and rain coming.

In effect

The reception is intellectual history and both sides belong in it. Chomsky's review argued that the reinforcement vocabulary either meant something precise, in which case it was false of language, or was extended so far that it meant nothing, and that the speed and structure of children's acquisition could not be accounted for by the mechanism on offer. It was widely taken as decisive and is a founding document of the cognitive turn.

The other half is less often carried. Kenneth MacCorquodale in 1970 and David Palmer in 2006 documented substantial misreadings in the review, arguing among other things that it addressed a version of the theory Skinner had not advanced. And the book's influence inside applied behaviour analysis has grown rather than faded, particularly in language intervention, where the distinction between a mand and a tact does real clinical work.

So the honest summary is not that Chomsky refuted Skinner and that was that. It is that a general theory failed and a taxonomy survived, and that the review's own accuracy is itself disputed in the literature.

What it does not say

It does not supply a working account of language acquisition, and it should not be cited as one.

It does not follow that reinforcement plays no part in language. The narrow functional distinctions remain useful, which is why they are still in use.

It does not carry Skinner's other 1950s positions with it. His account of alcoholism as a habit acquired because alcohol relaxed the individual in social situations is recorded here as his 1953 position and as nothing else. A purely operant account of addiction is not the current consensus, and nothing in this material is guidance.

Sources

  1. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts. The primary text.
  2. Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior, the framework the 1957 book sits on, and the source of the operant account of alcoholism recorded here as a historical position only.
  3. Chomsky, N. (1959). The review of Verbal Behavior. Skinner never replied.
  4. MacCorquodale, K. (1970) and Palmer, D. C. (2006), documenting substantial misreadings in the review. See Universal Grammar for the fuller handling of the dispute.
  5. The Modern Mind, Peter Watson, Perennial 2002, pp. 494-498, with the later Skinner at pp. 550-551. Cited here only for the fact that the idea existed and mattered. Watson is a journalist writing an intellectual history rather than a researcher, the book's apparatus is under one per cent peer-reviewed and carries no bibliography, and it is never the authority for a psychological finding.
  6. Evidence status contested, with the two halves kept apart.