Introduction

            In this blog post I will discuss Noam Chomsky’s 1971 paper ‘Psychology and Ideology’ where Chomsky critiques Skinner’s popular science book ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner claimed that freewill was an illusion and we could explain it away using an effective behavioural science. And once we did this we would be in a position to use behavioural science to engineer a more effective society than the one we currently live in.

I will argue that while Chomsky sometimes caricatures Skinner, and he is blind to the strengths of behaviourism as a discipline, his criticisms still hit the mark. Skinner’s remarks in ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’, exaggerated what the science of behaviour was capable of in 1971, and is still beyond what behavioural science can achieve 50 years later. To this end, Chomsky’s 1971 paper did the field of psychology and philosophy a favour with its terse criticism of Skinner’s attempt at popular science.

Psychology and Ideology

 At the beginning of ‘Psychology and Ideology’ Chomsky noted when reflecting on psychological claims that we need to ask two different kinds of questions: (1) What is the scientific status of the claims, (2) What social or ideological needs do they serve. He correctly noted that these two claims are logically independent. He argues that Skinner’s empirical claims are vacuous and completely without scientific merit. And he argues that because of their null scientific status they can serve the purposes of any would be dictator as rhetoric whether the dictator was on the left or the right.

            Chomsky even goes as far to argue that the these of ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ results in the whole project being incoherent:

 “But if his thesis is true, then there is also no point in his having written the book or our reading it. For the only point could be to modify behavior, and behavior, according to the thesis, is entirely controlled by arrangement of reinforcers. Therefore, reading the book can modify behavior only if it is a reinforcer, that is, if reading the book increases the probability of the behavior which led to reading the book (assuming an appropriate state of deprivation).” (Psychology and Ideology: p.21).

This is a forced choice it is probable that there are some true claims in the book and some false claims in the book. The cause of us reading the book could be specified in various manners; being reinforced by reading that class of book in the past; a book recommendation from a friend whose recommendations in the past have been reinforcing. But Chomsky doesn’t ask what the cause of reading it is; he asks what the point of reading it. He says on Skinner’s central thesis, the only point of reading the book, is that it will modify behaviour. And it will only modify behaviour if it is a reinforcer, that is if reading the book increases the probability of the behaviour which led to reading the book (ibid p. 21). This is a strange interpretation of Skinner’s project. We have already discussed possible causes of reading the book. Possible consequences of reading the book are negative reinforcement; reading the book takes away boredom and increases the probability of reading more books like this in the future. Or the reader could be punished as a result of finding the book unintelligible, and excruciating to read, which will decrease the probability of reading books of this class in the future. Or the person could find the book positively reinforcing and this may lead to reading more books of this class and possible seeking a career in behavioural psychology.

            It is important to note that behavioural psychology doesn’t stand or fall based on what point each individual gets from reading one popular book by B.F. Skinner, there are now over a hundred years of behavioural research. And behavioural science should be evaluated on its own terms, which are the degree to which their principles have given us the ability to predict and control the behaviour of various organisms.

            Chomsky goes on to argue as follows:

“Consider the claim that reading the book might reinforce such behavior. Unfortunately, the claim is clearly false, if we use the term ‘reinforce’ with anything like its technical meaning. Recall that reading the book reinforces the desired behavior only if it is a consequence of the behavior; and obviously putting our fate in the hands of behavioural technologists is not behavior that led to (and hence can be reinforced by) reading Skinner’s book. Therefore, the claim can be true only if we deprive the term ‘reinforce’ of its technical meaning.” (Ibid p. 22)

Reading books in the past has been reinforced positively in our school and college environment. Doing so has led to reinforcing consequences in the past. Reading behavioural books in the past (Watson’s Psychology as the Behaviourist Views it), led Skinner to pursue a career in behaviourism, this has been reinforcing in terms of (discovering things which he finds reinforcing), and a long career (which he found reinforcing). Similarly, for us, the general public, reading in the past has been reinforced, if ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ is in the stimulus class of popular science books people found reinforcing in the past then this may lead to people reading it. Lots of people reading it could influence behavioural change which will alter the probability of how people behave in the future. What courses they study, how they manage selection by consequences etc[1].

