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Verbal behavior

Language 35 (1):26 (1959)

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  1. Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology.Jerry A. Fodor - 1979 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1):63-73.
    The paper explores the distinction between two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are to be construed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined.The following claims are defended: (1) That the traditional dispute between (...)
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  • Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment? On the explanatory status and theoretical contributions of Bayesian models of cognition.Matt Jones & Bradley C. Love - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (4):169-188.
    The prominence of Bayesian modeling of cognition has increased recently largely because of mathematical advances in specifying and deriving predictions from complex probabilistic models. Much of this research aims to demonstrate that cognitive behavior can be explained from rational principles alone, without recourse to psychological or neurological processes and representations. We note commonalities between this rational approach and other movements in psychology – namely, Behaviorism and evolutionary psychology – that set aside mechanistic explanations or make use of optimality assumptions. Through (...)
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  • Language, tools and brain: The ontogeny and phylogeny of hierarchically organized sequential behavior.Patricia M. Greenfield - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (4):531-551.
    During the first two years of human life a common neural substrate underlies the hierarchical organization of elements in the development of speech as well as the capacity to combine objects manually, including tool use. Subsequent cortical differentiation, beginning at age two, creates distinct, relatively modularized capacities for linguistic grammar and more complex combination of objects. An evolutionary homologue of the neural substrate for language production and manual action is hypothesized to have provided a foundation for the evolution of language (...)
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  • Mentalism versus Behaviourism in Economics: A Philosophy-of-Science Perspective.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2015 - Economics and Philosophy 32 (2):249-281.
    Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scientific theories are nothing but constructs re-describing people's behaviour. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, on a par with the unobservables in science, such as electrons and electromagnetic fields. While behaviourism has gone out of fashion in psychology, it remains influential in economics, especially in ‘revealed preference’ theory. We defend mentalism in economics, construed as a positive science, and show that it fits best scientific practice. (...)
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  • The function of phenomenal states: Supramodular interaction theory.Ezequiel Morsella - 2005 - Psychological Review 112 (4):1000-1021.
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  • Becoming syntactic.Franklin Chang, Gary S. Dell & Kathryn Bock - 2006 - Psychological Review 113 (2):234-272.
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  • (2 other versions)The operational analysis of psychological terms.B. F. Skinner - 1945 - Psychological Review 52 (4):270-78.
    The major contributions of operationism have been negative, largely because operationists failed to distinguish logical theories of reference from empirical accounts of language. Behaviorism never finished an adequate formulation of verbal reports and therefore could not convincingly embrace subjective terms. But verbal responses to private stimuli can arise as social products through the contingencies of reinforcement arranged by verbal communities.
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  • Behaviorism at fifty.B. F. Skinner - 1974 - New York,: J. Norton Publishers.
    Each of us is uniquely subject to certain kinds of stimulation from a small part of the universe within our skins. Mentalistic psychologies insist that other kinds of events, lacking the physical dimensions of stimuli, are accessible to the owner of the skin within which they occur. One solution often regarded as behavioristic, granting the distinction between public and private events and ruling the latter out of consideration, has not been successful. A science of behavior must face the problem of (...)
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  • Generalization Bias in Science.Uwe Peters, Alexander Krauss & Oliver Braganza - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (9):e13188.
    Many scientists routinely generalize from study samples to larger populations. It is commonly assumed that this cognitive process of scientific induction is a voluntary inference in which researchers assess the generalizability of their data and then draw conclusions accordingly. We challenge this view and argue for a novel account. The account describes scientific induction as involving by default a generalization bias that operates automatically and frequently leads researchers to unintentionally generalize their findings without sufficient evidence. The result is unwarranted, overgeneralized (...)
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  • Developmental explanation and the ontogeny of birdsong: Nature/nurture redux.Timothy Johnston - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (4):617-630.
    Despite several decades of criticism, dichotomous thinking about behavioral development remains widespread and influential. This is particularly true in study of birdsong development, where it has become increasingly common to diagnose songs, elements of songs, or precursors of songs as either innate or learned on the basis of isolation-rearing experiments. The theory of sensory templates has encouraged both the dichotomous approach and an emphasis on structural rather than functional aspects of song development. As a result, potentially important lines of investigation (...)
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  • Innateness and the sciences.Matteo Mameli & Patrick Bateson - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (2):155-188.
