In 2010, I was tasked with summarizing Chomsky’s “A Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior” in three pages for Intro to the Cognitive Sciences. Not exactly my favorite type of assignment (I like making an argument, not summarizing), but I tried to have fun with it anyway…
A Review of A Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior
In “A Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, ” Noam Chomsky presents a scathing criticism of Skinner’s attempt to explain language under the behaviorist paradigm. Chomsky begins with a number of powerful arguments, which work to decompose Skinner’s Verbal Behavior into meaningless posturing. First, he asserts that Skinner puts forth a number of self-evident truths as if they “were a thesis which other investigators reject” but which actually have “no possible grounds for argument” (49). Next, Chomsky ridicules Skinner’s “completely meaningless” (53) attempt to extrapolate the honest results from rigorous animal studies to verbal behavior. Finally, Chomsky shows that Skinner relies on tautologies and metaphors to provide a superficial substance to his arguments. He concludes with a tone of wonder at the complexity and never-ending ingenuity of language; a tone that lends itself to the ultimate argument that language is currently beyond our understanding and if we are to attempt to understand it we must necessarily take leaps of faith in assuming the inner working of the human brain.
Chomsky begins his essay by looking at the restrictions Skinner has placed on the study of language. Restrictions, which Chomsky believes have constricted the pursuit of knowledge into a trivial achievement. Chomsky quickly moves from belittling Skinner’s scientific method as “nothing more than the definition of the problem,” to denying Skinner’s central thesis any greater application than “gross and superficial” speculation (49).
Chomsky next looks at the traditional language of behaviorism – “stimulus, response, and reinforcement” (50) – and how Skinner has attempted to adapt it to verbal behavior. He begins his criticism by arguing that “certain difficulties must be faced” in order to extend traditional behaviorism “to real-life behavior” (51). These difficulties entail a necessary dichotomy between a “lawful” narrow scope that “is of limited significance” and an unlawful broad scope in which “we must attribute an overwhelming influence on actual behavior to ill-defined factors” (51). After asserting the antithesis between these approaches, Chomsky argues that “Skinner does not consistently adopt either course” (51). Instead, Skinner “creates the illusion of a rigorous scientific theory with a very broad scope, although in fact the terms used in the description of real-life and of laboratory behavior may be mere homonyms, with at most a vague similarity of meaning” (51). This illusion is thoroughly mocked in Chomsky’s following contention.
Chomsky produces a humorously literal reading of Skinner’s work in order to ridicule its narrow application. This literal reading includes the only possible examples of stimuli and response allowable under a ‘lawful’ approach to behaviorism. Readers of Skinner’s work are led to believe that we only speak “under the control of the stimulus” of real-world objects with which we interact (52). The question then, is which “stimulus property of the physical object” (52) are we responding to? To answer this, Chomsky makes a great move in conflating Skinner’s supposed behaviorist philosophy with Chomsky’s own internal approach: “Stimuli are no longer part of the outside physical world; they are driven back into the organism. We identify the stimulus when we hear the response” (52). Chomsky further contends that “the notion response” for verbal behavior is “completely meaningless” because “no answers are suggested for… elementary questions” (53) such as defining “the unit of verbal behavior — the verbal operant” or “the controlling variables” in any “particular instance” (53). In order to provide a scientific-sounding argument, Skinner is thus led to misuse words like “control [as] a misleading paraphrase… for… denote or refer” (52) and “probability… as a cover term to paraphrase such low-status words as interest (54).”
Chomsky’s decomposition of behaviorist terms is no more biting as when he turns Skinner’s “reinforcement” into a “tautology,” since defining a natural reinforcer and measuring response strength are necessarily connected (55). Chomsky believes reinforcement is therefore an “empty” word which should not be “taken seriously” (55) and upon further examples, demonstrates that “the notion of reinforcement [in Skinner’s adaption to verbal behavior] has totally lost whatever objective meaning it may ever have had (56).”
In appraising the study of linguistics, Chomsky concedes that there is an “enormous difficulty of stating a problem… which will not either be completely trivial or hopelessly beyond the range of present-day understanding and technique (58).” Chomsky believes Skinner has fallen in this trap by a failure of the “latter type” (58).
To succeed where Skinner has failed, Chomsky argues linguists must acknowledge the perpetual newness of language. He believes our ability to make sense of this newness is based on an inherent “grammar that each individual has somehow and in some form internalized” (59). This grammar idea comes from K.S. Lashley’s discussion of “generalized patterns” and “integrative processes” of human language (58). Chomsky believes these intricate mechanisms are likely inborn in humans because of the “great complexity” and “remarkable rapidity” of acquired grammar of “all normal children” (60). He concludes by laying the groundwork for linguistics and cognitive science by hypothesizing about human “information-processing” as it relates to grammar and a hope that people will acknowledge the importance of “the contribution of the child to language learning” (60).
