Despite the suspicions of vulgar-minded behavior analysts, Skinner’s term “autoclitic” has distinguished antecedents. The “enclitic,” is a long-established grammatical term for a morphological unit that does not stand alone but “leans” on a preceding term, while a “proclitic” leans upon a subsequent term. In the word “y’all,” for example, the proclitic “y’” leans heavily on “all” for its intelligibility, whereas in the word “would’ve,” the enclitic “’ve” leans on the preceding “would.” An “autoclitic” then, is Skinner’s neologism for verbal behavior that leans upon itself. It cannot stand alone; it is effective only in the company of primary verbal behavior.
In the summer of 1947, Skinner gave a series of lectures on verbal behavior to the behavior analysis graduate students and faculty at Columbia University. Ralph Hefferline, a fresh Ph.D. and a competent stenographer, took down those lectures in shorthand, preserving them for posterity. (A cleaned-up transcript is now available at bfskinner.org.)
In the fall of 1947, Skinner gave the prestigious William James Lectures at Harvard University, at the invitation of the combined philosophy and psychology departments. Previous speakers had included Bertrand Russell, Wolfgang Köhler, and Edward Thorndike. Shortly after the conclusion of the lectures, Skinner was invited to join the Harvard faculty as a full professor, so much was at stake. The term “autoclitic” does not appear once in Hefferline’s transcript, but it appears 120 times in the last 77 pages of the William James Lectures, which he delivered just a few months later. This substantial discrepancy suggests to me that Skinner had withheld his more sophisticated analysis of verbal behavior from the graduate students at Columbia in order to reveal it for the first time to the more exalted audience at Harvard, an audience that had the power either to offer him a job for life or send him back to Indiana.1
The autoclitic, in Skinner’s lexicon, is verbal behavior that alters the effect on the listener of other verbal behavior of the speaker, perhaps by qualifying it, emphasizing it, clarifying it, negating it, or describing it’s strength or its controlling variables: It is raining; it’s not raining; I am sure it’s raining; I wonder if it’s raining; they say it’s raining. Prosody, word order, and sentence frames are autoclitic to the extent that they alter the effect of primary verbal operants on the listener: “I live in a greenhouse” vs. “I live in a green house;” pie apple vs. apple pie; The pig licked Donald’s foot vs. Donald licked the pig’s foot.
To a first approximation, one could say that the autoclitic is verbal behavior about one’s own concurrent verbal behavior. In the Hefferline Notes, when discussing such effects, Skinner spoke of primary verbal behavior and secondary verbal behavior. This way of putting it reminds us that Skinner was not the first to make important distinctions between levels of verbal behavior. My amateur scholarship has traced the concept back in time at least to 1922.
In 1922 Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was translated into English, and his patron, Bertrand Russell, wrote the introduction. The closing paragraph of Russell’s introduction begins with this simple sentence:
“[The difficulties raised by Wittgenstein] suggest to my mind some such possibility as this: that every language has a structure concerning which nothing can be said in that language, but that there may be another language dealing with the structure of the first language, and having itself a new structure, and that to this hierarchy of languages there may be no limit.” (Bertrand Russell, p. 19)
The concept of a separate language about language, though not cast in behavioral terms, is not far from the concept of verbal behavior whose controlling variables are discriminable features of other verbal behavior, or of the controlling variables of other verbal behavior.
But I am aware of no evidence that Skinner had read Russell’s introduction or that he was influenced by it, but one person who was likely influenced by Russell’s remarks was Alfred Tarski, for one of his most influential papers disposed of paradoxes by conceiving of two levels of language, an “object-level” language and a metalanguage whose subject was the object-level language. Again, we can see the parallel with the autoclitic, and as we will see below, Skinner alluded to Tarski’s concept of object-language, not only in Verbal Behavior, but in both the William James Lectures and the Hefferline Notes.
The latter fact is significant, for Tarski’s paper on the subject was published in Polish in 1933 and translated into German in 1935, but not published in English until 1956. Is it possible that Skinner read Tarski in the German translation? Almost certainly not. Skinner knew enough German to pass his qualifying exam in the subject at Harvard, but he later admitted:
I passed the departmental examination in German and could drop [the] course. Frank Pattie, a new instructor who graded my paper, said, “You passed your German but you got away with murder!” (Skinner: Shaping of a behaviorist, p. 34)
Reading philosophical disquisitions is difficult enough in one’s native language; it is implausible that Skinner had the time, interest, or fluency to read a Polish philosopher in German translation. However Tarski was a major influence on Rudolph Carnap, a member of the Vienna Circle of logical positivism. Carnap adopted Tarski’s levels of language and extended them to the philosophy of science. He wanted to create a formal language of referential words and syntactical rules, a language that would be utterly devoid of meaningless terms.