Chomsky’s critique though goes beyond the idea of reinforcing consequences of reading the Beyond, Freedom, and Dignity. He is also critical of Skinner’s casual manner of translating ordinary discourse into behaviourist language, and at the perceived lack of progress in behavioural science.

“Because of this unwillingness, there is also no discernible progress – today’s formulations in this domain are hardly different from those of 15 or 20 years ago – and no convincing refutation, for those who are untroubled by the fact that explanations can be invented on the spot, whatever the facts may be, within a system that is devoid of substance.” (Ibid pp 29-30)

Here it is fair to say Chomsky does have a point. Skinner had a penchant for inventing explanations for any behaviour or cognitive capacities in terms of reinforcement. And there was little indication that Skinner was overly concerned about testing the empirical validity of his claims about various complex behaviour being explicable in terms of reinforcement. Even today some behaviourists who have been heavily influenced by Skinner are critical of him for this tendency:

Evolution was for many years dramatically gene-centric…ontogenetic evolution was virtually ignored…behaviour analysis seemed to have made the opposite error…A good example is provided by the transcript of the recorded interview between B.F. Skinner and E.O. Wilson, in which almost every specialized, evolutionarily established behaviour put forward by Wilson was promptly interpreted by in Operant terms (Hayes and Sanford 2014 p. 115).

So, Chomsky’s criticism of Skinner casually translating every complex trait into something explicable in terms of operant conditioning is to the point. However, his criticism about a lack of advancement in behavioural science doesn’t stand up to critical scrutiny. Chomsky wrote ‘Ideology and Psychology’ in 1971 and his claim that there hadn’t been a huge advancement in behavioural science since around 1950 isn’t true.

             Behavioural science since 1950 had undergone rapid changes. Breland and Breland’s (1963) work on animal training demonstrated that instinctual drift would mean that non-human animals’ behaviour wasn’t as malleable as earlier naïve behaviourists thought. Skinner, who had long stressed both phylogenetic and ontogenetic factors playing a role in animal behaviour welcomed the work of the Breland’s. On Skinner’s way of thinking it was the behaviourists job to discover the different ways behaviour could be shaped and controlled through different schedules of reinforcement. The behaviourist wasn’t in the game of stipulating how malleable different organisms were. Nonetheless, despite the Breland’s work being congenial to Skinner’s behaviourism, for the public, instinctive drift made the thoughts of behaviourists gaining control over people and shaping their behaviour seem less threatening.

             As behavioural scientists continued to study human’s operating under schedules of reinforcement there was more reason to think that humans couldn’t be just shaped at a whim through schedules of reinforcement. Hundreds of behavioural studies on rule governed behaviour[2], have demonstrated that when humans were operating under rules this made them less sensitive to the contingencies of reinforcement. Children below the age of 5 could be shaped under schedules of reinforcement in a similar way to a rat, but once they passed 5 and could follow rules their behaviour became less sensitive to the contingencies of reinforcement (Bentall).

            Like the Breland’s work, work on rule-following sprung up from within behaviourism (Skinner 1963) and demonstrated that human behaviour was more complex than the behaviour of other organisms. The year Skinner wrote ‘Ideology and Psychology Sidman (1971) experimentally demonstrated that humans could derive untrained stimulus equivalence. And in the years since Steven Hayes (1989) demonstrated that humans could derive untrained relational frames (coordination, comparison, hierarchy, etc). The human under behavioural science began to closer resemble the human as described by cognitive scientists (built with innate constraints, have a species-specific capacity for productive reasoning etc), than it did the human as described by early behaviourists.  

Now Chomsky would parse some of these studies as resulting in the death of behaviourism as derived by Skinner.  However, things don’t have to be parsed in this manner. One could look at the work of behaviourists, such as Rescorla, Breland, Sidman, Lowe et all’s experimental refutations of previously held beliefs by behaviourists as a sign of an evolving healthy discipline.

One thing that should be emphasised was that when Skinner was writing ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ work on rule following in behavioural science was being done which was already demonstrating that we couldn’t simply reinforce behaviours we wanted repeated, when people operated under verbal rules, they were less sensitive to the contingencies of reinforcement than non-verbal animals. Thus, even for behaviourists at the time Skinner wrote ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity his work was outdated.  Society couldn’t be shaped in the manner Skinner wanted.

