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Chomsky's Objections to Skinner's approach to Verbal Behavior

Preprint · April 2018

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20744.11520

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Chomsky on Skinner Tomas Villena

Chomsky’s objections to Skinner’s approach to verbal behavior

Tomas Villena1

In his review of Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior”, Chomsky presents several objections

to the behaviorist approach for studying human language. In this paper, I will examine

two of such objections. The paper is structured as follows: First, I will give a brief

account of the basic ideas in Skinner’s behavioral approach that motivate Chomsky’s

critique. After this, I will present what I consider two of Chomsky’s strongest

arguments against Skinner’s view. Finally, I will mention some responses I think could

be used to defend Skinner in light of Chomsky’s attacks.

Skinner was a behaviorist. He believed that we can predict how humans act

verbally by observing their behavior when presented with different stimuli.

Furthermore, Skinner believed that we should employ what he called “functional

analysis” to formalize the behaviorist approach into a scientific endeavor. In particular,

Skinner believed that we should identify variables that control behavior and find the

mechanisms through which they interact to produce a given response. The variables in

this verbal behavior function are to be specified in terms of the basic building blocks:

stimuli, reinforcement and deprivation.

Skinner’s view then is based on using experimental methods to study verbal

behavior through observing responses in speakers given specific stimuli and associated

reinforcements. Crucially, Skinner seems to reject referencing hypothetical mental

1 University of California, Berkeley

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Chomsky on Skinner Tomas Villena

structures or internal cognitive processes we can not physically observe. Under

Skinner’s behaviorism, actual behavior of the subject in relation to it’s environment is

the only object of study with which we should be concerned. This is a particularly

questionable aspect of Skinner’s theory in Chomsky’s eyes and many of his criticisms

are based on attacking this particular idea of studying only what we can observe.

The general concern that Chomsky has with Skinner’s behaviorism is that he

thinks functional analysis of the form proposed by Skinner is an insufficient framework

for accounting for the complexities of human linguistic behavior. The two arguments

that I shall explore are thus aimed at pointing out the particular limitations of the

functional analysis framework that Chomsky takes to prove this insufficiency.

Chomsky’s first objection to Skinner’s behaviorist approach is that behaviorism’s

exclusion of unobservables disproportionately dismisses the importance of human’s

internal cognitive structure. Because of this, Chomsky believes Skinner’s behaviorism is

doomed to be insufficient to account for human verbal behavior and in particular, the

ease with which children learn language and it’s complex grammatical intricacies

without too much instruction.

According to Chomsky, one would expect the prediction of behavior of complex

organisms to require not only knowledge of how the organism responds to external

stimuli; but also knowledge of the internal structure of the organism. Behaviorism

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Chomsky on Skinner Tomas Villena

however only studies how external factors affect behavior completely ignoring

predetermined genetics and cognitive abilities.

In order to prove the importance of the internal structure of human organisms for

explaining verbal behavior, Chomsky gives several examples of how easy it is for

children to acquire language quickly without the actual need for many reinforcements.

He points out for instance that sons and daughters of immigrant parents who don’t

speak the dominant language have a remarkably easy time picking up both languages

without much “reinforcement” from their parents. In Chomsky’s eyes then verbal

behavior has a strong internal component. Thus, Chomsky thinks Skinner’s account

tends to mistakenly overestimate the role of external stimulus and reinforcements when

in reality most of what explains language is in how we are hard-wired for language

acquisition and use. Chomsky goes even further explaining that human speech is

complex and must be studied in meditational, neurological-genetic terms. In more

simple terms, Chomsky thinks the study of language should focus on understanding

the way we are pre-programmed genetically to learn and use language, and how it is

that we are able to understand complex grammatical structures. Underlying Chomsky’s

view is the assumption that language is an inherently different phenomena from other

sorts of behavior and so observation is uninformative because it excludes precisely the

central mechanism through which language is learned and exercised: our internal

neurological structure.

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Chomsky on Skinner Tomas Villena

Chomsky’s second argument against a behavioral approach to studying verbal

behavior is based on questioning the applicability of the functional analysis framework

in verbal behavior. Chomsky’s concern here is that Skinner’s functional analysis may

work perfectly well for testing animal behavior in laboratories, but the analytical tools

used in the lab may not be suitable to study human linguistic behavior. In particular,

Chomsky questions Skinner’s argument that his framework should be applicable to the

case of human language since it is scientifically sound, given it’s successful

implementation in the case of simple, non-verbal animal behavior. Chomsky questions

the scientific nature of the functional analysis framework claiming it creates the

“illusion of a rigorous scientific theory with a very broad scope”(85). According to

Chomsky’s reading of Skinner, we are only given what he thinks is a speculative and

analogical account of how functional analysis could be applied to the case of linguistic

behavior by giving examples of how smaller-scale discoveries have been made.

