The Case Against B.F. Skinner
The Noam Chomsky Website.
Whatever function “behaviorism” may have served in the past, it has become nothing more than a set of arbitrary restrictions on “legitimate” theory construction, and there is no reason why someone who investigates man and society should accept the kind of intellectual shackles that physical scientists would surely not tolerate and that condemn any intellectual pursuit to insignificance.
the claims are becoming more extreme and more strident as the inability to support them and the reasons for this failure become increasingly obvious.
In fact, Skinnerian translation, which is easily employed by anyone, leads to a significant loss of precision, for the simple reason that the full range of terms for the description and evaluation of behavior, attitude, opinion, and so on, must be “translated” into the impoverished system of terminology borrowed from the laboratory (and deprived of its meaning in transition).
In fact, there is nothing in Skinner’s approach that is incompatible with a police state in which rigid laws are enforced by people who are themselves subject to them and the threat of dire punishment hangs over all.
Such a conclusion overlooks a fundamental property of Skinner’s science, namely, its vacuity.
Skinner’s book contains no clearly formulated substantive hypotheses or proposals.
Sanctions backed by force restrict freedom, as does differential reward.
Skinner confuses “science” with terminology.
He appears to be attacking fundamental human values, demanding control in place of the defense of freedom and dignity.
His speculations are devoid of scientific content and do not even hint at general outlines of a possible science of human behavior.
Furthermore, Skinner imposes certain arbitrary limitations on scientific research which virtually guarantee continued failure.
As to its social implications, Skinner’s science of human behavior, being quite vacuous, is as congenial to the libertarian as to the fascist.
There is little doubt that a theory of human malleability might be put to the service of totalitarian doctrine.
In general, Skinner’s conception of science is very odd. Not only do his a priori methodological assumptions rule out all but the most trivial scientific theories; he is, furthermore, given to strange pronouncements such as the assertion that “the laws of science are descriptions of contingencies of reinforcement” (p. 189) — which I happily leave to others to decode.
Worse, we discover that Skinner’s a priori limitations on “scientific” inquiry make it impossible for him even to formulate the relevant concepts, let alone investigate them.
Skinner does not attempt to meet this criticism by presenting some relevant results that are not a monumental triviality. He is unable to perceive that objection to his “scientific picture of man” derives not from “extinction” of certain behavior or opposition to science, but from an ability to distinguish science from triviality and obvious error.
Skinner does not comprehend the basic criticism: when his formulations are interpreted literally, they are clearly false, and when these assertions are interpreted in his characteristic vague and metaphorical way, they are merely a poor substitute for ordinary usage.
At this point an annoying, though obvious, question intrudes. If Skinner’s thesis is false, then there is no point in his having written the book or our reading it. 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 will increase the probability of the behavior that led to reading the book (assuming an appropriate state of deprivation). At this point, we seem to be reduced to gibberish.
In every possible respect, then, Skinner’s account is simply incoherent.
Skinner’s “science of behavior” is irrelevant: the thesis of the book is either false (if we use terminology in its technical sense) or empty (if we do not).
But the thesis, in so far as it is at all clear, is without empirical support, and in fact may even be empty, as we have seen in discussing “probability of response” and persuasion. Skinner is left with no coherent criticism of the “literature of freedom and dignity.”