On Chomsky's Review of Skinner’s
VERBAL BEHAVIOR

Kenneth MacCorquodale
University of Minnesota

Introduction

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.

Chomsky's review was, to put it mildly, displeased. It was also a virtuoso performance whose echoes are still reverberating in psychology and whose dust has still not settled after 10 years. It has two parts. The first is an extended criticism of the basic analytical apparatus which Skinner brought to verbal behavior. So much occupies over one-half of the lengthy paper; the second part is a brief, actually rather casual, criticism of the application itself, as if the demolition of the basic explanatory apparatus had made serious discussion of its relevance to verbal behavior superfluous.

The fact that the review has never been systernatically replied to (although partial replies have appeared in Wiest, 1967 and Katahn and Koplin, 1968) has become the basis for an apparently wide-spread conclusion that it is in fact unanswerable, and that its criticisms are therefore essentially valid, a belief which Chomsky shares (Jakobovits and Miron, 1967, p. 142). There are, in truth, several sufficient reasons for the lack of rejoinder and none of them have anything to do with the merits of either Chomsky’s or Skinner’s case. First, because not all S-R psychologists are sympathetic to Skinner’s version many of them felt themselves out of Chomsky’s range and were not moved to defend themselves or Skinner. This is somewhat ingenuous of them, however, since Chomsky’s actual target is only about one-half Skinner, with the rest a mixture of odds and ends of other behaviorisms and some other fancies of vague origin. No behaviorist escaped untouched. On the other hand, most Skinnerians correctly concluded that their behaviorism was not particularly the focus of the review, much of which they frankly did not understand. For example, the review devoted six utterly bewildering pages (Chomsky, 1959, pp. 39-44) to yet another refutation (they must number now in the hundreds) of the drive-reduction theory of reinforcement, which has long since disappeared from everyone’s behaviorism, I believe, and which never characterized Skinner’s (Wiest, 1967, makes the same observation). Finally, and it must be said, probably the strongest reason why no one has replied to the review is its tone. It is ungenerous to a fault; condescending, unforgiving, obtuse, and ill-humored. For example, the perfectly well-defined word “response” is consistently called a “notion” which creates, in time, an overwhelming atmosphere of dubiety with respect to the word. The review's one kind word is in a footnote (Chomsky, 1959, p. 32). It is almost impossible to reply to whatever substantive points the review might have made without at the same time sounding either defensive and apologetic, or as truculent as the reviewer. I have hesitated until now because I am an editor for the Series in which Verbal Behavior was published. Caveat lector. I believe that the review is, in fact, quite answerable. In spite of its length it is highly redundant; nearly all of Chomsky's seeming cornucopia of criticisms of Skinner's basic behaviorism reduce in fact to only three, which can be addressed in finite, if necessarily somewhat extended, space and time, and one can avoid the provocation to an ad hominem reply. This discussion will be organized about these three points, followed by a very brief comment concerning Chomsky's criticisms of the application to verbal behavior per se.

The reader should realize in advance that there were and are no directly relevant facts to be brought to bear in this discussion. Although his thesis is empirical, Skinner’s book has no experimental data involving the laboratory manipulation of verbal responses which definitively demonstrate that the processes he invokes to explain verbal behavior are in fact involved in its production, although reinforcement has been shown to be effective in controlling verbal responses (Baer and Sherman, 1964; Brigham and Sherman, 1968; Holz and Azrin, 1966; Krasner, 1958; Lovaas, Berberich, Perloff, and Schaeffer, 1966; Salzinger, 1959; Salzinger, Feldman, Cowan, and Salzinger, 1965). Chomsky had no data to disprove the thesis of Verbal Behavior, nor does he yet. This can be said in the face of rather frequent statements subsequent to the review which assert, for example, that “Chomsky’s paper shows that verbal behavior cannot be accounted for by Skinner’s form of functional analysis (Fodor and Katz, 1964, p. 546).” Chomsky showed no such thing; he merely asserted it. Chomsky's criticisms of Skinner are, then, necessarily methodological. The disagreement is fundamentally an epistemological one, a “paradigm clash” as Katahn and Koplin have put it (Katalm and Koplin, 1968). It is therefore most peculiar that Chornsky nowhere refers to Skinner’s earlier book, Science and Human Behavior (Skinner, 1953), the source to which Skinner specifically sends the reader of Verbal Behavior for elaboration of general methodological matters (Skinner, 1957, pp. 11, 23, 130, 145, et seq.). It may be seen there, and in Cumulative Record (Skinner, 1959, 1961), that Skinner has never been reticent about his methodological convictions nor vague as to his reasons for maintaining them. By omitting all reference to these arguments Chomsky creates the highly erroneous impression that Skinner has innocently and impulsively blundered along unmindful of the difficulties inherent in what he was doing. This simply is not so. His application of the basic operant model to verbal behavior has been evolving since 1934 (Skinner, 1957, vii). It has survived explication, and criticism by by informed but not universally convinced students, in the classroom intermittently since then, and in the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1947. The 1957 book is, then, hardly the result of a momentary enthusiasm. It deserves a more thoughtful hearing.

In what follows I shall consider Chomsky’s three basic methodological criticisms in turn and compare each with what Skinner in fact said. The reader should understand that the italicized statements of Criticism are nowhere explicit in Chomsky's review, which merely adumbrates them.

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.

Return Home