Skinner's empirical work expanded on earlier research on trial-and-error learning by researchers such as Thorndike and Guthrie with both conceptual reformulations – Thorndike's notion of a stimulus-response 'association' or 'connection' was abandoned – and methodological ones – the use of the 'free operant', so called because the animal was now permitted to respond at its own rate rather than in a series of trials determined by the experimenter procedures. With this method, Skinner carried out substantial experimental work on the effects of different schedules and rates of reinforcement on the rates of operant responses made by rats and pigeons. He achieved remarkable success in training animals to perform unexpected responses, and to emit large numbers of responses, and to demonstrate many empirical regularities at the purely behavioural level. This lent some credibility to his conceptual analysis.
Radical behaviorism and language:
As Skinner turned from experimental work to concentrate on the philosophical
underpinnings of a science of behavior, his attention naturally turned
to human language. His book Verbal Behavior (1957) laid out a vocabulary
and theory for functional analysis of verbal behavior. This was famously
attacked by the linguist Noam Chomsky, who presented arguments for the
bankruptcy of Skinner's approach in the domain of language and in general.
Skinner did not rebut the review, later saying that it was clear to him
that Chomsky hadn't read his book (though subsequent rebuttals have been
provided by Kenneth MacCorquodale and David Palmer, among others). Skinner's
supporters claim Chomsky's consideration of the approach was superficial
in several respects, but the appropriate subject for a study of language
was a major point of disagreement. Chomsky (like many linguists) emphasized
the structural properties of behavior, while Skinner emphasized its controlling
variables.
What was important for a behaviorist analysis of human behavior was not language acquisition so much as the interaction between language and overt behavior. In an essay republished in his 1969 book Contingencies of Reinforcement, Skinner took the view that humans could construct linguistic stimuli that would then acquire control over their behavior in the same way that external stimuli could. The possibility of such instructional control over behavior meant that contingencies of reinforcement would not always produce the same effects on human behavior as they reliably do in other animals. The focus of a radical behaviorist analysis of human behavior therefore shifted to an attempt to understand the interaction between instructional control and contingency control, and also to understand the behavioral processes that determine what instructions are constructed and what control they acquire over behavior. Important figures in this effort have been A. Charles Catania, C. Fergus Lowe, and Steven C. Hayes.
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