On Skinner's Definition of Verbal Behavior

Abstract

"Descriptive definitions in science are useful insofar as they identify natural phenomenathat hang together in some distinctive way. In 1957, Skinner proposed an unusual definitionof verbal behavior that has subsequently been criticized even by fellow behavior analysts.Although Skinner did not justify his definition at length in his published work, twounpublished manuscripts show that he put considerable effort into identifying the implicationsof his definition. Certain passages in these manuscripts identify Skinner’s view of thefeatures that covary to make verbal behavior a coherent topic of study. A considerationof these passages does not imply that Skinner’s definition is better than alternatives, butit does clarify that which Skinner thought was distinctive about the subject matter towhich he devoted so much of his career."

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.