In Verbal Behavior, Skinner cites the 1937 English translation of Carnap’s book, Logical Syntax of Language, but his most extensive discussion is in A Psychological Analysis of Verbal Behavior (better known as the Hefferline Notes .
§282. [The resolution of the problem of paradoxes that] has come out of modern logic, due to several people, but especially Tarski, is that no sentence can refer to itself. There are different levels of language. A primary language must occur first in time. Carnap, the logician, calls primary language protocol language. He calls secondary language—that is, talk about primary language—metalanguage. The terms primary and secondary are used by Bertrand Russell.
§283. In primary language you have all statements about things. “C.U. [Columbia University] is in New York City.” The metalanguage, or secondary language, talks about statements in the primary language. It quotes. “C.U. is in New York City” is true, etc. The question arises as to whether the quote is the statement or the name of the statement. The logicians have found it necessary to set up levels of language. Then “This sentence is false” is not meaningful because it refers to something in another language.
§284. A language which puts the primary language in quotations and then uses such expressions as “is true”, “is false”, “can be denied”, etc., is too trivial for us to bother with here. It does, however, apparently solve the ancient paradoxes if you feel the need of a solution. We do, however, talk about our own verbal behavior and the classes and ways in which we do it are many. There is a part of our behavior—a part of almost every sentence—which is talking about the rest of the sentence. Carnap: the words no and not are primary language. For Russell they are secondary language. To say “There is no cheese in the icebox” is not to talk about something which is “no cheese”. It is, rather, equivalent to, “‘There is cheese in the icebox’ is false”. (p. 34)
By the summer of 1947, then, Skinner was citing Carnap in the context of autoclitic behavior as well as Bertrand Russell’s An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (the subject of Russell’s own William James Lectures in 1940). Since Skinner had taught classes on verbal behavior at least three times over the previous decade, it is possible—even likely—that he had discussed them previously.
But Skinner’s impatience with philosophical haggling, revealed in the dismissive tone in the extract above, suggests to me that he did not spend much time poring over books of philosophy, particularly because he had a much more direct source near at hand: Willard Van Orman Quine.
Skinner and Quine were peers. Both were recognized as exceptional by the Harvard faculty, and both were among the first to receive three-year fellowships from the University beginning in the fall of 1933. As Junior Fellows, they would meet periodically for dinner and conversation with the Senior Fellows. (It was on one such occasion that Whitehead challenged Skinner to explain his behavior as he intoned, “No black scorpion is falling upon this table.”) Quine and Skinner became good friends and colleagues until Skinner’s death nearly six decades later, and the influence was mutual: Quine’s philosophy retained a strong behavioristic flavor, to the bemusement of many of his admirers.
Quine had spent the spring of 1933 in Prague and Warsaw visiting Carnap and Tarski respectively, and upon his return to Harvard he gave several lectures on Carnap’s philosophy. (As an aside, Quine was helpful in getting Carnap a post in the United States as central Europe descended into fascism. His service to Tarski was even more momentous, though of a different sort: Quine had been instrumental in getting Tarski invited to the Unity of Science conference at Harvard in September 1939. Neither man realized that Germany would invade Poland shortly after Tarski’s ship left the dock. Most of Tarski’s relatives later died in the Holocaust.)
It is likely, then, that Skinner learned about Carnap and Tarski mainly from Quine. As he toiled on the 23-year project of writing Verbal Behavior, he included some of the philosophical distinctions into his analysis. By 1957, however, only vestiges remained. In any case, the esoteric concept of the autoclitic, puzzling to many and beloved of few, has roots that can be traced from Skinner to Quine, to Carnap, to Tarski, to Russell. It is an intellectual pedigree that any conceptual scheme would be proud of.
- The term autoclitic was first mentioned in the sixth of ten weekly lectures in the fall of 1947, so it is possible that I was being born on the day the term was introduced to the world. That suggests that my interest in Skinner’s Verbal Behavior has deep mystical roots. Do not sneer, skeptic: I was born under the sign of the scorpion, visible only in the black of night. ↩︎
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