Verbal Behavior
Hume’s moral thought itself, radical in its day, has come to guide most discussion of the human ethic for the past two centuries and while not entirely ending all statements of ethics, has shifted much of the discourse to the ethic of ethical positions.
Hume’s claims in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, is not that moral distinctions cannot influence how we act. Hume only claims that the recognition of moral right and wrong can motivate action. If moral distinctions were not practical in this sense, then it would be pointless to attempt to influence human behavior with moral rules.
In Behavior of Organisms (1938), Skinner argued that the causes of behaviors related to “drive” were environmental events, namely deprivation, satiation, and aversive stimulation, not internal states such as thirst or anger. He also maintained that these motivative variables were antecedent events and separate from all types of stimulus variable.
By 1957 when Skinner published Verbal Behavior, he was a household name psychologist. Skinner describes verbal behavior as a learned behavior that is shaped by environmental factors and reinforced through consequential effects on behavior to jockey for influence and gain access to behavioral events through the social interaction of speaking and being reinforced by a listener's response.Skinner sees language as a tool to achieve desired outcomes through communication with others to ally, alter or conform behavior. And by this time, for Skinner, language, for humans, has prime tool for the shaping of human behavior.
Skinner does not view most of the behavior of humans in terms of individual responses reinforced one by one, and he actually devotes a great deal of his work reflecting on the problem of human behavioral complexity. In this sense, Skinner moves, when he writes about human behavior, quite adrift from the typical stimuli-response of his precedential behaviorists.
Sometimes, Skinner does see certain complex behaviors arising from relatively simple sequences that induce responses, and Skinner invoked the idea of "chaining" responses. Chaining is based on the fact that a discriminative stimulus not only sets the occasion for subsequent behavior, but it can also reinforce a behavior that precedes it. Discriminative stimuli can become "conditioned reinforcers".
However, Skinner recognized that a great deal of behavior, especially human behavior, cannot simply be attributed to this type of conditioned chaining. Complex behavior can frequently suddenly appear in its final form such as learning directions to a locale; or the instructions for a test.
To account for this Skinner introduced the concept of rule-governed behavior. Simple behaviors can be formulated by verbal stimuli. “Come to Mommy” “Read the chapter in the book”, et. al. After a number of responses have gained verbal control, then the verbal stimuli thereafter can elicit nearly unlimited varieties of complex responses through scheduled reinforcements of verbal cues.
Behaviorism has its roots, of course, in John Locke’s blank slate that can be written upon as a human traverses through his learning stages. From Locke we move to classical associationism, that intelligent behavior is the product of associative learning. As a result of associations or pairings between what is experientially stimulative and ideas or thoughts that are formulated from these stimuli by persons and animals (Hume) and acquire knowledge of their environment and how to act. For Locke, intelligent behavior is a mark of such knowledge.
Psychological behaviorism,however, understands behavior only in reference to environmental stimuli or by learned experiences and disregards all references to internal thoughts or ideas that are only learned as responses to external stimuli. Psychological extinction could come by removing certain rewarding stimuli. For instance, liquor from the alcoholic.
More complexly, but still an external activity that helped transform a lot of the behaviors of the American political scene, was the removal of the equal time doctrine almost in conjunction with the rise of cable news channels to allow non-stop, non-rebutted ideas to be constantly reinforced to conform behavioral ideologies that can the exhibit themselves in fixated behavioral conflicts between those ideologies.
Skinner may not have always been on the right track, nevertheless, the idea is still being reinforced in our society.
Rate your customer service experience, take a survey to define your preference, questionnaires to determine your personality, or your identity. Even job interviews to see if an applicant might be a “good fit” for the company. These are all proof that people, at least, believe that behavior is shapeable; and of course they are absolutely right. And of course this observation is very much an observation about the impact of verbal behavior in shaping behavior that extends back to the manner in which mother first told the toddler to not touch the hot.
However, Skinner’ claim that, “{it is not that} inner states do not exist, they do not exist, but that they are not relevant in a functional analysis” boggles me.
“Not relevant’ means”, for Skinner, “explanatorily circular or regressive.” (Science and Human Behavior, 1953).
Skinner charges “that since mental activity is a form of behavior (albeit inner), the only non-regressive, non-circular way to explain behavior is to appeal to something non-behavioral. This non-behavioral something is environmental stimuli and an organism’s interactions wit, and reinforcement from, the environment.”
Which again is not wrong, but human behavior cannot be explained only by the stimuli encountered, but by the inner reflections on that stimuli and the behavioral causations interactions with previous inner reflections and the personal projections upon the stimuli of his personal reflections of both self and others within his environment.
