🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sep 8, 10:41 am, "Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote in messagenews:1189260270.081759.37300@19g2000hsx.googlegroups.com...

> >> >Skinner doesn't even know that such a thing as syntactic
> >> > structure exists.
>
> >> On the contrary, Skinner spends a great deal of time talking about it,
> >> especially Chapter Thirteen: Grammar and Syntax as Autoclitic Processes.
>
> > Saporta's 1961 collection *Psycholinguistics: A Book of Readings*
> > includes extensive excerpts from Skinner, as well as quite a few
> > behaviorist articles (and most of _Syntactic Structures_, at the time
> > Chomsky's only publication on the topic). Perhaps if I have some
> > leisure time, I'll look through them.

> > And as you said yourself, Skinner's approach is _not_ based on the
> > examination of communicating humans, but on the assumption that
> > language is no different from any animal behavior.
>
> No, I did not say that. I agreed that it contained no LABORATORY
> examinations of verbal behavior. I may respond to the rest of your post, but
> I wanted to clear up this misrepresentation of what I said. VB contains many
> examples of complex utterances (i.e., an "examination of communicating
> humans") but, since you know ZERO about what he said, you continue to say
> all manner of erroneous things.

It may not have been what you _intended_, but it's what you _said_.
(Oh, that's right, behaviorists can't have "intentions.")

You now owe comments on _three_ postings from me, the following being
the third:

You will perhaps not be happy that you encouraged me to read some
Skinner. The Saporta volume contains VB pp. 1-12 (on 67-74) and 114-29
(on 228-39).

Skinner appears to be under the impression that no behaviorist had
ever investigated language before ("Linguistics ... has recorded and
analyzed speech sounds and semantic and syntactical practices, but
comparisons of different languages and the tracing of historical
changes have taken precedence over the study of the individual
speaker. Logic, mathematics, and scientific methodology ... have
usually remained content with a formal analysis; in any case, they
have not developed the techniques necessary for a causal analysis of
the behavior of man thinking" [69a]).

The first sentence of that extract shows that he was rather more than
half a century retarded in his familiarity with philology or
linguistics, where attention to present-day data had been gradually
supplanting historical investigation in priority since the
"dialectologists" of the turn of the century.

As for the second sentence, he would seem never to have heard of
Bloomfield's *Language* (1933), a strictly behaviorist account;
Bloomfield scholars date his turn from "mentalism" to behaviorism to
his acquaintance with Weiss and his first publication from this POV to
1927.

Taken together, these two sentences guarantee that Skinner will not
make use of the analyses of English (let alone other languages) that
had been carried out in previous decades, notably the two descriptive
English grammar volumes by C. C. Fries and the phonology of Bloch,
Smith, and Trager. Instead, he is mired in the categories he learned
in high school, which are poorly adapted from the analysis of Latin
and have little to do with English.

Skinner apparently was not aware of any discussion of meaning other
than Ogden & Richards, *The Meaning of Meaning* (1923). AFAIK this
work had no influence whatsoever within linguistics. He could simply
have turned to Bloomfield's (1933) chapter called "Meaning" (which
Saporta conveniently reprints directly after his second Skinner
extract)!

Skinner is intent on denying any sort of mental existence to language.
He rejects the notion that language expresses ideas, because "ideas"
cannot be observed; he goes on to say that "meaning" and
"information" (the currently popular term) are merely other words for
"idea" (70b-73a).

Skinner denies any sort of social reality or significance to language
(68a), because it is the behavior of individuals, not of societies. He
is blissfully unaware that R. A. Hall, Jr., at least as long ago as
1951, had been insisting that there is no such thing as "a language,"
but only individual idiolects.

Now let's look at a rather nice passage from the beginning. Skinner is
not a bad writer -- rather better than Chomsky, at any rate, but
that's not a high bar to leap -- and here is something he writes
(69b): "It is characteristic of [verbal] behavior that it is impotent
against the physical world. Rarely do we shout down the walls of a
Jericho or successfully command the sun to stop or the waves to be
still. Names do not break bones." Do you see what he is doing in this
passage? He is alluding. Do you recognize the allusions? What in the
"verbal behavior" theory of language accounts for such use of
language?

Saporta's second extract is called "The Problem of Reference." I do
not know whether this is a complete chapter, or whether that is
Skinner's title. It turns out that "reference" is Skinner's word for
"meaning." (It's not how "reference" is used in linguistics and
philosophy, but clearly he neither knows nor cares.) How he can
discuss meaning without reference to meaning is utterly baffling, and
this entire chapter is simply uninterpretable. He addresses questions
that there is no reason for asking, and his answers to them tell us
nothing.

(I also note that Skinner's examples are taken only from English. thus
instancing exactly the same fault as Chomsky and his followers. At
least Chomsky had _started_ with another language entirely, Modern
Hebrew, in his M.A. thesis of 1951 -- a work which, as it happens, I
have become rather an expert on over the last few years.)

If this is the best their Master can do, I don't think I need to waste
any time on the other chapters in Saporta reprinted from JEAB vel sim.
They will doubtless merely confirm what I observed in those Academic
Press chapters: the materials addressed are simplistic, the analyses
are shallow, and the insights are nonexistent.