Autoclitics of Negation and Assertion

Broadly speaking, the autoclitic, in Skinner’s lexicon, is verbal behavior about one’s own verbal behavior. The verbal community wants to know, so to speak, some of the variables that caused you to say what you are saying, or how the various parts of what you say hang together. When you say, “poison ivy,” it is helpful to the listener to know why you said it. Perhaps it is the answer to a crossword clue, or a request that you spray herbicide on the Virginia Creeper, or a textual response to a plate in a botany book, or a guess that the plant you are wallowing in is the dreaded vine. Context can tell us much, but the speaker is usually in an excellent position to give us all the information we would like to know. Esoteric rules of grammar evolved to make fine distinctions that are of interest to the verbal community.

When I first read Verbal Behavior, I was struck by Skinner’s treatment of negation, for no, not, never, no way, nix, etc. seem appropriate, at every moment, to a nearly unlimited range of referents.  Not only is there no black scorpion falling upon this table, we can assert with confidence that one never fell in the past, nor is it likely that one will fall in the future. And black scorpions are but the opening wedge of a zoological catalog of beasts that are not falling, have never fell, nor are likely to fall upon this table. In short, negative terms are almost always “correct,” but only a tiny proportion are likely to be of interest to the listener. Why then are they useful?

Skinner’s solution to this puzzle was to point out that negative terms are, in fact, of interest to the listener when there is any reason to suspect that the converse is true.  If you are sitting down to a finely cooked meal at a scorpion-infested restaurant, it is comforting to know that none are, at present, falling on the table. One can make an analogous case for all instances and varieties of negation.

That source of stimulus control of negation had never occurred to me, so I was pleased to be enlightened. But apparently it had occurred to others, for Skinner refers to this account as “the traditional solution” (1957, p. 322). He cited no philosophers or logicians to support this generalization, but then, Skinner seldom cited anyone. A conspicuous exception to Skinner’s embargo is Bertrand Russell, and it was to Russell I turned for a relevant antecedent. Russell had delivered the prestigious William James Lectures to the combined philosophy and psychology departments at Harvard in 1940, seven years before Skinner delivered his own lectures on verbal behavior. The book that emerged from Russell’s lectures, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, would have been familiar to Skinner. When I burrowed into the book myself, I found the following passage:¹

“Suppose you are told, ‘there is butter in the larder, but no cheese’. Although they seem equally based upon sensible experience in the larder, the two statements ‘there is butter’ and ‘there is not cheese’ are really on a very different level. There was a definite occurrence which was seeing butter, and which might have put the word ‘butter’ into your mind even if you had not been thinking of butter. But there was no occurrence which could be described as ‘not seeing cheese’ or as ‘seeing the absence of cheese’. You must have looked at everything in the larder and judged, in each case, ‘this is not cheese’. You judged this, you did not see it; you saw what each thing was, not what it was not. To judge ‘this is not cheese’, you must have the word ‘cheese’, or some equivalent, in your mind already. There is a clash between what you see and the associations of the word ‘cheese’, and so you judge, ‘this is not cheese’. (p. 70)

It takes only a little effort to translate Russell’s argument into behavior analytic terms. I confess that I find the latter to be more satisfactory, and I think Russell would have agreed if he could have read Verbal Behavior.

Turning to the topic of assertion, it did not occur to me until a few months ago that assertion is subject to an analogous argument. An assertion has a connotation that goes beyond mere statement. If two men are standing unprotected in a heavy rain, one might say to the other, “It’s raining,” as a sardonic complaint, to which his companion might reply, “Really? I didn’t notice.” Thus the mere form of X is Y is an insufficient criterion to call something an assertion. But what is missing? It appears to me that the  missing element is a tendency, however slight, to doubt the statement, or at least to be wholly ignorant of the state of affairs.  That is, the autoclitics of assertion and negation are complementary. Skinner comes close to the same point when he writes, “Any collateral condition which is likely to weaken the listener’s response (for example, a denial by someone else or a doubt­ful set of circumstances) leads the speaker to intensify the assertive autoclitic” (Verbal Behavior, pp. 326-327), but I think it is fair to say that there must be at least some measure of weakness in the listener’s response in every case. Otherwise we are would find ourselves classifying behavior topographically rather than functionally.

As it happens, if I squint, I think I can read Russell’s discussion of assertion as an agreement. If I am wrong, his passage is worth quoting for other reasons: We can see some of the very roots of the concept of the autoclitic in Russell’s words:

Of course the same sort of thing may happen with an affirmative judgment, if it answers a previous question; you then say, ‘yes this is cheese’. Here you really mean ‘the statement “this is cheese” is true’; and when you say ‘this is not cheese’ you mean ‘the statement “this is cheese” is false’. In either case, you are speaking about a statement, which you are not doing in a direct judgement of perception. The man, therefore, who understands only object-words will be able to tell you everything that is in the larder but will be unable to infer that there is no cheese. He will, moreover, have no conception of truth or falsehood; he can say, ‘this is butter’ but not ‘it is true that this is butter’. (p. 70)

Alas, I am no philosopher, except to the extent that radical behaviorism is the philosophy of the science of behavior, but I see much to admire in Bertrand Russell’s writings. His History of Western Philosophy was the companion of my youth, for he was able to translate into simple prose the incomprehensible gibberish that I found in the works of the famous philosophers of history. But surely one of Russell’s greatest legacies is this: Skinner attributed his conversion to behaviorism to him.

1. Russell, B. (1967). An inquiry into meaning and truth. Baltimore: Penguin Books. ↩︎