LINGUISTIC BEHAVIORISM AND THE CORRESPONDENCE THEORY OF TRUTH

Linguistic Behaviorism (Place, 1996) is an attempt to reclaim for the behaviorist perspective two disciplines, linguistics acid linguistic p hilosophy, most of whose practitioners have been persuaded by Chomsky' s (1959) Review of B. F. Skinner's (1957) Verbal Behavior that behavio rism has nothing useful to contribute to the study of language. It tak es as axiomatic (a) that the functional unit of language is the senten ce, and (b) that sentences are seldom repeated word-for-word, but are constructed anew on each occasion of utterance out of units, words, ph rases and turns of phrase, that are repeated. On this view, the proble m of discriminating the true from the false arises from the use of nov el declarative sentences (statements) to depict or, to use Skinner's t erm, ''specify'' contingencies the like of which the listener need nev er have encountered and to which he would otherwise have no access. In such cases the listener needs to distinguish among the sentences he r eceives from other speakers between those where the situation depicted /specified corresponds to that which actually exists at the time and p lace specified in the sentence and are, therefore, true, and those to which no actual situation corresponds acid which are, therefore, false .