On Chomsky's Review of Skinner’s
VERBAL BEHAVIOR

Kenneth MacCorquodale
University of Minnesota

Skinner's Verbal Behavior is an analysis of speech in terms of its “controlling relations” which include the speaker’s current motivational state, his current stimulus circumstances, his past reinforcements, and his genetic constitution. Skinner has accepted the constraints of natural science in his basic analytical apparatus in that all of its terms are empirically definable. He intends to account only for the objective dimensions of verbal behavior and to invoke only objective, nonmentalistic and nonhypothetical entities to account for it. The notion of control, anathema to the politically oversensitive, means only “causation” in its purely functional sense, and need not alarm. It is not arguable nor criticizable that behavior is an orderly, controlled datum, sensitive to the circumstances of the behaver; this is simply a fact which has been amply confirmed.

Contents:

• Introduction
• Criticism 1: Verbal Behavior is an untested hypothesis which has, therefore, no claim upon our credibility
• Criticism 2: Skinner's technical terms are mere paraphrases for more traditional treatments of verbal behavior
• Criticism 3: Speech is complex behavior whose understanding and explanation require a complex, mediational, neurological-genetic theory
• Mediational terms
• Neurological-genetic mediators
• Grammatical behavior
• The extension to verbal behavior; the mand
• Tact, echoic, textual, and intraverbal operants
• Conclusion
• References

I am greatly indebted to Professor Stephen Winokur who read an earlier version of this paper and made many valuable suggestions.

Preparation of this paper was supported in part by grants to the University of Minnesota Center for Research in Human Learning from the National Science Foundation (GS-1761) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-01136) and the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota. Reprints may be obtained from the author, Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Elliott Hall, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455.

Originally published in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1970, pp. 83-99. Reproduced here by permission of the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior.

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