For instance why does Skinner never allow himself to be called Burrhus, apparently even to his closest allies, he’s just Skinner, and apparently all the way back to his school, he did not wish to be called Burrhus. There is no inner mental reflections involved. I know I became Ken early on because my given name ended in a t and my last name began with a t and I had a difficult time saying them together. I don’t recall being laughed at; I recall trying to self-correct my stutter and could not do it consistently, and so I reflected just to call myself Ken and drop the final, sure I suppose there was an external awareness that others thought you ought to be able to say your own name. And contrary to what some may presume it was not out of fear of being laughed at. I get laughed at so infrequently nothing dfelights me more, it perks me up. I was once told humor was like an airplane to me. That comment was an airplane as well. It had to be explained it flew right over my head. (It’s not entirely true, I just see nothing in one-liners, but I do crack up in situational humor, the slapstick of Lucy, humor that evolves out of a situation.)
But Skinner is probably the only major figure in the history of behaviorism to offer a socio-political world view based on his commitment to behaviorism. Skinner constructed a theory as well as narrative picture in Walden Two (1948) of what an ideal human society would be like if designed according to {his} behaviorist principles. One possible feature of this utopia is rejecting independent human behavior or any willing of difference that goes beyond the extolled behavior.
This, as far as I am aware, the only attempted utopian model to ever actually become a functioning utopian society. Kat Kincade, Will Bayley, and a few cohorts interested in developing Skinner’s behavioristic utopia on a functioning model founded the Twin Oaks Community in 1967 in Virginia.
I was not a founding member but I did go there some seventeen years later for several months. The community (long before my arrival) had evolved far away from its Skinnerian roots which were mostly disastrous for its adult participants.
But they continued to try to develop the Skinnerian technique in the raising of ‘the children.” I found this repellent in its method and the one young gentlemen who had grown up in the community who was a child of two of the founders was so socially non-adaptive he had to announce his presence to enter spaces to see if there were any objections to his entry. That more or less confirmed to me that their child-raising techniques were as about as wrong as can be.
What I found repellent was the complete isolation of the children from the adults except from those who signed up to assist on a scheduled basis and two hours a week they could walk around the grounds (but not go into any of the adult buildings) with their “primaries” (parents, but not called parents). The rest of the time they remained in the children’s building. And of course when they were walking with their primaries (only one primary at a time) all other adults had to stay far away.
Along about the time of the publication of Verbal Behavior, a young linguist exploded into the public consciousness.
Noam Chomsky’s explosive debunking of Verbal Behavior in his 1959 review is much better known than Skinner’s book, which, in my opinion, has been unduly neglected. Perhaps because of Chomsky’s review, which quite possibly is the most famous book review of all-time and catapulted its reviewer into the ranks of superstardom. (Chomsky had published prior articles on linguistics).
Chomsky concedes to Skinner that the only data available for the study of language consisted of what people say, but he denied any meaningful explanations were to be found within such verbosity.
Chomsky would argue that in order to explain a complex behavior, such as the use of language , as used by human speakers, it is necessary to delve into the internal organization of the organism to determine how it processes the verbal cues it receives as information. In order to make inferences about the language user’s mind it would be necessary to understand the meaning of the words to the speaker and the internal methodology for formulating the statements spoken.
Merely detecting patterns in the output could not be accepted as real comprehension without the internal inferences at work in the speaker and in those he is attempting to convey his message to, both who are continually making inferences from the words that might be spoken, and it is these inferences that derives the meaning.
“Hello”, might just be hello; it might be I’m here but I don’t wish to be; it might god; i’ve been missing you; it might be okay, you’re hear, now leave me alone. Every spoken word or sentence infers meaning to both the speaker and the listener.
Chomsky would of course go on to hold that attempts to explain behavior in terms of stimuli and response
“will be in general a vain pursuit. In all but the most elementary cases, what a person does depends in large measure on what he knows, believes, and anticipates. Actual discourse consists of interrupted fragments, false starts, lapses, slurring, and other phenomena that can only be understood as distortions of an underlying idealized patterns/
But even more, Chomsky will challenge the entire ethic of learning. He does see language as a type of knowledge, but to understand the presentation of language in the development of learning, Chomsky challenges the understanding of how that knowledge is acquired.
For Chomsky, it seems inexplicable that children acquire something as complex as the grammar and vocabulary of a language, let alone the speed and accuracy with which they do so, “at an age when they cannot yet learn how to tie their shoes or do basic arithmetic.”
“The mystery,” he says, “is deepened by the difficulty that adults, who are usually much better learners than small children, have with acquiring a second language.” (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.)