Chomsky goes on to quote Skinner’s claims about techniques we could use to control speech. Chomsky notes, correctly that Skinner’s science isn’t up to the task of doing such job. But he notes it would be abhorrent if such controls could be put in place:

Or consider freedom of speech. Skinner’s approach suggests that control of speech by direct punishment should be avoided, but that it is quite appropriate for speech to be controlled, say, by restricting good jobs to people who say what is approved by the designer of the culture. In accordance with Skinner’s ideas, these would be no violation of ‘academic freedom’ if promotions were granted only to those who conform, in their speech and writings, to the rules of the culture, though it would be wrong to go farther and punish those who deviate by saying what they believe to be true. Such deviants will simply remain in a state of deprivation. In fact, by giving people strict rules to follow, so that they know just what to say to be ‘reinforced’ by promotion, we will be ‘making the world safer’ and thus achieving the ends of behavioural technology (74,81). The literature of freedom would, quite properly, reject and abhor such controls. (Ibid pp. 30-31).

What Chomsky doesn’t note though is that Skinner’s philosophy always had safeguards in place so those under control had a means to resist any science of behavioural engineering.

            Since 1953 Skinner had written about countercontrol as a way organisms had of resisting being controlled by others. Spencer et al (2022) define countercontrol as follows:

“Countercontrol is a Skinnerian Operant concept that posits that an individual’s attempts to exert control over another person’s behaviour may evoke a countercontrolling response from the person being controlled that functions to avoid or escape potentially aversive conditions generated by the controller.” (Spencer et al p. 457)

Skinner had targeted our notion that people are free. He argued that people only described themselves as free when they could not identify the variables which were controlling their behaviour. He also noted that when people are under the control of positive reinforcers, they often describe their behaviour as freely chosen. He gave the example of state lottery which works as an implicit tax on people and noted that people think they freely chose to do the lottery. He emphasised the point that people value freedom because it is controlled by positive reinforcement and as a result does not occasion countercontrol (Delprato 2002 p. 195).

            Skinner warned that evidence of lack of countercontrol as an indication of “freedom” was dangerous. Belief that we are freely acting can lead to inadvertently being subject to long term aversive consequences resulting from our behaviour. This can happen when the controller is aware of these long-term consequences and the controlee is the ultimate loser in this scenario (ibid p. 195).

            Skinner argues that the correct solution to control is not to abolish it (he thinks this is impossible), but to analyse it and see if this is the type of control and consequence we want and if not to figure out a different type of controlling system to work within:

“Humans need (a) to eliminate aversive control (often a practical impossibility), (b) to identify positive reinforcement and other inconspicuous forms of control that have deferred aversive consequences, and (c) to substitute positive reinforcement contingencies without such consequences.” (Delprato p. 196).

Delprato argues that the above sequence is practically impossible, so we are in effect stuck with the use of countercontrol.

            As we discussed above since the mid-sixties, we knew that once people begin to follow verbal rules their behaviour isn’t shaped by the contingencies of reinforcement in the same way as non-human behaviour. Nonetheless, control and counter control are still facts in any society we live in. Relational Frame Theorists, behaviourists who have been studying emergent properties of verbal behaviour, have recently tried to tie countercontrol in with derived relational responding to see if we could use the concept now that our understanding of rule-following behaviour has expanded beyond Skinner’s conception (Spencer et al 2022).

            As things stand 50 years after Skinner wrote his ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ we still are nowhere near developing the capacity to behaviourally engineer our society. While Chomsky sometimes caricatured Skinner’s behaviourist position. He was surely correct to note that Skinner’s proclamations about the capacities of behavioural science to engineer our culture went well beyond anything possible in 1971 or anything possible today.

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[1] I am not hear arguing that we can explain people reading books entirely in terms of reinforcement, I am merely demonstrating that Chomsky’s quick argument for incoherence doesn’t work.

[2] See for example: Weiner et al (1964), Lippman and Myer (1967), Lowe et al (1983), Hayes et al (1986).

