Innateness and Language 10

Given his view that knowing a language is just a matter of having a certain set of behavioral dispositions, Skinner believed that learning a language just amounts to acquiring that set of dispositions. He argued that this occurs through a process that he called operant conditioning. (‘Operants’ are behaviors that have no discernible law-like relation to particular environmental conditions or ‘eliciting stimuli.’ They are to be contrasted with ‘respondents,’ which are reliable or reflex responses to particular stimuli. Thus, blinking when someone pokes at your eye is a respondent; episodes of infant babbling are operants.) Skinner held that most human verbal behaviors are operants: they start off unconnected with any particular stimuli. However, they can acquire connections to stimuli (or other behaviors) as a result of conditioning. In conditioning, the behavior in question is made more (or in some paradigms less) likely to occur in response to a given environmental cue by the imposition of an appropriate ‘schedule of reinforcement’: rewards or punishments are given or withheld as the subject's response to the cue varies over time.

他關於「知道語言」的觀點相當於是某人擁有或者掌握一個東西,這個東西是特定的行為傾向所形成的集合。史金納認為,學習語言就是去掌握行為傾向所形成的集合之總合。史金納認為這個過程可叫做operant conditioning。(operants是指行為不能從特定環境看出來,或歸納得出結果的。相對於respondents,operants是相較於反映出特定刺激的。因此,眨眼時,某人出現在你眼前是一種respondent, 嬰兒的牙牙學語是一種operant。)史金納認為,許多人的動詞行為都是operant: 它們的開始和刺激並沒有什麼關連。然而,人們卻可以去判斷刺激(或是行為)所帶出的結果的背後因素或條件,等等。在這些條件式的事物之下,行為的問題或多或少(或者在實用上)都像是一個由被規定的環境因素之恰當位置中,強加上的"增加計畫": 獎賞或是懲罰都是被給予的,就像一個主體response每一刻的各種因素。