This article first appeared as an assignment in Cognitive Psychology at UAGC in my undergrad studies. It was submitted July 5, 2022.
Communication is an endemic feature of all life, and it manifests across a dizzying range of methods from pheromonal expressions of insects to canine body language to whalesong. Humans are somewhat unique in their modes of communication because they have developed completely novel languages across different regions independent of one another. According to the World Atlas (Michaels, 2019), there are over 7,000 distinct human languages currently spoken around the world, each continuing to evolve according to the needs of the culture. But how did humans come to develop so many languages, each with its own profound complexity, yet all communicate essentially the same ideas? Research into this question has been fraught with conflict in multiple disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and neurology, with most arguments driven mainly by conflicting ideologies. Two of the most notable voices in this debate are Burrhus Frederick (B. F.) Skinner and Noam Chomsky. The former advocated a purely mechanistic model of language acquisition under radical behaviorism while the latter proposed an innate and organic source of language, founding the study of psycholinguistics.
Skinner’s Heterodoxy
B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) published the Behavior of Organisms in 1938, proposing a complete about-face from the fledgling practice of psychology and psychoanalytics by completely eschewing the existence of an internal, unseen motivation for why humans do what they do (Schlinger, 2018). Skinner believed that observable behavior was exclusively the result of external, environmental factors, and further that internal thoughts were equally predetermined by conditioned, learned responses (Diller, 2021; Lill & LaBrot, 2020). Later, in 1957, Skinner published Verbal Behavior, applying his interpretations to the acquisition of language. In his estimation, infants learned language only through the repeated cause-and-effect events provided by caregivers in an operant model that created stimuli-response (S-R) connections. This is the same method by which he and other behaviorists believed rats learned how to navigate mazes, though laboratory research continued to confound their hypotheses (Robinson-Riegler & Robinson-Riegler, 2012a). Skinner believed that language was a symptom of cognitive complexity rather than a cause or catalyst for it (McLaughlin, 2010). He vehemently denounced psychoanalytics, refusing to accept that behaviors could be the result of some invisible mental life, impervious to scrutiny or – most importantly – measurement (Skinner, 1954). However, for context, consider that Skinner’s devotion to determinism and renunciation of undetectable influences may stem more from his rejection of religion as an atheist than from a truly scientific ideology (Boeree, 2006).
To say that Skinner’s contribution to language acquisition was divisive would be an understatement. Behaviorists acknowledged but defended the weak theory structure and nearly absent methodology in Verbal Behavior by clarifying and reconstructing it for years after its publication (Knapp, 1980; MacCorquodale, 1969; Zehrer, 1959). Non-behaviorists were not so quick to forgive the failings of the work (Linn, 1974), the most notable among them being Noam Chomsky who penned the first of his many scathing reviews of Skinner and his fundamental thesis (1959) in response to Verbal Behavior. In it, Chomsky noted that Skinner failed the most basic of scientific premise: to be honest to the data, to approach one’s hypotheses with objectivity and without personal bias. He pointed out that Skinner’s proposal (Skinner himself deigned to call his models theories to avoid inaccurate classification, he claimed (Scriven, 1956)) consciously and deliberately ignored the impact of confounding features of humanity’s cognitive capacity, instead making grand leaps of questionable logic between animal studies and human behavior.
Chomsky would later dissect Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) with a viciously damning article in the New York Review of Books entitled “the Case Against B. F. Skinner” (1971), effectively accusing Skinner of supporting racism, fascism, and a version of stark determinism that would ignore the emotions, desires, motivations, and culpability of human actions. A perusal of these two pieces by Chomsky leveled directly at Skinner suggests a much deeper conflict than a difference of opinion over language acquisition.
