B - CATANIA,C.(2002) - The Verbal Behavior of Place

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1EUROPEANJOURNAL OF BEHAVIORANALYSIS NUMBER1 (SUMMER2002)2002,11111, 1 - 5

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Although I might first have met Ullin Placebriefly at a meeting in Europe, my first substan-

tial contact with him was when he undertook anextensive trip to visit laboratories and scholarsconcerned with behavior analysis around theworld. He spent some time with me as he camethrough Maryland, and we met on many subse-quent occasions at international meetings con-cerned with behavior analysis and related disci-plines. In these later travels he was typically ac-companied by his wife, Peggy Place. During asabbatical year I spent in North Wales not long

after his visit (1986-1987) I saw him more fre-quently, and he was a marvelous tour guide forme and my wife during a trip to his native York-shire, where his wit and his breadth of interestsranged from neolithic sites to medieval cathedralsto contemporary highlights like the veterinarypractice of Alf Whyte (vet to the sheep that UllinPlace had once owned, and more likely to berecognized by his pseudonym, James Herriot ofAll Creatures Great and Small). But behavior

analysts know Ullin Place best, of course, throughhis abiding interest in the functions and originsof verbal behavior, as informed by his solidgrounding in philosophy and psychology.

In October 1998, I was asked to review apaper on language origins that Ullin Place had

The verbal behavior of Ullin T. Place

A. Charles CataniaUniversity of Maryland Baltimore County, USA

Ullin Place died on 2 January 2000. His contributions to philosophy and to behavior analysis have earnedhim an enduring place in our new century. This memorial uses text from his correspondence to illustrate thescope of his lifes work and the perseverance and courage with which he faced its end.

submitted to the electronic journal, Psycoloquy(Place, 2000). My review was critical, especially

on the grounds of differences between Placestreatment of verbal terms such asmandand tactand B. F. Skinners (1957) own treatments of thoseterms (some other issues involved the role ofequivalence classes in language and individual ver-sus group selection in evolution). I did know,however, that Ullin Place was thoroughly famil-iar with Skinners book, at one time having pro-duced what was virtually a concordance ofSkinners technical terminology and noting, for

example, that not a single sentence in Verbalbehavior that included the term tact involved averbal response to a past but now absent stimu-lus or event.

The editor ofPsycoloquy, Stevan Harnad, ac-cepted the manuscript conditional upon revision.Four reviews accompanied the correspondenceand I was identified as the author of mine. Iwrote an email note to Ullin Place in December1998, in which I included a few comments about

his manuscript that I hoped would be helpful,but many months elapsed without a reply andwith no sign of revision of his manuscript. Ihad become concerned that he had taken mycomments personally but I should have knownbetter. During 1999, Harnad had received othersubmissions concerned with language origins forPsycoloquy and began to plan to have them allappear at about the same time. He had beenattempting to contact Ullin Place about his manu-

script and had learned that he had been ill, butalso that he had managed some recent travel,which gave the appearance that his health was

This article is based on a paper presented in a MemorialSymposium for Ullin T. Place at the Fourth European Meetingfor the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, Amiens, France,

July 2000. Other presentations from that symposium together

with invited papers dealing with Ullin Places work are avail-able in Behavior and Philosophy. The author is in the Departmentof Psychology, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, Maryland 21250 USA. Email:[email protected]


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mproving. Upon receiving that information (anda new email address), I send another message toUllin Place and got his reply in early November1999 (he also circulated copies of his reply to anumber of other colleagues). It began as fol-ows:

Dear Charlie:

.Im afraid the information relayed byStevan about my state of health is bothout of date and much more sanguine thanis justified by the facts. These are as fol-lows:

1. Last December on my return from

the International Congress of Behavior-ism and the Sciences of Behavior in SevilleI was diagnosed as suffering from smallcell fast-growing carcinoma of the lungwhich as you probably know is incurable.Without treatment it has a life-expectancyof 6 to 9 months. With treatment 12 to18 months.

2. Between December and March I

underwent 4 chemotherapy treatments.The first of these showed some improve-ment. The second and third showed nofurther improvement, while after thefourth there was a deterioration. Conse-quently chemotherapy on the primary tu-mour was abandoned in favor of radio-therapy. This proved remarkably success-ful. Within a month of the completionof the course, by the end of June, all trace

of the primary tumour on X-ray had vir-tually disappeared, my state of health assubjectively assessed appeared to besteadily improving and I was led to be-lieve that, provided I could avoid the de-velopment of metastases, I might yetprove to be one of those very rare casesin which remission from the disease be-comes relatively permanent.

3. But it was not to be. By early Sep-tember I began to develop chest painswhich were making sleeping difficult. I

went to my GP only to discover whilewaiting in his surgery that I had developeda swollen gland at the base of the neck. Iwas rapidly sent off to the South Cleve-land Hospital in Middlesbrough for a fur-ther course of radiotherapy to deal with

this. I was hoping that curing it wouldalso deal with the chest pains; but in this Iwas again disappointed. It appears thatthey were caused by a recurrence of theoriginal tumour and a spread of the dis-ease to the inside wall of the chest - a muchmore intractable problem.

