MacCorquodale (1970) - JOURNAL OF THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS...

JOURNAL OF THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR
ON CHOMSKY'S REVIEW OF SKINNER'S
VERBAL BEHAVIOR
KENNETH MACCORQUODALE1' 2
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
Skinner's book, Verbal
Behavior,
was pub-
lished in 1957. Chomsky's review
of it ap-
peared in 1959. By the criterion of seminal
influence in generating controversy and stimu-
lating publication, both must be counted ma-
jor successes,
although the
reputation
and
influence of the review are more widely ac-
knowledged. It has been reprinted at least
three times (The Bobbs-Merrill Reprint Series
in the Social Sciences, No. A-34; Fodor and
Katz, 1964;
Jakobovits
and Miron, 1967), and
Chomsky
has recently written (in Jakobovits
and Miron,
1967, p. 142) that he
would
take
back little of it if he were rewriting it now.
Skinner's Verbal Behavior is an analysis of
speech in terms of its
"controlling
relations"
which include
the speaker's current motiva-
tional state, his current stimulus
circum-
stances, his past reinforcements, and his ge-
netic constitution.
Skinner has accepted the
constraints of natural science in his
basic ana-
lytical apparatus in that all of its terms are
empirically definable.
He intends to account
only for the objective dimensions
of verbal be-
havior and to invoke only objective, nonmen-
talistic and nonhypothetical entities to account
for
it. The
notion of control, anathema to the
politically oversensitive, means only "causa-
tion" 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;
1I
am
greatly indebted
to Professor Stephen Winokur
who read
an
earlier
version of
this
paper and
made
many
valuable suggestions.
2Preparation of this
paper was
supported in
part
by
grants to
the University of Minnesota
Center
for
Re-
search 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 Minne-
sota.
Reprints
may
be obtained from the author, De-
partment
of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Elli-
ott
Hall, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455.
this is simply a fact which has
been amply
con-
firmed.
Chomsky's review
was, to put
it mildly, dis-
pleased. It was also a virtuoso
performance
whose echoes are still
reverberating in psychol-
ogy
and whose dust has still
not
settled after
10 years. It has two parts. The
first
is
an ex-
tended criticism of the basic
analytical
appa-
ratus which Skinner brought to
verbal behav-
ior. So much occupies over one-half of the
lengthy paper; the second part is a
brief,
actu-
ally rather casual, criticism of
the application
itself, as if the demolition of the basic explana-
tory apparatus had made serious discussion of
its relevance to verbal behavior
superfluous.