Verbal behavior has this kind of independent status when it is in transmission between speaker and listener—for example, when it is the “information” passing over a telephone wire or between writer and reader in the form of a text. Until fairly recently, linguistics and literary criticism confined themselves almost exclusively to the analyses of written records. If these had any meaning, it was the meaning for the reader, since the circumstances under which the behavior had been produced by the writer had been forgotten, if they were ever known. The availability of verbal behavior in this apparently objective form has caused a great deal of trouble. By dividing such records into words and sentences without regard to the conditions under which the behavior was emitted, we neglect the meaning for the speaker or writer, and almost half the field of verbal behavior therefore escapes attention. Worse still, bits of recorded speech are moved about to compose new “sentences,” which are then analyzed for their truth or falsity (in terms of their effect on a reader or listener), although they were never generated by a speaker. Both logician and linguist tend to create new sentences in this way, which they then treat as if they were the records of emitted verbal behavior. If we take the sentence “The sun is a star” and put the word “not” in the proper place, we Read more at location 1336
