Skinner’s Quote of the Day

One learns to gesture through movement duplication but to speak through product duplication, which is more precise. (p. 491)

Vocal behavior must have had several advantages in natural selection. Sounds are effective in the dark, around corners, and when listeners are not looking, and they can be made when…

The human species took a crucial step forward when its vocal musculature came under operant control in the production of speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all the distinctive…

It is often said that bees have a language, that they “tell each other where good forage is to be found,” that the dance “conveys information,” and so on. Such…

It was only after a tendency to imitate had evolved that contingencies existed for the evolution of the reciprocal process of modeling. (p. 489)

The plausibility of a reconstruction [of evolution] depends in part upon the size of the variations that are assumed to have occurred. The smaller the variations, the more plausible the…

Because a verbal environment is composed of listeners, it is understandable that linguists emphasize the listener. (p. 487)

Strictly speaking, verbal behavior does not evolve. It is the product of a verbal environment, or what linguists call a language, and it is the verbal environment that evolves. (p.…

Verbal behavior left no artifacts until the appearance of writing, and that was at a very late stage. We shall probably never know precisely what happened, but we ought to…

Evolutionary theory has always been plagued by scantiness of evidence. We see the products of evolution but not much of the process. (p. 487)

And now my labor is over. I have had my lecture. I have no sense of fatherhood. If my genetic and personal histories had been different, I should have come…

To deny a creative contribution does not destroy man qua man or woman qua woman any more than Butler’s phrase [“A hen is only an egg's way of making another…

The poet often knows that some part of his history is contributing to the poem he is writing. He may, for example, reject a phrase because he sees that he…

Selection is a special kind of causality, much less conspicuous than the push-pull causality of nineteenth-century physics, and Darwin’s discovery may have appeared so late in the history of human…

The key term in Darwin’s title is Origin. Novelty could be explained without appeal to prior design if random changes in structure were selected by their consequences. It was the…

A biologist has no difficulty in describing the role of the mother. She is a place, a locus in which a very important biological process takes place . . .…

Something does seem to be taken away from the poet when his behavior is traced to his genetic and personal histories. Only a person who truly initiates his behavior can…

Does the poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories? (p. 479)

Verbal Behavior was criticized in a different way by an old friend, I. A. Richards, whose interest in the field goes back, of course to the Meaning of Meaning .…

... I agreed to participate [in a BBC television discussion with Chomsky] only if the moderator could guarantee equal time. I suggested that we use chess clocks. My clock would…

Eventually the question was asked, why had I not answered Chomsky? ... No doubt I was shirking a responsibility in not replying to Chomsky, and I am glad an answer…

. . . Chomsky’s review began to be widely cited and reprinted and became, in fact, much better known than my book. (p. 474)

Let me tell you about Chomsky. I published Verbal Behavior in 1957. In 1958 I received a 55-page typewritten review by someone I had never heard of named Noam Chomsky.…

... I intend to raise the question of whether I am responsible for what I am saying, whether I am actually originating anything, and to what extent I deserve credit…

The study of the verbal behavior of speaker and listener, as well as of the practices of the verbal environment which generates such behavior, may not contribute directly to historical…

The origins of most forms of response will probably always remain obscure, but if we can explain the beginnings of even the most rudimentary verbal environment, the well-established processes of…

Where the baby first cried as a reflex response to painful stimulation, it may now cry as an operant. (p. 465)

The relatively undifferentiated babbling of the human infant from which vocal verbal behavior develops is undoubtedly an evolutionary product, but it is not the sort of behavior which is evoked…

It is unlikely, moreover, that verbal behavior in the present sense arose from instinctive cries. Well-defined emotional and other innate responses comprise reflex systems which are difficult, if not impossible,…

The mother bird cries out not “in order to warn her young” but because the young of earlier members of the species who have cried out have survived to perpetuate…

Innate and acquired responses both appear to be emitted “in order to achieve effects”—in order to promote the welfare of the species or the individual. (p. 463)

There is a parallel between natural selection and operant conditioning. The selection of an instinctive response by its effect in promoting the survival of a species resembles, except for enormous…

To say that [responses] are instinctive is merely to say that each form of behavior is observed in most members of a given species, when there has been no opportunity…

A superficial resemblance between verbal behavior and the instinctive signal systems of animals (many of them vocal) has been the source of much confusion. (p. 462)

Early man was probably not very different from his modern descendants with respect to behavioral processes. If brought into a current verbal community, he would probably develop elaborate verbal behavior.…

In studying the practices of the community rather than the behavior of the speaker, the linguist has not been concerned with verbal behavior in the present sense. (p. 461)

The “languages” studied by the linguist are the reinforcing practices of verbal communities. When we say that also means in addition or besides “in English,” we are not referring to…

I have found it necessary from time to time to attack traditional concepts which assign spontaneous control to the special inner self called the speaker. Only in this way could…

Men will never become originating centers of control, because their behavior will itself be controlled, but their role as mediators may be extended without limit. (p. 460)

If we eventually give a plausible account of human behavior as part of a lawfully determined system, man’s power will increase even more rapidly. (p. 460)

There is no reason why scientific methods cannot now be applied to the study of man himself—to practical problems of society and, above all, to the behavior of the individual.…

The program of a radical behaviorism left no originating control inside the skin. (p. 459)

It is as unfair to ask a science of behavior to  as to ask the science of physics to account for the changes in temperature which were taking place in…

In 1934, while dining at the Harvard Society of Fellows, I found myself seated next to Professor Alfred North Whitehead. We dropped into a discussion of behaviorism . . .…

In many ways, then, this seems to me to be a better way of talking about verbal behavior, and that is why I have tried to get the reader to…

Hundreds of puzzling questions and obscure propositions about verbal behavior may be dismissed, while the new questions and propositions which arise to take their place are susceptible to experimental check…

It is my belief that something like the present analysis reduces the total vocabulary needed for a scientific account. It eliminates far more terms than it creates, and the terms…

Stating the matter in the most selfish light, I have been trying to get the reader to behave verbally as I behave. (p. 455)

I have invented a few new terms—“mand,” “tact,” “autoclitic,” and so on—which are perhaps now part of the reader’s vocabulary, though in what strength I would not undertake to say.…

It has not been my purpose to present the facts of verbal behavior as such, and that is why I have not been greatly concerned with experimental or statistical proof.…