Childers et al 2023 argue that the debate between Chomsky and Quine and Skinner is revisited by contemporary debates on Large Language Models and Chomskian linguistics. They go on to argue that proponents of the view that data driven large language models mirror human natural language make the same mistakes that Chomsky critiqued people like Quine and Skinner ago 50 years ago. In this blog post I will argue that Childers et al largely misinterpret Skinner and Quine’s project and hence any connections they draw with Large Language Models and Connectionism are problematic.

            Childers et al argue that Quine and Skinner’s empiricism has collapsed under criticisms from Chomsky. And that Quine responded to this collapse by modifying his position his empiricism to accommodate Chomsky’s position by appealing to innate mechanisms.  They note that once such an appeal accepted then we are in a place where we are no longer empiricists, and our position is closer to that of rationalists. I would argue that this is an idiosyncratic reading of empiricism. Empiricists, like Hume and Locke, appealed to innate mechanisms explain how we acquired our knowledge of the world. It is just that the innate mechanisms they appealed to wouldn’t be sufficient to account for the complexity of human language and cognition. Quine’s externalized empiricism is of a piece with Hume’s except for in Quine’s case he is advocating for the innate mechanisms to be determined experimentally. Childers et al call this hybridised empiricism and note that it is empiricism only in name. It is unclear to me why Quine arguing that we determine what innate structures are necessary based on behavioural tests should be considered anything other than ordinary empiricism externalized.

            They do go on to make the further point that Quine’s speculations about the innate principles necessary are extremely vague. I would agree with them on this point; when Quine talks about analogical synthesis being the method in which we connect sentences with sentences he is extremely vague. Gibson (1987) wrote about Quine’s postulation of analogical synthesis being a postulated innate structure to be mapped by future scientists. In the 35 years since Gibson wrote those words there has been very little work done by philosophers influenced by Quine filling in the details of this project.

            There has though been scientific research into analogy from a scientific perspective in both behavioural science and cognitive science. Relational Frame Theorists are behavioural scientists whose experimental work on language has left them to abandon some of Skinner’s account of language. Thus, they argue their research shows that rule following in language changes how people respond to schedules of reinforcement, and they argue that human specific emergent properties such as the ability to derive stimulus equivalence, and relations of coordination, hierarchy, etc. These relational frames under contextual control exhibit the property of Mutual entailment, combinatorial entailment, and transfer of function (Relational Frame Theory an Overview p.62). In Relational Frame Theory they demonstrated empirically that analogy is a relational frame which typically emerges at about 5 years of age, defining analogy as the capacity to derive sameness amongst equivalence relations or equivalence-equivalence responding.  They think that these derived relational frames may play a role in linguistic productivity. However, it would be unfair to argue that they vindicate Quine’s concept of analogical synthesis as Quine’s vague formulations played no role in the experimental paradigm. And furthermore, it is impossible to tell the degree to which RFT is consistent with Quine as his formulations were too vague to match on to them.

            In cognitive science analogical reasoning has been researched in detail see for example Hofstadter (2013), and Gentre and Hoyos (2017). Gentre has being doing experimental work on analogies for over 40 years. Based on her experimental work she argues that children start deriving analogies from 7months of age. The discrepancy between her chronology of when analogies are acquired and the timeline in RFT can be accounted for in the lower criteria set for what counts as an analogy for Gentre. Gentre argues that analogies involve transfer of knowledge from one area to another whereas RFT theorists argue that stimulus-stimulus equivalence is necessary for something to count as analogy.

            In their ‘Analogy and Abstraction’ Gentner and Hoyos note a difficulty in explaining children’s acquiring of abstract analogies and their difficulty is like the one which faces Quine. We know from the psychological literature that children (1) prefer to extend their concepts based on bare perceptual similarities, (2) this results in them making concrete analogies, (3) children can extend their comparison classes through multiple exemplars.

Two of the primary ways of making an analogy are through projective alignment and through mutual alignment. Projective alignment is when people use an already well understood domain to illuminate another domain. However, when it comes to young children, they do not have a large store of well understood concepts, so it is difficult for them to use already understood concepts to explain a different concept. Therefore, young children typically use mutual alignment in their analogical abstraction. In mutual alignment analogies one discovers commonalities which were not obvious in either analog (ibid p. 3). Mutual alignment involves establishing a structural alignment between two-representations based on matching relations between analogues (ibid p.4).

