In Tune with their Scientific Philosophies and Theories of Language, Skinner’s Writing Style is Simpler, Punchier, and Less Abstract than Chomsky’s
Bibliographic record
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.The Google Ngram viewer 1 was employed to search for the appearance of the two names (Chomsky and Skinner) in books scanned by Google that were published between 1955 and 2000.The name Skinner had a background rate of 25 mentions per million words in the earliest third of the 20 th century, so data for this name were corrected by subtracting this as a constant.Fig. 1 displays occurrences or mentions of Chomsky and Skinner over the entire period.Mentions of Chomsky rose to a high in the 1970's and 1980's when cognitive psychology was experiencing its wave of popularity.After this date, mentions remain higher for Chomsky than for Skinner.The enduring importance of these theorists to current discussions is supported by the rate at which their names were still used at the end of the 20 th century (Fig. 1).As well, Google Trends 2 data for 2018 and most of 2019 (consulted in October, 2019) showed a roughly equal employment of the names of the two scientists as Google search terms.The number of Google searches for either author were at about the rate of 1/12 th of the Google searches involving William Shake speare: interest in the theoretical positions that Skinner and Chomsky represent remains high in the 21 st century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".