Sources for Skinner's pragmatic selectionism in 1945.
Skinner's 1945 verbal behavior paper is the point he went full Darwinian—know this and you'll teach language as consequence-driven selection, not rule memorization.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author dug through Skinner's 1945 paper on verbal behavior. He asked: where did Skinner's idea of selection by consequences really come from?
He compared Skinner's early, mechanical views with the new language he used in 1945. The shift, he says, came from Darwin and the philosopher Peirce, not from gears-and-levers psychology.
What they found
The 1945 article is the moment Skinner drops machine talk and picks up evolutionary talk. Words survive because they work, not because they are pushed by inner springs.
This pragmatic selectionism treats verbal responses like species: the environment picks the forms that pay off.
How this fits with other research
Malone (1999) shows Thorndike had already framed the law of effect as a Darwinian process. Skinner's 1945 paper simply makes that view explicit for language.
de Lourdes R da F Passos et al. (2007) add that Bloomfield's structural linguistics fits the same physicalist, listener-focused mold. Together these papers show a slow build, not a lone genius moment.
Petursdottir et al. (2023) extend the idea into modern AAC tools. They keep Skinner's selection logic but swap topography vs. selection for screen size, icon clarity, and array layout.
Why it matters
When you teach mand, tact, or intraverbal lessons, frame them as selection contests. Arrange consequences so the child's response that gets the candy, the toy, or the laugh wins and returns. Tell parents and teachers: we are speeding up evolution, not drilling empty habits. This historical lens keeps your verbal behavior program grounded in functional consequences, not mysterious rules inside the head.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Skinner's pragmatic selectionism shows up strongly in his 1945 publication, "The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms," in which he introduced a probabilistic three-term contingency for verbal behavior. This probabilism was accompanied by an expanded contextualism and an increased emphasis on consequences with a clear alignment to pragmatism. In total, these changes represent Skinner's most striking shift from mechanistic and necessitarian values to pragmatic selectionism, and these changes may be indebted more to the conceptual contributions of others than Skinner acknowledged. Before 1945, Skinner made at least some positive associations with the views of Watson, Russell, and Carnap. From 1945 and afterwards, he strongly disassociated his views on verbal behavior from theirs. Before 1945, Skinner did not associate his views with those of Darwin or Peirce. After 1945, he strongly associated his views with those of Darwin and Peirce (in one published interview). No sources for his pragmatic selectionism, however, were referred to in 1945.
The Behavior analyst, 2001 · doi:10.1007/BF03392031