Chomsky’s Neodoxy
Avram Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) published his first work, “Systems of syntactic analysis,” in 1953, setting a fierce tone and a quick pace for what would become the study of psycholinguistics. Four years later – the same year as Skinner’s Verbal Behavior – Chomsky’s book Syntactic Structures was released, setting in motion what many considered the start of the cognitive revolution (Lightfoot & Chomsky, 2002). Chomsky’s premise is that individual humans acquire language from an innate, organic cognitive capacity, that language faculty is a neurological potentiality that immediately begins developing upon introduction of opportunity, and that (specifically regarding Skinner’s model) humans are capable of free will beyond a construction of reflexive behaviors (Witkowski, 2020). Humans are born with an implicit sensitivity to the meaning and context of verbal communication, adapting constantly with transformational grammar, understanding syntax and sentence structure organically and without formalized teaching (Robinson-Riegler & Robinson-Riegler, 2012b). His universal grammar theory suggests additionally that all languages follow basic common rules, for instance understanding noun/object relationships to verbs/actions and establishing a sense of temporal placement (Corballis, 2019).
Chomsky’s position has heavily influenced neuroscience, perhaps because it seems to follow far more naturally and intuitively that the intense complexity required to communicate via human tongues could not possibly be exclusively a matter of observed modeling, stimuli-response, or conditioned operants. Neurology has pursued an aggressive agenda informed by Chomsky’s model, illustrating that the neurological underpinnings of language are valid, demonstrable, and consistent (Bolhuis, 2019; Zaccarella & Trettenbrein, 2021). There are, as science dictates, gaps and questions surrounding the premise, including how non-culturally-based communication paradigms such as sign language fit into the picture (Lillo-Martin, 2021), but these questions hone and challenge the premise to improve.
A Final Comparison of the -Doxies
After a thorough review of the bodies of work of each of these gentlemen as well as the speculative discourse surrounding their public overlaps, the true nature of their conflict lurks just below the surface. The topic was mentioned briefly before that Skinner’s perspective was likely heavily informed by his atheism and, thus, a desire to only rely on that which is verifiable. He also was almost a quarter century older than Chomsky, a white male, and embedded in a culture still mostly unaware of its endemic Eurocentricity, including being a member of American academia before and through the Second World War. Chomsky, on the other hand, was born an American-born Jew who witnessed the genocide of his people at the hands of the Nazi regime, even writing on the rise of fascism in Europe in 1938 or so when he was only 10 years old (McGilvray, 2021). As a Jew, particularly at that time in history, Chomsky did not have the privilege that Skinner did of ignoring the political implications of his work. One might surmise that Chomsky’s utterly vicious treatment of Skinner’s work was, while not entirely unfounded, motivated far more by the potential for it to be used to justify further atrocities (e.g. eugenics) in the name of science. These topics were addressed by Chomsky in a follow-up interview some 45 years after his initial review of Beyond Freedom and Dignity, where he described the cultural backdrop of the original article (Virués-Ortega, 2006). Given that Chomsky was already a passionate political activist, radicalized by the injustice he saw not only for his own people but across the world, it only makes sense that Skinner, stumbling into Chomsky’s specialized purview in the late 1950s, did not stand a chance. Skinner had neither science nor ethics on his side.
In the end, there truly is no debate between Skinner and Chomsky: Skinner chose to describe an animal exclusively by its appearance, projecting his own interpretation of causality onto the thing without robust investigation; Chomsky subjected it to an x-ray, a genetics test, and a battery of interactive puzzles, just for starters. Skinner spent years defending his thesis, insisting that the nature of humanity is deterministic and best controlled by reinforcement; Chomsky constantly updated and revised his theses, publishing hundreds of books, making mistakes, and always advocating for the greatest good of mankind. If there is a legitimate debate between the two of them, it is purely philosophical, exploring the question of whether mankind has a destiny, free will, or any hope of a future. Given that Skinnerian behaviorism is mostly employed by marketers, advertisers, and other capitalist-consumerist interests – all of which pose a significant threat to our long-term survival as a species – one can only hope that more people will realize that Chomsky has been fighting for us all along.
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