Summary of Chapter One

Here is my summary of chapter one. I know i am a little behind schedule :(
but would be grateful if anyone could point out any fundamental misunderstandings before i get too far with ch 2. Unfortunately the formatting of headings has disappeared but i guess that doesn't make much difference to how much sense it makes.

Chapter 1

Why a behavioural approach is a good idea.

This chapter opens by (briefly) making a case for a behavioural approach to language. It points to the progress made the behavioural approach in other areas, and to the difficulty the cognitive approach has had in stepping outside common sense assumptions (e.g. that words can be understood as representing ideas). The cognitive approach is said to provide a reasonable account within its own assumptions (i.e. that the task is to describe how words and sentences etc. are perceived, encoded, produced etc.). However, a behavioural approach may have something different and useful to offer.

The chapter continues by saying that language is, or should be, of fundamental importance to behaviour analysts, pointing out that the early focus on the behaviour of non-verbal organisms was only ever intended to be a starting place.

What sort of behavioural approach we are talking about.

The authors outline the assumptions of their particular brand of behaviour analysis, i.e. functional contextualism. This is really very simple. If you start from the goals (predict and influence) everything else follows. These goals (predict and influence) mean that the independent variables must be in the environment of the person/system/group being studied (else, obviously, the theory cannot tell you how to change the person/group/system). Hence the importance of context or environment. Also, ‘truth’ has to be what works in achieving those goals. There is no other criterion. That’s all there is to it. (??)

Why the previous attempts of behaviourists (even Skinner’s) to provide an account of language didn’t work and why this one will be better.

The next few sections of the chapter are concerned with outlining previous attempts by people working within the behavioural tradition to develop accounts of human language. Since these appear to have come unstuck in some way or other, it is important to understand what went wrong, and perhaps to explain the ways in which the current approach is different and stands a better chance of success.

The first to be considered is Kantor’s interbehavioural approach, which apparently did not generate a viable programme of research. The case is made that this is because it was based on descriptive rather than functional contextualism. In other words, the lesson is look what happens if you do not have your goals in place. (?) Some valuable and influential aspects of his work are also outlined: specifically, the importance of context and the idea that the stimulus functions of an event should be seen as part of the response to the event and that stimulus functions can be transferred from one event to another.

The chapter then looks at Skinner’s approach to language, and two attempts (those of Willard Day and Kurt Salzinger) to obtain the empirical data that would be needed to test and develop this model. The main point of this section is to argue that Skinner’s work, although an enormous step forward at the time, is not up to the job of moving us forward now. Basically if it was going to work we’d be a lot further ahead by now. The authors say that if you are happy to accept this conclusion you can skip the next few pages, but if you need to be convinced then you have to read them. I guess people who are familiar with Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour would find this section easy to follow, but I’m not and I didn’t. However the main point seems to be that there is problem with his definition of verbal behaviour: you decide whether or not a piece of behaviour is verbal by seeing how it is reinforced. If it is reinforced by someone who has been trained to reinforce it in this way by the verbal community then the behaviour is verbal. However, the behaviour of the listener/reinforcer is not itself necessarily verbal (it could be reinforced in some other way). This is a problem, because trained ‘listeners’ who deliver the reinforcement could be reinforcing all sorts of different behaviours that we wouldn’t generally consider verbal, such as the behaviour of rats in operant conditioning experiments. This makes the definition both too broad (it includes rats in operant conditioning experiments) and too narrow (it excludes the behaviour of the listener).

The research has led to RFT

The last part of the chapter outlines the work in behaviour analysis that paved the way for RFT. There are two main strands of research.

The first to be considered is research on rule-governed behaviour. Basically, instead of having to learn contingencies by trial and error you can just be told them and that way you get them much quicker, but you tend to take longer to notice if they turn out not to be what you were told they were. This would seem to be something to do with language (the “language hypothesis”). However, an account of rule-governed behaviour as verbal behaviour could not be accommodated within Skinner’s approach because a) the function of a stimulus as a rule depends on the history of the listener rather than the speaker and Skinner’s definition of verbal behaviour concerned only the speaker, and b) he could only say a rule was a discriminative stimulus which specifies a contingency, but this is inadequate (because it does not distinguish rules from other types of discriminative stimuli) unless you can specify what is meant by ‘specify’ which he was not able to do (following his own rules).

The second is derived relational responding. This section starts by outlining a famous paper by Sidman (1971) in which he reports that a person (child?) with learning difficulties who had been taught to match spoken words to pictures and separately taught to match the same set of spoken words to printed words was then able to match pictures to the corresponding printed words without actually being trained to do this. [NB I think there is an error in book near the top of page 18 in the sentence that begins, “Sidman’s (1971) …”?]. Because the picture-written words relationships had not been trained they are called derived. The next paragraph summarises how equivalence relations were studied using matching to sample procedures. If, having learnt that selecting X from X, Y and Z is correct in the presence of A, A is then selected from an array from stimuli such as A, B and C in the presence of X, then this is said to show symmetry. Further, if having learnt that selecting X is correct in the presence of A, and selecting P is correct in the presence of X, when then presented with an array of say P, Q and R in the presence of A, you pick P, well then that shows transitivity.

This was exciting because it seems very like language (e.g. the relationships between words and things are symmetrical). It was also puzzling because this symmetry does not generally apply in other situations, and the example of approaching thicket in the presence of a lion, but not a lion in the presence of a thicket is given.

The chapter ends by claiming that taking this idea of derived relational responding further (in the next chapters) leads to a more adequate definition of verbal behaviour, allows rule-governed behaviour to be understood as verbal, and lays the ground for a ‘vibrant research agenda’.

Thanks,

Janet