On Chomsky's Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior

Skinner's book, Verbal Behavior, was published in 1957. Chomsky's review of it appeared in 1959. By the criterion of seminal influence in generating controversy and stimulating publication, both must be counted major successes, although the reputation and influence of the review are more widely acknowledged. It has been reprinted at least three times (The Bobbs-Merrill Reprint Series in the Social Sciences, No. A-34; Fodor and Katz, 1964; Jakobovits and Miron, 1967), and Chomsky has recently written (in Jakobovits and Miron, 1967, p. 142) that he would take back little of it if he were rewriting it now. Skinner's Verbal Behavior is an analysis of speech in terms of its "controlling relations" which include the speaker's current motivational state, his current stimulus circumstances, his past reinforcements, and his genetic constitution. Skinner has accepted the constraints of natural science in his basic analytical apparatus in that all of its terms are empirically definable. He intends to account only for the objective dimensions of verbal behavior and to invoke only objective, nonmentalistic and nonhypothetical entities to account for it. The notion of control, anathema to the politically oversensitive, means only "causation" in its purely functional sense, and need not alarm. It is not arguable nor criticizable that behavior is an orderly, controlled datum, sensitive to the circumstances of the behaver;