🚀 go-pugleaf

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@verizon.net> wrote in message 
news:1188993040.304358.76210@50g2000hsm.googlegroups.com...
> On Sep 4, 11:51 pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>> On Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:27:54 -0700, "Peter T. Daniels"
>> <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote in
>> <news:1188962874.711693.93360@r29g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>
>> in sci.cognitive,sci.lang,bionet.neuroscience:
>>
>> > On Sep 4, 5:40 pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> >> The article is at
>> >> <http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&ar...>
>> >> in the form of 17 scanned pages; there's also a link by
>> >> which one can download it as a 2.9M .pdf.
>> >> 'On Chomsky's review of Skinner's _Verbal Behavior_'
>> >> Reviewed by Kenneth MacCorquodale
>> >> J Exp Anal Behav. 1970 January; 13(1): 83-99.
>> > Thank you. Did it look worth reading?
>>
>> I just skimmed the first few pages, so take anything I say
>> with a grain of salt, but it seemed to me that one would
>> have to be familiar with VB to get much out of the review: a
>> good chunk of MacC's argument appears to be that Chomsky
>> either didn't understand or misrepresented what Skinner was
>> actually saying.  I've not read VB (and know damn-all about
>> behaviorism anyway), so I'm not part of the intended
>> audience.
>
> A first glance yields the rather telling sentence "Although his thesis
> is experimental, Skinner's book has no experimental data involving the
> laboratory manipulation of verbal responses which definitively
> demonstrate that the processes he invokes to explain verbal behavior
> are in fact involved in its production" (p. 84a)

Yet when I mentioned the establishment of a verbal repertoire in special 
populations your response was that this was something other than language or 
something like that. Right? Part of the problem with "proving Skinner's 
thesis" is that the critical experiments would all be unethical. The study 
of operant behavior has, of course, proceeded and in a fashion that we 
expect from science. There are, further, some data using non-humans that 
suggest the cogency of some of Skinner's interesting propositions as in:

Lubinski, D., & Thompson, T. (1987). An animal model of the interpersonal 
communication of interoceptive (private) states. Journal of the Experimental 
Analysis of Behavior, 48, 1-15.
Pigeons were taught to interact communicatively (i.e., exchange 
discriminative stimuli) based on 1 pigeon's internal state, which varied as 
a function of cocaine, pentobarbital, and saline administration. These 
performances generalized to untrained pharmacological agents (d-amphetamine 
and chlordiazepoxide) and were observed in the absence of aversive 
stimulation, deprivation, and unconditioned reinforcement. The training 
procedure used in this study appears similar to that by which humans learn 
to report on (tact) their internal environments and may be construed as a 
rudimentary animal model of the interpersonal communication of private 
events.


Further, the sampling of papers I posted involving humans were just that, a 
sampling. I think there are two important things to consider in evaluating 
Skinner's book: first is it internally consistent and cogent - this is where 
it is usually attacked through misrepresentation (i.e., Chomsky's arguments 
that it can't account for this o that observation). The second is more 
difficult - can it be experimentally demonstrated? I already mentioned the 
ethical issues - one cannot eliminate critical aspects of the environment to 
see if they are really important in a child's acquisition of "language." 
But, then, one can establish "functional language" to a greater or lesser 
extent in special populations - Oh, I forgot, you already dismissed that.

>