The difficulty is to explain how children can go from using concrete analogies based on bare perceptual similarities to more abstract relational concepts. One problem is that presenting young children with exemplars which are not perceptually similar will not be helpful as the children won’t have the capacity to mutually align the two analogs. So, we are left with a mystery as to how young children form more abstract relational analogs. Gentner and Hoyos argue that we overcome this barrier through a process called progressive alignment. Experimental studies have shown that if young children are presented with abstract relational analogues they cannot pick up on the relationship. However, if they are first trained on concrete analogues and then later retested on the abstract relational analogues their performance improves dramatically.

This progressive alignment gives young children the capacity to move beyond bare similarity and acquire more abstract relations. Like in the case of RFT it is possible to use these experimental works to fill out Quine’s speculations, however, given the vagueness of Quine’s speculations it would be a stretch to call this work Quinean. Thus, I would agree with Childers et al that Quine’s notion of similarity and analogy is too vague to do the work he set for himself.

When it comes to Skinner, Childers et al err two major ways. Firstly, they argue that Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour book would be unheard of today if it wasn’t connected in people’s mind with Quine’s empiricist model. However, Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour has in fact spawned a massive experimental literature with hundreds of experimental studies into Skinner’s Verbal Operants (Sauter and Leblanc 2006, Jennings et al 2021). At first research inspired by Skinner focused on simpler verbal operants such as Mands and Tacts with a lot of research being applied research with people with developmental disabilities (Ochs and Dixon 1989). But over the last 15 years there has been an explosion of research into more complex verbal operants such as the intraverbal, and there is a massive increase in non-applied experiments and studies of people without an intellectual disability or autism (over 50% of the people studied have no diagnosis) (Jennings et al 2021). As the years go by the pace of experimental tests into Skinner’s Verbal Operants are rapidly increasing (Aguirre et al 2016).  There is no evidence, or reason to think, that any of this research was inspired by Skinner’s name being associated with Quine. In fact Quine’s name is virtually never cited in papers on Verbal Behaviour, or in papers about behavioural off shoots from Verbal Behaviour.

Secondly, Kenneth McCorquodale (1970), replied to Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour and noted that when Chomsky criticized Skinner’s notion of the probability of a Tact occurring, he confused the probability of a tact being used in a particular moment, versus the probability of a Tact being used at any point in a person’s life McCorquodale (1970). Childers et al criticised the use of the notion of “momentary probability” as an idiosyncratic use of probability and went on to make the following point:

. “More importantly, his claim that under certain circumstances the relevant probability becomes “extremely high” is unwarranted, unless we already know how the language functions.” (Childers et al p. 221).

It is unclear precisely what Childers et al mean by “under certain circumstances”. One circumstance could be in studies on intraverbal acquisition. If a child is being taught to use an intraverbal, using multi-exemplar training involving the frame “the wheels on the bus go_”, what would the probability of a child saying “round and round”? Are Childers et al seriously suggesting that we cannot estimate the probability cannot be established in these circumstances? And given that we have established developmental milestones on things like stimulus equivalence and the training procedures used to elicit them are Childers et al seriously suggesting that we cannot assign probabilities in these experimental settings? Granted Chomsky’s point still stands, it is probably not possible to assign probabilities to certain words being spoken as people interact daily, but has little bearing on experimental control in precise settings which is what Skinner and Relational Frame Theorists were interested in.

            Ultimately what Childers et al argue is that both Quine and Skinner had to do in response to Chomsky’s criticisms is to progressively modify their positions with more and more innate architecture. There is little evidence to support this interpretation of Quine, see Gibson (1987), for a detailed exposition of the extended debate between Quine and Chomsky on innate architecture. However, I largely agree with Childers et al that Quine’s vague sketch of analogical synthesis wasn’t detailed enough or clear enough to account for our linguistic development. This is important because Quine was committed to giving a mechanistic explanation for our behavioural capacities. He argued consistently throughout his career that it is ultimately at the neurological level we should be looking for our explanations, that behaviour was just data to point us towards underlying mechanisms. If the data turned out to support a Chomskian type architecture I don’t think it would have much difference to Quine’s overall project of naturalizing epistemology.

