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The organism Skinner chose to test and demonstrate this principle was the white rat. “It has the advantage over man of submitting to the experimental control of its drives and routine of living.”⁹³ The hungry rat is put in a box, with a lever at one end. Pressing the lever releases food. The rat is trained to learn that a certain stimulus produces a reward in the form of food. “The work is ‘mechanistic,’” Skinner concludes, “in the sense of implying a fundamental lawfulness or order in the behavior of organisms.”⁹⁴

“Instead of going to a drinking fountain,” Skinner says on the first page of Verbal Behavior, “a thirsty man may simply ‘ask for a glass of water’ – that is, he may engage in behavior which produces a certain pattern of sounds which in turn induces someone to bring him a glass of water.”⁹⁵ By the next page, he proposes to replace the term “language” and the discipline of “linguistics” with the study of “verbal behavior.” This was to mark his recognition of the primacy of social practices and human activities without which language is meaningless and linguistics a disconnected abstraction. The last part of the previous sentence is not quite the way Skinner would have put it. It is our paraphrase, signaling in advance our sympathies with some of the premises of behaviorism. Or to push the paraphrase further, behaviorism affirms the foundational presence of material structures of meaning, and their integral connection with the ideal.

Of course, after the horrors of concentration camps, gulags, and places like Abu Ghraib,^§MS3.1.2a we take fright at the idea of putting rats in boxes, then extrapolating from this to the human experience, or even the more general ideal of placing people in institutional boxes of one kind or another, figuratively when not literally. However, with Skinner, in this grammar of multimodality we also abandon notions of “language” and “linguistics,” for some similar as well as some different reasons.

But let’s continue our historical narrative. Because now a protagonist with the honorific “linguist” enters the drama, in the personage of Noam Chomsky.^§MS3.1.2f

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⁹² B.F. Skinner, 1957, Verbal Behavior, New York, NY: Prentice Hall, pp. 456–57.

⁹³ B.F. Skinner, 1938, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis, New York, NY: Appleton Century Crofts, p. 47.

⁹⁴ Ibid., p. 433.

⁹⁵ B.F. Skinner, 1957, Verbal Behavior, New York, NY: Prentice Hall, p. 1.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 287–288.

B.F. Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior” §MS3.1.2d