Freedom and equality?

[Jim Farmelant]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2000 22:47:35 -0700 "Lisa & Ian Murray"
<seamus at accessone.com> writes:
> >>Miles wrote: This is a pretty generous summary of the rise and fall 
> of
> behaviorism
> > in psychology as a scientific discipline.  In fact, Skinner's 
> ideas
> > fell out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s among psychological 
> researchers
> > because a growing corpus of cognitive research clearly 
> disconfirmed
> > basic behaviorist tenets.
> ===============
> 
> Some scholars cite Noam Chomsky's 1957 Syntactic Structures and his 
> 1959
> review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, to which Skinner never replied, 
> as the
> death knell of behaviorism. An anarchist slam dunk on 
> authoritarianism in
> yet another neglected dimension of human affairs :-)

Although Skinner never replied to Chomsky, a behaviorist reply
was written by K. MacCorqoudale in 1969.  "On Chomsky's
Review of Skinner's *Verbal Behavior*."  Journal of the
Experimental Analysis of Behavior. 12:831-841.
MacCorquoudale among other things characterized Chomsky's
review as "an amalgam of some rather oudated behavioristic
lore including reinforcement by drive reduction, the extinction
criterion for response strength, a peudo-incompatibility of
genetic and reinforcement processes, and other notions which
have nothing to do with Skinner's account."  In other words
MacCorquodale charged that Chomsky was basically attacking
a straw man which had little to do with Skinner's actual views,
in particular failing to distinguish the ways in which Skinner's
radical behaviorism differed from other forms of behaviorism.

Also, Pere Julia in his *Explanatory Models in Linguistics*
(Princeton Press, 1983) provided a defense of Skinner's
approach to language as verbal behavior and critiqed
Chomsky's approaches.

Regardless, of how one evaluates the respective positions of
Chomsky and Skinner, I think that one can agree with
Marc Richelle in his *B.F. Skinner: A Reappraisal* that
Skinner made a big mistake by not replying directly to Chomsky.
Richelle seems to think that this was because Skinner was lacking
a taste for the kind of rough-and-tumble intellectual debates which
Chomsky clearly relishes.

Jim Farmelant

> 
> Ian
> 
> 
> 

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