            Skinner on the other hand was interested in discovering behavioural regularities. He was interested in underlying neuroscientific explanations only insofar as they helped in functional control of the organism in particular circumstances. Whether people are impressed with the literature inspired by Skinner’s verbal behaviour and the predictions it makes is one thing. But this literature needs to be engaged with we cannot stipulate a priori how much experimental control has been gained in a particular experimental setting. As things stand there is little evidence that empirical evidence that Skinner’s account will ever be able to handle linguistic productivity[1]. And this will make it extremely difficult to ever gain predictive control over more complex linguistic behaviour beyond Tacts, Mands and simple Intraverbals. Behaviourists inspired by Skinner such as Relational Frame Theorists claim that they can handle linguistic productivity but since there is little engagement with linguistic data it is hard to test these claims. Ultimately these behaviourist studies are engaged in tests of how the organism behaves not stipulating the nature of the organism’s brain. The historical story Childers et al tell of Quine, Skinner and Chomsky’s dispute being mirrored in contemporary debates on connectionism, Large Language Models, and standard computational theories. The work of Quine and Skinner are very different from each other and both of their views have very little in common with work ongoing in Artificial Intelligence.

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[1] See David C Palmer 2023 ‘Towards a Behavioural Interpretation of English Grammar’ for a recent Skinnerian inspired attempt at understand grammar behaviourally.

The Extended Mind is a thesis by Andy Clark and David Chalmers which states that the Mind Extends beyond the brain and encompasses aspects of the physical world. They give an example of a person who has dementia who keeps a diary to remind him of things he needs to do, such as when to take medication, where things are stored etc. If the person with dementia has reliable access to this diary most of the time, then they argue that the information in the diary is part of his extended mind.

            In ordinary circumstances if I want to remember when to do something it is because the information is stored in my brain, and I can access to information to make decisions. I don’t have to always have access to the information sometimes I may forget, but in general I have reliable access to the information. Chalmers and Clark argue that it is arbitrary to consider the information stored in a brain which you can reliably access to be part of your mind but to think that information in your diary which you can reliably access isn’t.

The thesis is counter intuitive. And some people reject it because of this counterintuitive feel, arguing that the thesis extends our ordinary concept of cognition too far. However, this counter argument has little force. There is little reason to assume that our theoretical understanding of a particular phenomena should be intuitive at first. Logical coherence should be the test of the theory not whether it chimes with your folk-psychological concepts.

The argument of Chalmers and Clark focused on information within a diary, but today with our phones which we carry everywhere with us storing so much information, the argument becomes even more radical, with it implying that aspects of the internet that we can reliably access are part of our extended mind.

Intellectual Disability

Psychologist J.J Gibson wrote about affordances which are relational aspects of our environment which we could interact with. Affordances relate not just to features of the environment but to the suitability of the environment to an observer or agent. Thus, steep stairs are an affordance for a person who can walk but to a person in a wheelchair they are not an affordance. Our natural and social environments contain affordances for some people but not for all. What are affordances are depends on the intentions, capabilities, and interests of the individual. In general, we tend to build our environment in such a way that can help people access the affordances they need, for example, building wheelchair ramps.

People with an intellectual disability who are non-verbal have interests and desires, but as a result of being non-verbal they will have difficulties in accessing various affordances in their environment. It is for this reason that there are practices and regulations in place which ensure that organisations who care for people with an intellectual disability do everything possible to ensure that they facilitate their communication capacities. Doing this involves giving them access to Speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, and a full Multi-Disciplinary Team. Furthermore, staff working with them must be trained in things like techniques to facilitate non-verbal people communicating their needs. Various types of augmentative communication devices are used on the recommendations of SLT, and things are in place such as visual schedules and Picture Exchange Communication System (an augmentative system based on Skinners Verbal Behaviour).