4. Within a week of completing thesecond course of radiotherapy in

Middlesbrough, I was back in hospital, thistime the Friarage in Northallerton, with adiagnosis of pneumonia, fluid on the lung(pleurisy?) and an irregular heartbeat. Thiswas treated by antibiotics, draining the leftlung and thereafter sealing the left lungcavity by sticking it to the inside chest wallwith talcum powder of all things!

5. This seems to have done the trick,

at least for the time being and I was al-lowed home from hospital this Wednes-day afternoon the third of November.

The pneumonia, pleurisy and presumablythe irregular heartbeat are now under con-trol and my consultant thinks that I shouldnow survive for another six months orso; but almost certainly no longer than that.I still get pains in the chest, hiccoughing,and occasional attacks of vomiting and,

as a side effect of the drugs aimed at con-trolling these other symptoms, severe con-stipation. The drugs I am having to taketo control these symptoms, principallymorphine to control the pain, leave merather more drowsy than I would wish;but all in all I still seem capable of pro-ductive intellectual work during my morelucid intervals.

Following this description of his medical sta-tus and prospects, he turned to an outline of thestatus of his work. As a summary of the range


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of issues with which he had been concernedthroughout his career, it could hardly be improvedupon. But we can only guess at what we havemissed when we contemplate what he wouldhave done had more time remained to him.

As you can imagine, this leaves me in thesituation of having a large backlog of aca-demic work, most of it written since I fi-nally retired in 1986, which is either un-published, published in obscure locationswhere it is unlikely to reach target audi-ences, in need of revision in the light ofsubsequent work both by others and bymyself and, above all, lacking the coordi-nation within the corpus that only publi-

cation in book form can achieve. Therange of topics covered is very large, rang-ing as it does from the mind-body prob-lem in both its philosophical and neurop-sychological aspects, conceptual analysis asthe empirical investigation of contingency-shaped linguistic conventions,connectionism and the conceptualist theoryof universals, the picture theory of mean-ing and the correspondence theory of

truth, argument structure and sense- andtruth-preserving sentence transformations,the causal counterfactual, dispositions andtheir role in causation, T-intenTionality, asthe mark of the dispositional, S-intenSionality as the mark of thequotational, three levels of contingency-shaped learning, the neuro-synaptic, theconditioned reflex and the molar/ oper-ant, language learning and the win-shift/

fail-stay contingency (the contingency analy-sis of conversation and other pragmaticinteraction), contingency analysis as appliedto the semantics of both narrative textsand conversational utterances, and all thisbefore getting on to the problem of lan-guage evolution.

In each of these areas I am planning a littlebook in conjunction with one or two col-

laborators setting out as briefly and suc-cinctly as possible my position on the is-sue in question, based wherever possible

on existing published and unpublished ar-ticles. To give you an idea of the kind ofthing that is envisaged, let me quote thebookplan of the first of these, that on themind-body problem, the one closest tocompletion as things stand at present.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE ZOM-BIE-WITHIN

The Metaphysical Foundations, Concep-tual Status and Empirical Elaboration ofa Scientific HypothesisbyULLIN THOMAS PLACEwith editorial assistance fromMARCO NANI and LUCA

MALATESTI

BOOK PLAN

Chapter 1. Conceptual Analysis and theConcept of Mind

Chapter 2. From mystical experience tobiological consciousness: apilgrims progress? (1997)*

Chapter 3. The concept of heed (1954)

Chapter 4. Is consciousness a brain pro-cess? (1956)

Chapter 5. Two concepts of conscious-ness: the biological/ privateand the linguistic/social (1992)

Chapter 6. We needed the analytic-syn-thetic distinction to formulatemind-brain identity then: westill do (1997)*

Chapter 7. The two-factor theory of the

mind-brain relation (2000)Chapter 8. Consciousness and the zom-

bie-within: a functional analy-sis of the blindsight evidence(2000)

Chapter 9. The causal potency of qualia:its nature and its source(1999)*

* Date of completion. Otherwise dates

are dates of original publication.


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In view of this it is not surprising that myPsycoloquy article has landed up at theback of a long line. I am getting ratherworried about this, particularly as my lifeexpectancy on the most sanguine forecastdoes not allow me, even working full time

on this alone, the time to complete the textof my paper on The role of the hand,submit to Psycoloquy, read the commen-taries and reply to them.

