Author: B. F. Skinner Foundation

Self-descriptive verbal behavior is of interest for many reasons. Only through the acquisition of such behavior does the speaker become “aware” of what he is doing or saying, and why.…

The extensive verbal behavior usually called animism may have little to do with private stimuli. It may represent a stage in the growth of a verbal environment in which responses…

If we observe that an animal cowers or retreats when someone approaches, we call it afraid, not because we read into the animal our own private accompaniments of fear but…

The response His face is familiar cannot be formulated in the same way as His face is red. The condition responsible for familiar is not in the stimulus but in…

There are at least four ways in which a reinforcing community with no access to a private stimulus may generate verbal behavior with respect to it. (p. 131) [Editorial challenge:…

In setting up the kind of verbal operant called the tact, the verbal community characteristically reinforces a given response in the presence of a given stimulus. This can be done…

... the problem of privacy cannot be fully solved by instrumental invasion of the organism. No matter how clearly these internal events may be exposed in the laboratory, the fact…

A small but important part of the universe is enclosed within the skin of each individual and, so far as we know, is uniquely accessible to him. It does not…

The fact that a verbal response conditioned in the presence of a given stimulus is found to show some strength in the presence of another stimulus showing some of the…

A quotation is a special form of tact which uses the minimal repertoire of echoic behavior. Whether we are to call it echoic or a tact is unimportant. The classifications…

Having developed a functional suffix -ed with respect to that subtle property of stimuli which we speak of as action-in-the-past, the suffix may be added for the first time to…

Just as a speaker who possesses well-developed echoic behavior may imitate new complex sound-patterns heard for the first time, so the individual who possesses a well-developed minimal repertoire of tacts…

The most familiar examples of functional units are traditionally called words. In learning to speak the child acquires tacts of various sizes: words (doll), phrases (on the table), and sentences…

The properties of a stimulus which are relevant in evoking a response, either in the individual speaker or according to the practices of a given community, can be discovered only…

In studying the properties of the world of things or events which are responded to verbally we must lift ourselves by our own bootstraps; many properties of nature can be…

We are interested in finding terms, not to take traditional places, but to deal with a traditional subject matter. (p. 115)

How a stimulus or some property of a stimulus acquires control over a given form of response is now fairly well understood. The form of a response is shaped by…

... how a word “stands for” a thing or “means” what the speaker intends to say or “communicates” some condition of a thing to a listener has never been satisfactorily…

What do pyramidality, poetry, chair, red, or foxy really “mean”? If we try to answer this by discovering what they “mean to us,” we are behaving empirically, although under a…

Abstraction is a peculiarly verbal process because a nonverbal environment cannot provide the necessary restricted contingency (p. 109)

Our definition of verbal behavior, incidentally, includes the behavior of experimental animals where reinforcements are supplied by an experimenter or by an apparatus designed to establish contingencies which resemble those…

Some extended control is ... permissible and even useful, but a free extension of the tact cannot be tolerated, particularly in practical and scientific matters. The verbal community deals with…

The tact is a relation, not merely a response, and in the absence of a controlling stimulus no relation can be established. (p. 105)

Unfortunately, metaphor is also often useful when there is nothing to say. John Horne Tooke pointed this out: “ ... Similes ... are frequently found most useful to the authors…

Literature is prescientific in the sense that it talks about things or events before science steps in—and is less inclined to talk about them afterward. (p. 98)

Metaphorical extension is most useful when no other response is available. In a novel situation to which no generic term can be extended, the only effective behavior may be metaphorical.…

Verbal behavior would be much less effective if metaphorical extension were not possible. Even when a nonextended tact is available, the metaphor may have an advantage. It may be more…

Where is a man when he is “on top of the world” or when he has “suffered a moral fall”? How do we “shut our eyes to the truth”? Answers…

Sometimes a genuine extension seems to occur when no similarity between stimuli expressible in the terms of physical science can be demonstrated. There are several possible explanations. Two stimuli may…

A second type of extension takes place because of the control exercised by properties of the stimulus which, though present at reinforcement, do not enter into the contingency respected by…

To discover the “essence” of chair, we should have to examine the actual contingencies of reinforcement in a given community. (p. 91)

The property which makes a novel stimulus effective may be the property upon which reinforcements supplied by the community are contingent. This “generic extension” is illustrated when a speaker calls…

A given object does not remain the inevitable occasion for the reinforcement of an appropriate response, and the probability of response therefore comes to vary with the occasion. The listener…

The practical behavior of the listener with respect to the verbal stimulus produced by a tact follows the same three-term relation which has already been used in analyzing the behavior…

Theories of meaning usually consider the behaviors of both speaker and listener at the same time. The practice is encouraged by the notion of the “use of words,” which appears…

In very general terms we may say that behavior in the form of the tact works for the benefit of the listener by extending his contact with the environment, and…

Verbal behavior in which the reinforcement is thoroughly generalized, and the control of which therefore rests almost exclusively with the environment, is developed by the methods of science. The reinforcing…

A tact which is established with a completely generalized reinforcement might be called “pure” or “objective”... A truly generalized reinforcement is, however, rare ... and pure objectivity in this sense…

Roughly speaking, the mand permits the listener to infer something about the condition of the speaker regardless of external circumstances, while the tact permits him to infer something about the…

It may be tempting to say that in a tact the response “refers to,” “mentions,” “announces,” “talks about,” “names,” “denotes,” or “describes” its stimulus. But the ... only useful functional…

The invented term “tact” will be used here. The term carries a mnemonic suggestion of behavior which “makes contact with” the physical world. A tact may be defined as a…

In all verbal behavior under stimulus control there are three important events to be taken into account: a stimulus, a response, and a reinforcement. These are contingent upon each other…

All verbal behavior is, of course, borrowed in the sense of being acquired from other people. (p. 73)

Most of the “facts” of history are acquired and retained as intraverbal responses. (p. 72)

In echoic behavior and in writing from copy there is a formal correspondence between stimulus and response-product. In textual behavior and in taking dictation there is a point-to-point correspondence between…

In echoic behavior, the correspondence upon which reinforcement is based may serve as an automatic conditioned reinforcer. The speaker who is also an accomplished listener “knows when he has correctly…

Why the family, the community, and educational agencies arrange ... [reinforcement of textual behavior] is to be explained in terms of the ultimate advantages gained from having an additional literate…

Since the term “reading” usually refers to many processes at the same time, the narrower term “textual behavior” will be used here. In the textual operant, then, a vocal response…

In all kinds of self-echoic behavior we have to consider the possibility that the verbal stimulus may be covert. (p. 65)