    The concept of innateness is a part of folk wisdom but is also used by biologists and cognitive scientists. This concept has a legitimate role to play in science only if the colloquial usage relates to a coherent body of evidence. We examine many different candidates for the post of scientific successor of the folk concept of innateness. We argue that none of these candidates is entirely satisfactory. Some of the candidates are more interesting and useful than others, but the (...)
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  • In defense of nativism.Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (2):693-718.
    This paper takes a fresh look at the nativism–empiricism debate, presenting and defending a nativist perspective on the mind. Empiricism is often taken to be the default view both in philosophy and in cognitive science. This paper argues, on the contrary, that there should be no presumption in favor of empiricism (or nativism), but that the existing evidence suggests that nativism is the most promising framework for the scientific study of the mind. Our case on behalf of nativism has four (...)
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  • (2 other versions)The operational analysis of psychological terms.B. F. Skinner - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):547.
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  • Selection by consequences.B. F. Skinner - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):477-481.
    Human behavior is the joint product of (i) contingencies of survival responsible for natural selection, and (ii) contingencies of reinforcement responsible for the repertoires of individuals, including (iii) the special contingencies maintained by an evolved social environment. Selection by consequences is a causal mode found only in living things, or in machines made by living things. It was first recognized in natural selection: Reproduction, a first consequence, led to the evolution of cells, organs, and organisms reproducing themselves under increasingly diverse (...)
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  • Toward a Connectionist Model of Recursion in Human Linguistic Performance.Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater - 1999 - Cognitive Science 23 (2):157-205.
    Naturally occurring speech contains only a limited amount of complex recursive structure, and this is reflected in the empirically documented difficulties that people experience when processing such structures. We present a connectionist model of human performance in processing recursive language structures. The model is trained on simple artificial languages. We find that the qualitative performance profile of the model matches human behavior, both on the relative difficulty of center‐embedding and cross‐dependency, and between the processing of these complex recursive structures and (...)
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  • Large Language Models Demonstrate the Potential of Statistical Learning in Language.Pablo Contreras Kallens, Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan & Morten H. Christiansen - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (3):e13256.
    To what degree can language be acquired from linguistic input alone? This question has vexed scholars for millennia and is still a major focus of debate in the cognitive science of language. The complexity of human language has hampered progress because studies of language–especially those involving computational modeling–have only been able to deal with small fragments of our linguistic skills. We suggest that the most recent generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) might finally provide the computational tools to determine empirically (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Why meaning (probably) isn't conceptual role.Jerry Fodor & Ernest Lepore - 1991 - Mind and Language 6 (4):328-43.
    It's an achievement of the last couple of decades that people who work in linguistic semantics and people who work in the philosophy of language have arrived at a friendly, de facto agreement as to their respective job descriptions. The terms of this agreement are that the semanticists do the work and the philosophers do the worrying. The semanticists try to construct actual theories of meaning (or truth theories, or model theories, or whatever) for one or another kind of expression (...)
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  • Distributional Information: A Powerful Cue for Acquiring Syntactic Categories.Martin Redington, Nick Chater & Steven Finch - 1998 - Cognitive Science 22 (4):425-469.
    Many theorists have dismissed a priori the idea that distributional information could play a significant role in syntactic category acquisition. We demonstrate empirically that such information provides a powerful cue to syntactic category membership, which can be exploited by a variety of simple, psychologically plausible mechanisms. We present a range of results using a large corpus of child‐directed speech and explore their psychological implications. While our results show that a considerable amount of information concerning the syntactic categories can be obtained (...)
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  • Revisiting Quine on Truth by Convention.Jared Warren - 2017 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 46 (2):119-139.
    In “Truth by Convention” W.V. Quine gave an influential argument against logical conventionalism. Even today his argument is often taken to decisively refute logical conventionalism. Here I break Quine’s arguments into two— the super-task argument and the regress argument—and argue that while these arguments together refute implausible explicit versions of conventionalism, they cannot be successfully mounted against a more plausible implicit version of conventionalism. Unlike some of his modern followers, Quine himself recognized this, but argued that implicit conventionalism was explanatorily (...)
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  • Précis of Gallistel's The organization of action: A new synthesis.C. R. Gallistel - 1981 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (4):609-619.
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  • What connectionist models learn: Learning and representation in connectionist networks.Stephen José Hanson & David J. Burr - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (3):471-489.
