Review of Verbal Behavior

by B.F. Skinner

Genres: Psychology

Paperback

First published October 1, 1991

About the author

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was a highly influential American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform and poet. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974. He invented the operant conditioning chamber, innovated his own philosophy of science called Radical Behaviorism, and founded his own school of experimental research psychology—the experimental analysis of behavior. His analysis of human behavior culminated in his work Verbal Behavior, which has recently seen enormous increase in interest experimentally and in applied settings. He discovered and advanced the rate of response as a dependent variable in psychological research. He invented the cumulative recorder to measure rate of responding as part of his highly influential work on schedules of reinforcement. In a recent survey, Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century. He was a prolific author, publishing 21 books and 180 articles.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The thought is that this review crushed Behaviorism. Sounds good to me.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chomsky crushes B.F. Skinner's totally ungrounded book Verbal Behavior. Chomsky's "Review" is extremely dense and technical, recommended only for linguistics students and other social science students. The article is composed of nine major analytical points over the first two thirds (about 20 pages) with another third of the article spent on 48 detailed footnotes clarifying the above nine points. Chomsky is thorough, clear, and relatively concise (considering how much information he covers in 30 pages), which together make the text very dense and a lot of work to get through.

This is the definitive response to Skinner, and to the entire school of naively reductive Behaviorism to which Skinner belongs.