We saw above when discussing the patient with dementia who had reliable access to his diary that this could be considered a part of his extended mind. In the case of a non-verbal person in a service, there are affordances in their environment they may want to access such as going for coffee, visiting friends, going for a bus drive etc. If they can use PECS cards to indicate what they want, and those cards are not reliably available they you are taking away a part of their extended mind. It would be analogous to taking away a person’s prosthetic leg. A prosthetic leg may be artificial, but it is still a part of the persons way of accessing affordances in their environment and the same thing would apply to augmentative communicative systems.

I would argue that a similar thing is true of staff working with non-verbal people in a service. The staffing team ends up as part of the extended mind of the non-verbal person they are supporting. Just like the diary of the person with dementia contains information he can access, and my I-phone contains information I can access, staff working with non-verbal people with an intellectual disability contain information and affordances which a non-verbal person cannot access on their own.

As discussed above, not providing a person with reliable access to their prosthetic leg, denies them access to affordances in their environment, and likewise not providing a non-verbal person with experienced staff who know them and are versed in communication training is denying them affordances in their environment. It is for this reason that there is such a massive push in policies to ensure that effective communication training is available, consistent staffing are maintained etc. However, in a lot of the literature this is spelled out in atomistic terms. Thinking of these issues in terms of the extended mind helps people think  more relationally, and emphasises how our environment, social network, and social supports are partially constitutive of our own minds.

In this blogpost I will consider Quine’s relation to two of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Operants: the Mand, and the Tact. I will argue that Quine’s Observation Sentence is analogous to Skinner’s Tact, but that Quine makes very little use of the notion of a Mand. A Mand is one of the most studied verbal operants, and it is the first verbal operants that is targeted by behavioural scientists if a child is experiencing language delays. Yet Quine gives the Mand a very small role in his overall theory of language acquisition. I will discuss Quine’s reasons for not considering things like Manding as important in sketching his naturalized epistemology and then discuss the degree to which these verbal operants are separable and how their separability will affect Quine’s choice of downplaying of the role of Mand’s in his story of how we go from stimulus-to science.

Quine’s Relation to Empirical Psychology

While Quine didn’t use the same vocabulary as Skinner some of his concepts map effortlessly onto Skinner’s concepts. Thus, Quine’s notion of an Observation Sentence is the same as Skinner’s notion of a Tact (both are shaped by discriminative stimulus and social feedback). Nonetheless despite arguing for this functional independence between different Verbal Operants Skinner noted that for ordinary speakers the two may be entwined. Thus, if a person has acquired a label as a Tact the chances are that they will be able to use it as a Mand. Skinner gives four reasons to support his argument for interdependence. (1) Tact emergence may be facilitated by the acquisition of a Mand in the presence of the Manded stimulus. (2) The similarity between the stimulus that evokes a Tact and that that evokes a Man may be similar enough to affect a transfer. (3) Transfer may occur if care givers reinforce one operant as if it were the other, (4) Children early in life may acquire generalized verbal skills which result in both the Mand, and the Tact being acquired (Petursdottir et all p.60). Skinner was speculating about these matters but in the 60 years since he wrote ‘Verbal Behaviour’ their partial interdependence has been confirmed.

Quine showed no interest in Mand’s and hence he had little interest in how Mand’s and Tacts related to each other and affected the process of acquiring a language.  He was clear that because of his interest in ontology and epistemology he was giving an idealized conception of how we acquire language. He was interested in observation sentences because they are our entering wedge into language and hence to our theory of the world. He is explicit that the story he gives of how we go from stimulus to science is meant to be an impressionistic one. He fully acknowledges that his story may deviate from the story told by a fully worked out science.

            Quine’s position on this matter is dubious. He was critical of Carnap for engaging in make belief in place of making use of current scientific psychology.

