VERBAL BEHAVIOR by B. F. Skinner William James Lectures Harvard University 1948 To be published by Harvard University Press.† Reproduced by permission of B. F. Skinner Preface In 1930, the Harvard departments of psychology and philosophy began sponsoring an endowed lecture series in honor of William James and continued to do so at irregular intervals for nearly 60 years. By the time Skinner was invited to give the lectures in 1947, the prestige of the engagement had been established by such illustrious speakers as John Dewey, Wolfgang Köhler, Edward Thorndike, and Bertrand Russell, and there can be no doubt that Skinner was aware that his reputation would rest upon his performance. His lectures were evidently effective, for he was soon invited to join the faculty at Harvard, where he was to remain for the rest of his career. The text of those lectures, possibly somewhat edited and modified by Skinner after their delivery, was preserved as an unpublished manuscript, dated 1948, and is reproduced here. Skinner worked on his analysis of verbal behavior for 23 years, from 1934, when Alfred North Whitehead announced his doubt that behaviorism could account for verbal behavior, to 1957, when the book Verbal Behavior was finally published, but there are two extant documents that reveal intermediate stages of his analysis. In the first decade of this period, Skinner taught several courses on language, literature, and behavior at Clark University, the University of Minnesota, and elsewhere. According to his autobiography, he used notes from these classes as the foundation for a class he taught on verbal behavior in the summer of 1947 at Columbia University. Thanks to Ralph Hefferline, who attended these lectures and distributed mimeographed copies of his meticulous notes, one can assess Skinner's analysis as presented in these early courses. But even as his pen left the page, Hefferline's notes were out of date: By the summer of 1947, Skinner's analysis had evolved considerably beyond that which he presented to the Columbia students, for that fall he gave the more sophisticated William James Lectures. As the text of these lectures differs greatly from Hefferline's notes, it is implausible that it was written in the few weeks between the Columbia class and the Harvard lectures. It is apparent that, at least in part, Skinner withheld his refined analysis from the Columbia students in order to unveil it in the much more prestigious context of the William James Lectures. The manuscript of the William James Lectures is an important document not only to the historian of science but to the student of verbal behavior, for it provides an alternative exposition of much of the content of Skinner's book as well as some points that are covered nowhere else. But the manuscript was never published and therefore remained inaccessible to most scholars. Consequently, with the help of others, I created this electronic version of the document with the goals of making it more widely available and, just as importantly, permitting its contents to be searched and excerpted. ii In service of this second goal, the present document is not a veridical copy, scan, or photograph of the manuscript. Rather, it is a transcription, a text, and the reader should be aware of what that implies. I have necessarily made some changes to the document, and it is the main purpose of this preface to explain what those changes are and what they imply for the scholar who wishes to cite the work. I have preserved everything of importance in the original document and many incidental features that are of little importance. As an example of the latter, I have used the same font and have preserved the cramped spacing of the original. I retained the practice of underlining examples of verbal response rather than using italics. A printed copy looks as though it were typed and is essentially identical to the original. The pagination has been retained precisely, so one can cite the text without concern that there will be a discrepancy with the original manuscript. Words that are split across page breaks in the original are split here, and in the same place. However, the line numbers do not always coincide, as slight discrepancies in spacing, along with occasional editorial changes, add up over the lines of a page. I corrected all spelling, typographical, and transcription errors (of which there were hundreds), standardized the punctuation, and supplied the missing or faded characters at the remarkably tight margins of the original text. By inserting myself between the manuscript and the reader in this way, I might seem to be taking a liberty, but almost all such changes were trivial ones that any copy editor would have made without bothering to consult the author (e.g., the change of anlysis to analysis), and in no case did I introduce a change of substance, except as mentioned below. The text can now be read smoothly, and more importantly, any search for target strings will be highly accurate, if not perfectly so. Moreover, none of the errors in the original document have any historical value, for it is apparent from the nature of some of these errors - e.g., rumor for humor, with for which, or for of - that the manuscript was typed from Skinner's notes by a secretary, or perhaps a student, for the product is by no means of professional quality. The errors in the manuscript probably tell us more about this secretary than about Skinner. In those cases where the correct form was uncertain, and where the error affected the sense of the passage, I explained my decision in the endnotes. My policy was to check Verbal Behavior for parallel constructions, and if I could find none, I made no change and offered a suggested reading in the endnotes. I changed non-standard spellings to standard spellings (e.g., "neurone" to "neuron"), but since these were not errors in the manuscript but were presumably how Skinner spelled the words at that time, I recorded such changes in the endnotes. For the countless iii abbreviations in the manuscript (r, vb, acct, wd, spkr, mng, etc.) I substituted full terms (response, verbal behavior, account, word, speaker, and meaning, respectively). No doubt those were Skinner's abbreviations, not those of his secretary, and I was tempted to retain them, for they do indeed tell us something about how Skinner wrote his drafts, and they impart to the manuscript a dynamic quality. But the abbreviations distract the reader and interfere with the smooth interpretation of the text. Moreover an important purpose of this project was to produce a searchable document. The scholar who wants to discover what Skinner said about meaning, or when he first started using the term verbal behavior, would find nothing at all in the present document under those terms if the abbreviations had been retained. Skinner himself spotted some errors and listed them as errata on a page inserted at the beginning of the manuscript. I have made those changes in the text without identifying them. Most of them were minor, but one requires comment here. According to Skinner, almost all of manuscript pages 142 and 143 were out of place and belonged some 17 pages later, between the first and second paragraphs of Page 159. I have made that change as well, so that the text appears as Skinner intended it, but I did it in a way to preserve as far as possible the coordination of the present document with the original manuscript. Consequently, I left blank all of Page 142, and most of Page 143. The preceding and following pages therefore correspond exactly to the original manuscript. I then added two pages, 159A and 159B, to make space for the inserted passages, thereby preserving the correspondence of the two documents for all other pages. I have noted the insertion points and original page transitions in the endnotes so that the scholar who wishes to cite something from those very pages can make an informed decision about how to do so. It is my expectation that the present document, because of its availability and ease of use will become the standard source for scholarship, so to repeat and perhaps clarify the last point, if readers wish to cite any passage from pages 159-159B of the present document, and wish to attribute it to the 1948 unpublished manuscript by Skinner, they should consult the endnotes to determine on which page of the original manuscript the passage falls. If the present document finds a permanent home on the internet, as I trust it will, it can be referenced at that address as an edited version of the original document, and a reconstruction of the original pages will be unnecessary. Perhaps in anticipation of publication, Skinner added two footnotes to Page 27, flagged with numerals, but as there was no room for them there, he inserted them in some white space at the end of the chapter on Page 36. As the reader would otherwise have no easy iv way of finding them, I adjusted the line spacing of Page 27 and was able to fit them in at the bottom of the page. A third footnote appears in the original manuscript on Page 80, flagged with an asterisk. To differentiate passages keyed to my endnotes from those keyed to Skinner's own footnotes, all endnotes are flagged with a dagger(†). The endnotes themselves are differentiated by the page numbers of the corresponding text, along with a few identifying words. I want to acknowledge the generous assistance of Catherine Green, a graduate student in behavior analysis at Simmons College.