Chomsky’s refers to the Meno, a dialog in which Socrates guides a young boy, without a formal education, into producing a fairly complex geometric proof, apparently from the child’s own mental resources. Plato, speaking through Socrates of course, concludes that it must have been present in the child already, only dormant until the right conditions were presented. This becomes Chomsky’s explanation for language acquisition. He also cites Leibniz and Descartes as holding similar views concerning important areas of knowledge, whether that is true for Leibniz I am not too familiar with him to be able to say.
For Descartes, the dormant learning is mostly because of God, rather than an innate quality in humans, who have to define their inner self in order to comprehend the reality of the external world that only becomes comprehensible because of the presence of a creator who in turn gives one the ability to comprehend one’s own inner self.
Largely motivated by what has become known as the “Poverty of the Stimulus Argument,” Chomsky demonstrates an inadequacy to explain the linguistic knowledge that children arrive at. Children only ever hear a small subset of the sentences that they can produce or understand. Furthermore, the language that they do hear is often “corrupt” in some way, such as the incomplete sentences frequently used in casual exchanges, children between their first utterances of single words to phrases between eighteen to thirty months still master the syntax and language skills necessary to communicate.
So the very unwell liked conclusion would be that if the child’s mental workings are capable of developing such complex tasks as learning at such an early age, well, they are also capable of, and doing an awful lot of other mentally complex tasks long before they are given credit for having the ability to deduce, simply because their physical abilities are actually developing post their mental deductions .
And all of this was some thirty years before observations began to observe young children were doing a great deal of internal reflection and by the age of four most children have developed a strong (positive or negative) sense of self and of others and have also formulated how they believe others view them (positive or negative.)
Which of course does not mean those complex thoughts are going to be positive or negatively focused, but that much of the child’s understanding of the social complexes are developing and becoming the ethic that will develop for the child how his personality will develop towards his perspective of his community and his role within that communal ethic.
But it is the verbal demeaning or the verbal praising that he primarily hears from his first caretakers that will determine much of his or her future understanding and whether they will approach life with fear and hate. I think children, young children, need exposure to more influences than just the parents.
We live in the now, but the now is developed for the future by its offspring and when the future becomes their now, then what?
If they have parents who withhold them from learning a greater variety of people and encountering broader experiences, the now of the future becomes worse than the now of the present. We can’t isolate them from the world, I saw the results of that in the community at East Wind (an offshoot of Twin Oaks, also founded by Kat Kincaid. But allowing them to be isolated and the property of one or two who will develop their entire future is to carry all of the misery of thos one or two into the misery tomorrow.
I am not an educator, and I don’t know profess to know a great deal about “education”; but I believe education is not the only way we learn; that is the system of education. Miss Faye Reid in Faye’s Rants has some marvelous ideas on that, and wrote out a brilliant presentation in an article simply called “education”. There are other alternatives as well. I know a little bit about Montesorri.
But I did take 57 hours in psychology and another 30 in sociology before scrapping it all to study theology and religious history. There are a great many articles today, some long term studies that have followed children from infancy to middle-age. There is a great deal of plasticity in the human brain that allows for the development of what we like to call our “intelligence”.
The scope of learning, to be more amiable, more balanced, and less directive of how people’s thoughts developed cannot be the province of two people any more than it can be the province of Skinner. It cannot be the province of source of information. It cannot be the province of textbooks and education needs to focus more towards guiding students to learn how to seek out information rather than teach them what information they are supposed to learn (or what is withheld. )
I’m rambling here, but it seems most fesr, most hatred, most inequality comes from withholding both experience and knowledge. There should be a punishment for hate speech. Confine the one who hates the other into their community for six months and make them totally dependent on them. Every millionaire should need to spend three months a year doing day labor.
And once people who know the other they will begin to lose their fears and their hatreds; once the boss learns what it is to labor, maybe he will not be as abusive to labor.
Aetius, the Roman general who defeated Attila (who contrary to popular “knowledge” never sacked Rome. Rome was not even the capital of the Western Roman empire during Attila’s time) was sent as hostage to the Huns, as a child, he grew up with Attila. When he was returned he was considered too barbaric, but when they were threatened the Romans chose him to defend them with promises of wealth and high rank. And at the battle of Catalunian Plain, Aetius did just that. He didn’t see Attila as a barbarian, he knew better than that. But he also knew the Hun tactics and was able to counter every move that Attila made because he knew every move Attila was going to make.
Without learning what is to have and to have not; without learning how to learn—-what the now becomes is a population who has grown up not learning, no matter how many facts he may know. One can only know others if one knows oneself and one can only know oneself after he has learned to know others.