More specifically, Chomsky believes that the concepts of stimulus and

reinforcements are particularly weak building blocks for studying verbal behavior. On

the one hand, Chomsky claims that responses may have different stimuli with which

they can be associated. This seems to make the behaviorist project an unscientific one, in

which certain responses are associated with stimuli somewhat arbitrarily. Chomsky

provides examples in which the stimuli is not clear from an observed situation. We may

hypothesize for instance that if we show an image to a speaker and the response

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Chomsky on Skinner Tomas Villena

happens to be some feature present in the image, the conclusion is that the image

caused this response in some way. It might however well be the case that the reason for

the response has nothing to do with the external stimulus and we are making a value

judgement based on our prior beliefs that bias our scientific observation. This

subjectivity is concerning for Chomsky and he believes it undermines the applicability

of behaviorism deeply.

On the other hand, Chomsky criticizes the very notion of reinforcement defined by

Skinner as strengthening any operant (which are emitted responses for which no

obvious stimuli can be attributed) which precedes it. For Chomsky again classifying

something as a reinforcer is tricky and a matter of subjective interpretation. In any case,

the general argument is that these categories work in simplified contexts for non-verbal

behavior but in the context of speaking humans, Skinner’s terminology ends up being

just that: terminology. Chomsky seems to think there is nothing rigorous about

assigning stimuli and reinforcements in the complex context of human verbal behavior

since doing so is a matter of interpretation that is by nature subjective. In this sense,

Chomsky thinks Skinner’s functional analysis seems to give us analytical tools but in

reality it is only an oversimplified unscientific framework.

Several responses to Chomsky’s objections may be elaborated. I shall focus on two

responses. Firstly, regarding the lack of objectivity in the behaviorist concepts of

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Chomsky on Skinner Tomas Villena

stimulus, it seems like Chomsky thinks Skinner needs to make more claims to sustain

his analytic apparatus than I believe he does.

Take stimulus for instance. Chomsky believes that it’s troubling to assign stimulus-

response causal relations since the assignment of stimulus to responses seems to be a

subjective process. Chomsky points out that a speaker can utter a proper name without

the subject identified with that proper name being present, and so the stimulus could

actually be inside the speaker’s mind (precisely an unobserved dimension that

behaviorists would miss). For example, I can say “Arc” without the subject identified

with this name being present so the physical stimulus seems to be absent thus somehow

showing the inadequacy of behaviorist methods to explain my verbal behavior.

This however is not a very strong argument since Skinner may think that a

response could be consistent with several stimuli and still be perfectly convinced of the

effectiveness of his analytical framework. It doesn’t have to be the case that only the

presence of the person that the speaker identifies with the proper name is the cause of

the utterance of the name. There are several stimuli that can cause several responses,

this is part of the difficulty of science. The whole point of Skinner’s behaviorism is

proposing hypotheses of certain kinds of stimuli causing certain kinds of responses and

testing these hypotheses by controlling for other variables that may in principle muddle

the relationship: if we are good scientists, we should diminish the probability that the

identification of a particular stimuli is subjective.

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Chomsky on Skinner Tomas Villena

In the case of proper names, the hypothesis that the presence of the person is the

only cause of the utterance of the name can be quickly dismissed through behavioral

experiments with treatment and control groups and observing the utterance of proper

names. Chomsky’s argument doesn’t seem to undermine the possibilities of

behaviorists to come up with clever experimental designs with treatments that clearly

identify stimuli, reinforcement and response in scientific ways. Chomsky hasn’t proved

that language can’t be studied scientifically through observation, he just points out it’s

hard to get it right because unobservables may be playing a role. The role of

unobservables however does not preclude us from believing that there are relations

between observable stimuli and verbal behavior; and that we can design experiments to

objectively test hypotheses regarding these relationships.

Finally, we can counter Chomsky’s first attack: that studying human verbal

behavior through observable variables is insufficient since it ignores the importance of

our internal cognitive structure and ability for language. Although I believe this is a

strong point, it fails to establish that there is a need to study this structure in order to

understand language in meaningful ways. Perhaps this undermines Skinner’s claim

that the behaviorist project explains most language, but even if we accept the idea that

we have important cognitive predispositions for language, this doesn’t mean that

studying the relationship between observable aspects of language can not give us a

useful and informative account of verbal behavior.

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 Chomsky on Skinner Tomas Villena

Chomsky doesn’t really show that behaviorism is not a valid discipline for

studying human language, at best he shows it excludes a neurological aspect. However,

we don’t always need to study the whole story to understand facts about the world

scientifically. A good example is the study of human biology and medicine. There are

some areas of biology and medicine that study relationships between physically

observable features of the body and others that focus on molecular and cell biology. UC

Berkeley has a department in Integrative Biology and another department in Molecular

and Cell Biology; and people in these departments don’t seem to argue like Chomsky

that one method is utterly insufficient. Studying evolution in terms of physical changes

in animal body and studying the change in the corresponding genes seem both like

parts of the story but not many people would claim the physical study of evolution is

flawed methodologically as Chomsky does with Skinner.

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