    Connectionist models provide a promising alternative to the traditional computational approach that has for several decades dominated cognitive science and artificial intelligence, although the nature of connectionist models and their relation to symbol processing remains controversial. Connectionist models can be characterized by three general computational features: distinct layers of interconnected units, recursive rules for updating the strengths of the connections during learning, and “simple” homogeneous computing elements. Using just these three features one can construct surprisingly elegant and powerful models of (...)
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  • Elementary errors about evolution.Richard C. Lewontin - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):367-368.
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  • An operant analysis of problem solving.B. F. Skinner - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):583-591.
    Behavior that solves a problem is distinguished by the fact that it changes another part of the solver's behavior and is strengthened when it does so. Problem solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli. Verbal responses produce especially useful stimuli, because they affect other people. As a culture formulates maxims, laws, grammar, and science, its members behave more effectively without direct or prolonged contact with the contingencies thus formulated. The culture solves problems for its members, and does so by (...)
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  • The Effects of Feature-Label-Order and Their Implications for Symbolic Learning.Michael Ramscar, Daniel Yarlett, Melody Dye, Katie Denny & Kirsten Thorpe - 2010 - Cognitive Science 34 (6):909-957.
    Symbols enable people to organize and communicate about the world. However, the ways in which symbolic knowledge is learned and then represented in the mind are poorly understood. We present a formal analysis of symbolic learning—in particular, word learning—in terms of prediction and cue competition, and we consider two possible ways in which symbols might be learned: by learning to predict a label from the features of objects and events in the world, and by learning to predict features from a (...)
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  • On the Origin of Language.Marcello Barbieri - 2010 - Biosemiotics 3 (2):201-223.
    Thomas Sebeok and Noam Chomsky are the acknowledged founding fathers of two research fields which are known respectively as Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics and which have been developed in parallel during the past 50 years. Both fields claim that language has biological roots and must be studied as a natural phenomenon, thus bringing to an end the old divide between nature and culture. In addition to this common goal, there are many other important similarities between them. Their definitions of language, for (...)
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  • The Linguistic Analogy: Motivations, Results, and Speculations.Susan Dwyer, Bryce Huebner & Marc D. Hauser - 2010 - Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (3):486-510.
    Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral judgments. As a theoretical hypothesis, LA thus requires a rich description of the computational structures that underlie mature moral judgments, an account of the acquisition and development of these structures, and an (...)
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  • (1 other version)Behaviorism at fifty.B. F. Skinner - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):615.
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  • Empiricism in the foundations of cognition.Timothy Childers, Juraj Hvorecký & Ondrej Majer - 2023 - AI and Society 38 (1):67-87.
    This paper traces the empiricist program from early debates between nativism and behaviorism within philosophy, through debates about early connectionist approaches within the cognitive sciences, and up to their recent iterations within the domain of deep learning. We demonstrate how current debates on the nature of cognition via deep network architecture echo some of the core issues from the Chomsky/Quine debate and investigate the strength of support offered by these various lines of research to the empiricist standpoint. Referencing literature from (...)
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  • SOAR as a unified theory of cognition: Issues and explanations.Allen Newell - 1992 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (3):464-492.
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  • The third contender: A critical examination of the dynamicist theory of cognition.Chris Eliasmith - 1996 - Philosophical Psychology 9 (4):441-63.
    In a recent series of publications, dynamicist researchers have proposed a new conception of cognitive functioning. This conception is intended to replace the currently dominant theories of connectionism and symbolicism. The dynamicist approach to cognitive modeling employs concepts developed in the mathematical field of dynamical systems theory. They claim that cognitive models should be embedded, low-dimensional, complex, described by coupled differential equations, and non-representational. In this paper I begin with a short description of the dynamicist project and its role as (...)
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  • What is this cognition that is supposed to be embodied?Ken Aizawa - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (6):755-775.
    Many cognitive scientists have recently championed the thesis that cognition is embodied. In principle, explicating this thesis should be relatively simple. There are, essentially, only two concepts involved: cognition and embodiment. After articulating what will here be meant by ‘embodiment’, this paper will draw attention to cases in which some advocates of embodied cognition apparently do not mean by ‘cognition’ what has typically been meant by ‘cognition’. Some advocates apparently mean to use ‘cognition’ not as a term for one, among (...)
