In Tune with their Scientific Philosophies and Theories of Language, Skinner’s Writing Style is Simpler, Punchier, and Less Abstract than Chomsky’s

Abstract

Psychology is defined as the scientific study of behavior and mental processes, and, in the 1960s and 1970s, B. F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky were held to represent the two poles of this definition with respect to the psychology of language (Benjafield, 2015, p. 395; Hergenhahn, 2009, p. 616). Skinner was a logical positivist and a behaviorist: he attributed all behaviors, even the most complex ones such as language, to learning on the basis of reinforcement and he refused to theorize about “mind” because it could not be measured directly in any objective way. Chomsky was a cognitive psychologist who focused on the role of the mind in performance and especially in language: his theory was human-centered. In an article written half-way between Skinner and Chomsky’s day and the present, Andressen (1991) noted that Chomsky rode a wave of increasing preference for cognitive, mind-based psychology to greater and greater fame while Skinner’s behaviorism, still employed in many practical settings, was at a theoretical disadvantage due to its waning popularity. Spear (2007, p. 374), emphasized the rising popularity of cognition and neuroscience in the psychology literature: he also provided evidence of the dramatic fall in the popularity of behaviorism as a keyword for psychology articles published after 1970.