Author: B. F. Skinner Foundation

An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin. (p. 163)

The therapist may begin with a number of statements which are so obviously true that the listener’s behavior is strongly reinforced. Later a strong reaction is obtained to statements which…

Our belief in what someone tells us is similarly a function of, or identical with, our tendency to act upon the verbal stimuli which he provides. (p. 160)

In a well-known experiment, Diven recorded changes in the resistance of the skin of the hand produced by the reflex secretion of sweat which is often a conspicuous feature of…

The distortion due to differential generalized reinforcement may be traced in the behavior of the troubadour or in the history of the art of fiction. The troubadour begins, let us…

GENERALIZED REINFORCEMENT is the key to successful practical and scientific discourse. It brings the speaker’s behavior most narrowly under the control of the current environment and permits the listener to…

I shall go skiing tomorrow is not, of course, literally a response to future behavior. No matter how we may interpret past events, as in the examples given above, it…

. . . when the child says There was an elephant at the zoo, he appears to be reacting to his past history rather than merely profiting from it. This…

What is the time limit on the stimuli controlling tacts? Show a child a watch and say What is that? and the response Watch is fairly easily explained. Show him…

Greater ease of execution is only one reason why behavior becomes covert. Another kind of consequence of verbal behavior . . . is commonly called punishment. An important distinction between…

Verbal behavior is especially likely to drop below the overt level, because it can continue to receive reinforcement by being useful to the speaker in many ways. (p. 141)

It is only through the gradual growth of a verbal community that the individual becomes ‘conscious’ (p. 140)

A man’s report of his own behavior is widely used in the social sciences, from cultural anthropology to psychophysics, and the reliability of the informant or subject is a crucial…

Self-descriptive verbal behavior is of interest for many reasons. Only through the acquisition of such behavior does the speaker become “aware” of what he is doing or saying, and why.…

The extensive verbal behavior usually called animism may have little to do with private stimuli. It may represent a stage in the growth of a verbal environment in which responses…

If we observe that an animal cowers or retreats when someone approaches, we call it afraid, not because we read into the animal our own private accompaniments of fear but…

The response His face is familiar cannot be formulated in the same way as His face is red. The condition responsible for familiar is not in the stimulus but in…

There are at least four ways in which a reinforcing community with no access to a private stimulus may generate verbal behavior with respect to it. (p. 131) [Editorial challenge:…

In setting up the kind of verbal operant called the tact, the verbal community characteristically reinforces a given response in the presence of a given stimulus. This can be done…

... the problem of privacy cannot be fully solved by instrumental invasion of the organism. No matter how clearly these internal events may be exposed in the laboratory, the fact…

A small but important part of the universe is enclosed within the skin of each individual and, so far as we know, is uniquely accessible to him. It does not…

The fact that a verbal response conditioned in the presence of a given stimulus is found to show some strength in the presence of another stimulus showing some of the…

A quotation is a special form of tact which uses the minimal repertoire of echoic behavior. Whether we are to call it echoic or a tact is unimportant. The classifications…

Having developed a functional suffix -ed with respect to that subtle property of stimuli which we speak of as action-in-the-past, the suffix may be added for the first time to…

Just as a speaker who possesses well-developed echoic behavior may imitate new complex sound-patterns heard for the first time, so the individual who possesses a well-developed minimal repertoire of tacts…

The most familiar examples of functional units are traditionally called words. In learning to speak the child acquires tacts of various sizes: words (doll), phrases (on the table), and sentences…

The properties of a stimulus which are relevant in evoking a response, either in the individual speaker or according to the practices of a given community, can be discovered only…

In studying the properties of the world of things or events which are responded to verbally we must lift ourselves by our own bootstraps; many properties of nature can be…

We are interested in finding terms, not to take traditional places, but to deal with a traditional subject matter. (p. 115)

How a stimulus or some property of a stimulus acquires control over a given form of response is now fairly well understood. The form of a response is shaped by…

... how a word “stands for” a thing or “means” what the speaker intends to say or “communicates” some condition of a thing to a listener has never been satisfactorily…

What do pyramidality, poetry, chair, red, or foxy really “mean”? If we try to answer this by discovering what they “mean to us,” we are behaving empirically, although under a…

Abstraction is a peculiarly verbal process because a nonverbal environment cannot provide the necessary restricted contingency (p. 109)

Our definition of verbal behavior, incidentally, includes the behavior of experimental animals where reinforcements are supplied by an experimenter or by an apparatus designed to establish contingencies which resemble those…

Some extended control is ... permissible and even useful, but a free extension of the tact cannot be tolerated, particularly in practical and scientific matters. The verbal community deals with…

The tact is a relation, not merely a response, and in the absence of a controlling stimulus no relation can be established. (p. 105)

Unfortunately, metaphor is also often useful when there is nothing to say. John Horne Tooke pointed this out: “ ... Similes ... are frequently found most useful to the authors…

Literature is prescientific in the sense that it talks about things or events before science steps in—and is less inclined to talk about them afterward. (p. 98)

Metaphorical extension is most useful when no other response is available. In a novel situation to which no generic term can be extended, the only effective behavior may be metaphorical.…

Verbal behavior would be much less effective if metaphorical extension were not possible. Even when a nonextended tact is available, the metaphor may have an advantage. It may be more…

Where is a man when he is “on top of the world” or when he has “suffered a moral fall”? How do we “shut our eyes to the truth”? Answers…

Sometimes a genuine extension seems to occur when no similarity between stimuli expressible in the terms of physical science can be demonstrated. There are several possible explanations. Two stimuli may…

A second type of extension takes place because of the control exercised by properties of the stimulus which, though present at reinforcement, do not enter into the contingency respected by…

To discover the “essence” of chair, we should have to examine the actual contingencies of reinforcement in a given community. (p. 91)

The property which makes a novel stimulus effective may be the property upon which reinforcements supplied by the community are contingent. This “generic extension” is illustrated when a speaker calls…

A given object does not remain the inevitable occasion for the reinforcement of an appropriate response, and the probability of response therefore comes to vary with the occasion. The listener…

The practical behavior of the listener with respect to the verbal stimulus produced by a tact follows the same three-term relation which has already been used in analyzing the behavior…

Theories of meaning usually consider the behaviors of both speaker and listener at the same time. The practice is encouraged by the notion of the “use of words,” which appears…

In very general terms we may say that behavior in the form of the tact works for the benefit of the listener by extending his contact with the environment, and…