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  • Faculty disputes.John Collins - 2004 - Mind and Language 19 (5):503-33.
    Jerry Fodor, among others, has maintained that Chomsky's language faculty hypothesis is an epistemological proposal, i.e. the faculty comprises propositional structures known (cognized) by the speaker/hearer. Fodor contrasts this notion of a faculty with an architectural (directly causally efficacious) notion of a module. The paper offers an independent characterisation of the language faculty as an abstractly specified nonpropositional structure of the mind/brain that mediates between sound and meaning—a function in intension that maps to a pair of structures that determine soundmeaning (...)
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  • Cognitive ethology: Theory or poetry?Jonathan Bennett - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):356-358.
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  • Understanding how input matters: verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar.Jeffrey Lidz, Henry Gleitman & Lila Gleitman - 2003 - Cognition 87 (3):151-178.
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  • Why stereotypes don’t even make good defaults.Andrew C. Connolly, Jerry A. Fodor, Lila R. Gleitman & Henry Gleitman - 2007 - Cognition 103 (1):1-22.
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  • Morgan’s Quaker gun and the species of belief.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):119-144.
    In this article, I explore how researchers’ metaphysical commitments can be conducive—or unconducive—to progress in animal cognition research. The methodological dictum known as Morgan’s Canon exhorts comparative psychologists to countenance the least mentalistic fair interpretation of animal actions. This exhortation has frequently been misread as a blanket condemnation of mentalistic interpretations of animal behaviors that could be interpreted behavioristically. But Morgan meant to demand only that researchers refrain from accepting default interpretations of (apparent) actions until other fair interpretations have been (...)
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  • Planning and the brain.Jordan Grafman & James Hendler - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (4):563-564.
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  • Leibnizian privacy and Skinnerian privacy.Keith Gunderson - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):628.
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  • Methods and theories in the experimental analysis of behavior.B. F. Skinner - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):511-523.
    We owe most scientific knowledge to methods of inquiry that are never formally analyzed. The analysis of behavior does not call for hypothetico-deductive methods. Statistics, taught in lieu of scientific method, is incompatible with major features of much laboratory research. Squeezing significance out of ambiguous data discourages the more promising step of scrapping the experiment and starting again. As a consequence, psychologists have taken flight from the laboratory. They have fled to Real People and the human interest of “real life,” (...)
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  • Coming to terms with private events.B. F. Skinner - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):572.
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  • Learning and selection.Justine Kingsbury - 2008 - Biology and Philosophy 23 (4):493-507.
    Are learning processes selection processes? This paper takes a slightly modified version of the account of selection presented in Hull et al. (Behav Brain Sci 24:511–527, 2001) and asks whether it applies to learning processes. The answer is that although some learning processes are selectional, many are not. This has consequences for teleological theories of mental content. According to these theories, mental states have content in virtue of having proper functions, and they have proper functions in virtue of being the (...)
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  • Enactivism, pragmatism…behaviorism?Louise Barrett - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (3):807-818.
    Shaun Gallagher applies enactivist thinking to a staggeringly wide range of topics in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, even venturing into the realms of biological anthropology. One prominent point Gallagher makes that the holistic approach of enactivism makes it less amenable to scientific investigation than the cognitivist framework it seeks to replace, and should be seen as a “philosophy of nature” rather than a scientific research program. Gallagher also gives truth to the saying that “if you want new ideas, (...)
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  • When does the intentional stance work?Daniel C. Dennett - 1985 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8 (4):763-766.
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  • The scientific study of lingustic behaviour: A perspective on the Skinner-Chomsky controversy.Hugh M. Lacey - 1974 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 4 (1):17–51.
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  • Radical behaviorism and theoretical entities.G. E. Zuriff - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):572.
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  • Singing down a blind alley.John Alcock - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (4):630-631.
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  • Conceptual errors, different perspectives, and genetic analysis of song ontogeny.Paul C. Mundinger - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (4):643-644.
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  • Mental, yes. Private, no.Howard Rachlin - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):566.
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  • Linking production and comprehension processes: The case of relative clauses.Silvia P. Gennari & Maryellen C. MacDonald - 2009 - Cognition 111 (1):1-23.
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  • Birdsong and the “problem” of nature and nurture: Endless chirping about inadequate evidence or merely singing the blues about inevitable biases in, and limitations of, human inference?Marc Bekoff - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (4):631-631.
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