Review

"Verbal Behavior” is likely Skinner’s most popular as well as most controversial work, earning the title of controversial mainly after Chomsky’s famous review of the book. As I see it, an honest review of this book would be incomplete without an inclusion of Chomsky’s response, Which is something I plan to write up on my cognitive science blog at a later date. For now, here is my incomplete opinion on “Verbal Behavior.” Prior to the publishing of this book linguistics had already developed a rich history as a field, so Skinner’s goal of providing a new, “functional analysis” of language was from the start an uphill challenge much like Darwin’s presentation of evolutionary theory. Unlike Darwin however, Skinner has half the theoretical evidence and twice the conjecture.

Starting in chapter 2, Skinner defines verbal behavior as the, “acoustic product of muscles to produce speech,” which is strictly confined to the physiological output of speech, and is used later to describe “verbal episodes.” In this chapter Skinner also gives a dissatisfied opinion over the use of linguistic terminology, specifically “phonemes,” the smallest acoustic event as a unit of speech (ah, fa, etc.) and “morphemes,” the smallest meaningful unit of speech (dog, word, etc.). His reasoning is these units approximate the topography of noise, but fail to label verbal events. Thus, the smallest unit of verbal behavior needs to be defined in order to identify and define verbal behavior. For this purpose, Skinner uses the unit “operant,” which is defined as the unit of behavior which acts on the environment as the “response.” The operant comes from Skinner’s lifelong work on operant behavior, which is used throughout the rest of the book to differentiate verbal behavior from linguistics. While several critics have accused Skinner of producing a bastardized version of language analysis, I think this is a little unfair. Skinner’s analysis more than anything is an attempt to bridge linguistics with psychology("psychology" is the word I find the most appropriate to use, but it's worth noting that Skinner actively campaigned against behaviorism being lumped in the same category as psychology). regardless of whether or not he was successful at this is debateable.

Operants are available to be pulled from an individual’s, “verbal repertoire,” which rather than being the individual’s known vocabulary is instead the potential verbal behaviors which could be emitted. This would include how loud the verbal response is emitted as well as accompanying physical gestures, but it is NOT a a collection of the potential words used nor the “meaning” of those words (Skinner hated “meaning”). This actually leads into where verbal behavior becomes hazy, which is when it’s used to overstep into language analysis. The best example of what I mean is what Skinner refers to as “autoclitics." Autoclitics are any behavior based upon or dependent on verbal behavior and used in conjunction with the verbal behavior. Autoclitics act as a catch-all phrase for adjectives, adverbs, prepositions… pretty much every aspect of syntax aside from nouns, pronouns and verbs. At best, it is a confusing concept and, at worst, an oversimplification of preexisting linguistic concepts without any added intellectual value. Why is that? This is because operant behavior functions as an explanatory tool for the process of behavior emission from the organism and not as an effective method to define the behavior emitted nor to describe the underlying physiology which dictates what biological systems are at work to enable an organism to perform specific behaviors and how those behaviors are performed. Behaviorism is best used as a mediatory force between these two fields. Really, it is the expression of an organism’s behavior on the environment in response to the environment.