Behaviourism and Linguistics: An Historical Note
Authors: Alkon Paul K. 
Published: July 2017

Behaviourism provided a framework within which language could be discussed without presupposing words to be the vehicles of “thought.” Consequently behaviourism created a more favourable intellectual milieu for modern linguistics than did the earlier school of structural psychology. To appreciate the significance of this shift in outlook, one must trace the influence of philosophical empiricism upon the development of experimental psychology, for only by doing so can we understand why psychology was able to exert a conservative influence upon linguistic studies and why that influence abruptly vanished after the First World War.

Descartes helped to implant in Western philosophy the doctrine, known as dualism, that mind can be considered, apart from the body, as a distinct entity whose properties can be investigated and related to the sphere of physical substance. He also postulated the existence of “innate” ideas, which are present in the mind, although not derived from experience. Locke, and the subsequent school of British Empiricism, accepted the dualistic distinction between mind and body, but rejected the doctrine of innate ideas. Hence epistemology resolved itself into the question of how we come to perceive the external world. Eventually, John Stuart Mill answered this question by asserting that various discrete sensations were the elements which compounded to form our perceptions of external reality. Structural psychology adopted both Cartesian dualism and an elementalistic theory of perception based upon that of John Stuart Mill. Later, however, the schools of Gestalt psychology and behaviourism came into being as protests against the older tradition. The former retained a dualistic distinction between mind and body, but discarded the elementalistic view of perception, whereas the latter set aside dualism entirely and regarded behaviour as the only proper subject-matter for psychological study.

Leonard Bloomfield's work has been of prime importance in the development of modern linguistics. In 1914 he evidently accepted the assumptions of structural psychology, viewing language as largely a resultant, albeit also partly a determinant of, the mechanism of perception. Within two years, however, he had moved towards a recognition of the fundamental weakness of such assumptions: namely, their rather too rigid insistence that all perceptual experience is composed of various discrete units. It was William James' criticism of structural psychology that had prompted Bloomfield to reconsider his own position. Gestalt psychology might well have been accepted as a more fruitful theoretical foundation for linguistics, inasmuch as it fully recognized and attempted to solve the problems with which Bloomfield had begun to grapple. But in fact, behaviourism provided a more direct pathway to the desired goal, since it eliminated Cartesian dualism and the elementalistic theory of perception along with it. Consequently linguistic studies could proceed without relating the observed phenomena to any theory of the supposed structure of the mind or the presumed mechanisms of perception underlying verbal behaviour. The most far-reaching result of this new freedom is the now-familiar assumption that linguistic study must begin with the phonology of the language under consideration, and then proceed to describe the morphological and syntactic features in terms of structure within the system, rather than in terms of any causal interrelationships between such formal features of the language and the “mental life” of the speech community in question. Moreover, underlying that assumption, and necessary to it, are the concepts of the phoneme and the morpheme, both of which were far less tenable, if not impossible, within the framework of structural psychology.