Reflection on historical papers marking decline of Behaviorism

What I was paying most attention to with the assorted readings were their style of argumentation and how the rhetoric of science has changed (and varies).

Skinner had an informality that I can't imagine getting published today. And Chomsky's argumentation was much more caustic than I expected. His Aspects of a Theory of Syntax was my introduction to the subtle, understated and loaded argumentation that I really enjoy about scientific writing. In that book there are sentences that are superficially entirely innocuous, and that can only be recognized as crushing blows by those familiar with his opponents and the context of his argument. By contrast, Chomsky's review of Verbal Behavior was unabashedly snarky and facetious. I'm still trying to get my head around the contrast. As for his argumentation, the formal arguments, showing the limits of finite state machines to generate the variety of syntactic structures, presented a much more impressive, disinterested and final argument.

In the review, Chomsky's arguments focused on the meaninglessness of Skinner's vocabulary. Verbal Behavior is more of a statement book, Skinner had to have known that he wasn't explaining language so much as laying out a research agenda. In such a circumstance, the exploratory use of scientific vocabulary is entirely appropriate. For example take Popper's argument:

" science does not use definitions in order to determine the meaning of its terms, but only in order to introduce handy shorthand labels. And it does not depend on definitions; all definitions can be omitted without loss to the information imparted. It follows from this that in science, all the terms that are really needed must be undefined terms. " http://www.dieoff.com/page126.htm

The Shepard/Metzler was much more to my liking. Not only did it present a much more damning argument, it did so much less subtly, with only one understated sentence fragment put towards the broader implications of their results,a nd no mention of behaviorism: " These findings appear to place rather severe cosntraints on ossible explanations of how sujects go about determining identity of shape of differently oriented objects. They are, however, consistent with an explanation suggested by the subjects themselves. " Without an awareness of the issues that were most relevent at the time, the significance of that comment would be missed by many. And that, for me atleast, makes it much more satisfying, and a much better representationmore in tune with the sort of scientific-literary aesthetic that has been resolving over the past century.