“But why all this creative reconstruction, all this make belief? The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all anybody has to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not see how this reconstruction really proceeds? Why not settle for empirical psychology?” (Epistemology Naturalised p. 74)

 Yet Quine himself is in effect engaged in a made-up story about how we go from stimulus to science. He justifies this as follows:

“Much of what is earliest and most urgent in language learning, furthermore, is a matter of neither stating nor assenting nor acting upon statements, but of importuning…But statement learning is what is relevant to our study, which aims at understanding the acquisition of scientific theory.” (The Roots of Reference p. 46)

“Anyway, I am not bent even upon a factual account of the learning of English, welcome though it would be. My concern is with the essential psychogenesis of reference would be fulfilled in fair measure with a plausible account of how one might proceed from infancy step by step to a logically regimented language of science, even bypassing English” (Ibid p. 92)

 Because of Quine’s emphasis on cognitive language, he is ignoring the messier pragmatic aspects of learning a language that are described by people such as the later Wittgenstein, and Skinner. There is a sense in which we can justify this; it is after all standard practice in the sciences to engage in idealizations. Quine could be parsed as sketching a scientific story of how we go from stimulus to science; we can use this abstract sketch and fill in the details as we learn more about the acquisition process. Nonetheless, Quine does seem to be guilty of holding Carnap to higher standards than he holds himself to.

Because Quine is only interested in descriptive language and its role in us acquiring our theory of the world; he claims he doesn’t need to think about things such as importuning or as Skinner would it Manding.  Skinner had noted that Mands such as asking for water would be controlled by an establishment operation of a deprivation such as thirst and subsequent reinforcement of the thirst being relieved, while the Tact for Water could be controlled by a non-verbal discriminative stimulus, which the person was reinforced for saying the word in the presence of. Thus, you would have two different operants controlling the one sound for ‘Water’. As we saw above Skinner thought that these two operants would in practice end up entwined. If indeed Mands and Tacts are intertwined, then this would affect any proposed psychologically realistic story of how we go from stimulus to science.

Lamarre and Holand (1985) did a study on children tested the independence Tacts and Mands with preschool children. They trained children up on the relations “on the left” and “on the right” as both Mands and as Tacts. The study found that when the children learned them as Tacts, they couldn’t generalize them to Mands without training, while when they learned them as Mand’s they couldn’t generalize them to Tacts without training. This indicated that the two terms were for young children at first functionally independent and that transfer from one to the other wasn’t automatic.

Lamarre and Holland’s original study has been criticised by Wallace et al 2006. They noted that Lamarre and Holland’s establishing operations may not have been clear. There is no indication whether the items the child is manding for or the reinforcement they are receiving for Manding are items the child desires. When this was controlled for in other experiments the transfer from Tacts to Mands occurred for preferred items. Wallace et al claim their study demonstrates how responses taught as Tacts can facilitate the establishment of Mands for high preference items. And they noted that their experiments showed a difficulty with Tact-to-Mand transfer for low preference items (in line with Lamarre and Hollands study). Demonstrating that their lack of transfer was more than likely caused by not using sufficiently motivating reinforcers.

Gamba et al (2016) have done a meta-analysis on studies into whether functional independence in Mand-Tact independence has been demonstrate empirically. And they noted that there has been 28 empirical studies into the functional independence of the Mand and the Tact since Lamarre and Holland’s original study. They noted that there have been 13 studies which have demonstrated the functional independence of Mands and Tacts, but that in studies which the stimuli tacted and Manded were preferred items transfer of function occurred (Gamba et al p.27). Whether these studies are sufficient to cast doubt on the functional independence of the Mand and Tact is hard open to interpretation. Gamba et al note that in some of these experiments the Manded items were present which may have served to evoke previous Tacts and this may need to be controlled for in future experiments (ibid p. 31).

Thus far the experimental results are not sufficient to conclusively demonstrate the functional independence of Mand’s and Tacts. Quine appears to have been agnostic on this issue. However, one questions whether he has a right to this agnosticism. He was critical of Carnap for engaging in make belief in his epistemology, but his own Naturalized Epistemology engages in as much make belief. Quine’s focus on observation sentences at the expense of things like Mand’s serves to distort our picture of how we acquire our language and scientific heritage. In abstracting away from these details Quine is giving a hyper-intellectual fantasy of how we acquire language he is letting the metaphor of the scientist being a disinterested theorist keying observation sentences to stimuli, blind him to the more pragmatic aspects of language acquisition.

In this blogpost I discussed Quine’s relation to Skinner’s Verbal Operants of Mands and Tacts. In my next post I will focus on linking Quine’s concept of association of sentences to sentences with recent empirical work on Skinner’s Verbal Operant the Intraverbal.