Verbal Behavior (1957) is a book written by B.F. Skinner in which the author presents his ideas on language. For Skinner, speech, along with other forms of communication, was simply a behavior. Skinner argued that each act of speech is an inevitable consequence of the speaker's current environment and his behavioral and sensory history, and derided mentalistic terms such as "idea", "plan" and "concept" as unscientific and of no use in the study of behavior. For Skinner, the proper object of study is behavior itself, analysed without reference to mental structure, but rather with reference to the structure and history of the environment in which particular behaviors occur. 1957 was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 _ August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist and author. ... One might be looking for the academic discipline of communications. ... John B. Watson was one of the important influences on the development of behaviorism. ...

Verbal Behavior touches on many perennial issues in philosophy, most notably the issue of rationalism vs. empiricism. For rationalists, the structure of human knowledge comes from within and is largely innate: we may learn from experience, but the essence of human thought is the ability to reason — to acquire new knowledge through deduction and induction, and to reduce the clamour of information that reaches us through our senses to pure mathematical concepts such as "square" and "melody". In its extreme form, as espoused by Descartes, rationalism holds that virtually all knowledge may be arrived at by "pure reason", i.e. by logical reasoning from a set of self-evident first principles. From this perspective, the role of the senses in the formation of knowledge is merely that of a catalyst, accelerating a process which is internal to the mind/brain. In contrast, Skinner was an extreme empiricist, arguing that notions such as "reason", "idea", "knowledge" and "concept" have no scientific significance. For example, a speaker of English could not, according to Skinner, be said to have a "knowledge of English" in any well-defined sense — he would merely have acquired a set of behaviors which allowed him to respond appropriately during English conversations. Philosophy is a discipline or field of study involving the investigation, analysis, and development of ideas at a general, abstract, or fundamental level. ... A separate article deals with a different philosophical position called rationalism. ... Empiricism (greek εμπειρισμός, from empirical, latin experientia - the experience), is the philosophical doctrine that all human knowledge comes at first from senses and experience. ... In philosophy, reason or rationality (adjective can be either rational or reasonable, each giving a slightly different meaning, and both of which are also related to the word logical) describes a type of thought or aspect of thought, especially abstract thought, which is felt to be especially human. ... René Descartes René Descartes (IPA: , March 31, 1596 – February 11, 1650), also known as Cartesius, worked as a philosopher and mathematician. ... A catalyst (Greek: καταλύτης, catalytÄ“s) is a substance that accelerates the rate (speed) of a chemical reaction without itself being transformed or consumed by the reaction (see also catalysis). ...

The book itself has been no less controversial than these broader philosophical issues, and is probably now more famous for the controversy surrounding it than for its actual contents. Particularly famous is Noam Chomsky's scathing review [1], which is said by many to have initiated a "cognitive revolution" in Psychology, a shift from the study of behaviour for its own sake to a study of the mental mechanisms which underly it. Empiricist ideas about behavior are still being explored, especially in the field of cognitive science known as connectionism. Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... The cognitive revolution is a name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that combined new thinking in psychology, anthropology and linguistics with the nascent fields of computer science and neuroscience. ... Psychology (Classical Greek: psyche = soul or mind, logos = study of) is an academic and applied field involving the study of behavior, mind and thought and the neurological bases of behavior. ... Rendering of human brain based on MRI data Cognitive Science is the scientific study of the mind and brain and how they give rise to behavior. ... Connectionism is an approach in the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of mind. ...

External links

• Chomsky's Review of Verbal Behavior
• The Camel and the Arab
• Ken MacCorquodale's Response to Chomsky's Review of Verbal Behavior