He proposed that he and I collaborate onrevising hisPsycoloquymanuscript, but he had al-ready done some revision. In his most recentdraft of his manuscript he had resolved my mis-givings about the differences between his and

Skinners treatments of the technical vocabularyof verbal behavior with just the two words Ihave italicized here:

I rely on a somewhat deviant version ofSkinners (1938; 1953) behaviour analysisin which behaviour in general and linguis-tic/verbal behaviour in particular is con-strued as a part learned, part unlearnedadaptation to what Skinner calls the three-

term contingency. Language behaviouris unique in that, when fully developed, itinvolves two different levels of adapta-tion to the three-term contingency.

My role in the revision of his manuscript con-sisted mainly of converting it into an appropri-ate format for electronic publication inPsycoloquy.Ullin Place did not live to see it appear.

At the end of November 1999, I received

two other extensive messages from Ullin Place.Both were copies to me and to a number ofother colleagues of his email correspondence withMarco Nani. One message consisted of a draftof a substantial manuscript on mind-brain iden-tity theory that he was coauthoring with Nani.The other was a reply to Nanis suggestions aboutother collaborative work. It included the fol-owing (cf. the list of topics in the earlier emailcorrespondence above):

Your idea sounds most exciting and shouldundoubtedly be pursued. On the other

hand, as far as I am concerned, it has beenovertaken by events. Since I last wrote, Ihave abandoned my original idea whichwas to have three collections of my pub-lished and unpublished papers publishedafter my death. Instead I am now pro-

posing to write a series of 17 little paper-backs under the title U. T. Place: Essaysin Radical Empiricism which I will try tocomplete as far as possible myself in themonths that are left to me. This serieswould not compete with your proposal,since it would focus exclusively on settingout my current thinking on all the majortopics I have been engaged in from themind-body problem, causation and dis-

positions, intentionality, connectionism andthe conceptualist theory of universals,learning theory, conceptual analysis, thepicture theory of meaning and variousaspects of language. The 17 titles are asfollows:

SERIESU.T. PLACE: ESSAYS IN RADICALEMPIRICISM

VOLUMES

1. CONSCIOUSNESS AND THEZOMBIE-WITHIN

2. CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS: THEEMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONOF LINGUISTIC CONVEN-

TION3. CONNECTIONISM AND THE

CONCEPTUALIST THEORY OFUNIVERSALS

4. THE PICTURE THEORY OFMEANING AND THE CORRE-SPONDENCE THEORY OF

TRUTH5. ARGUMENT STRUCTURE:

SENTENCE TRANSFORMA-TIONS THAT PRESERVE SENSEREFERENCE AND TRUTH

VALUE6. THE CAUSAL COUNTERFAC-

TUAL: METAPHYSICAL AND


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NEUROPSYCHOLOGICALASPECTS

7. DISPOSITIONS AND CAUSA-TION

8. T-INTENTIONALITY AS THEMARK OF THE DISPOSITION-

AL9. S-INTENSIONALITY AS THE

MARK OF THE QUOTATION-AL: THE CASE FOR BEHAVIOR-ISM

10. THE TOWER OF BABEL: ASPECULATIVE RECONSTRUC-

TION OF THE ORIGINS OFPHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

11. PROBLEM SOLVING AND

CONTINGENCY-SHAPING:CONSCIOUSNESS AND LAN-GUAGE

12. THREE LEVELS OF CONTIN-GENCY-SHAPED LEARNING:

THE NEUROSYNAPTIC, THEREFLEX AND THE MOLAR/OPERANT

13. LANGUAGE LEARNING ANDTHE WIN-SHIFT/ FAIL-STAY

CONTINGENCY IN THEANALYSIS OF PRAGMATICINTERACTION

14. CONTINGENCY ANALYSIS INTHE SEMANTICS OF NARRA-TIVE TEXTS AND CONVERSA-TIONAL SEQUENCES

15. EMOTION, MOOD AND MO-TIVATION

16. ETHICS AS A METHOD OF

BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION17. THE ROLE OF THE HAND IN

THE EVOLUTION OF LAN-GUAGE (PSYCOLOQUY PAPER)

Since this series will focus exclusively onpresenting my current thinking on thesetopics with little or no reference to its an-tecedents and background in my ownwork or that of others, it shouldnt con-

flict with your proposals in any way.

Ullin Place then included the contents for thefirst volume, essentially as it had appeared in theearlier email message quoted above. He added:

But thats not all. Because all the constitu-ent chapters except the first are reproduced

from existing published and unpublishedwork all of which is on my hard disk as acomputer file, it has been a simple matterto actually put the book together as amanuscript ready for submission to a pub-lisher. Apart from the index which willtake a little longer, I should have reachedthis stage by the middle of this comingweek. My first book under my own solename in 75 years!

That was the last message I received fromUllin Place. Early in the new year I received thefollowing from his wife, copied to me and to anumber of other colleagues:

I very much regret to inform you that UllinPlace died on Sunday 2nd January 2000.

He wished that you should be informed.

References

Place, U. T. (2000, 23 Jan). The role of the handin the evolution of language. Psycoloquy(psyc.00.11.007.language-gesture.1.place, 1281 lines).

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Scienceand human behavior.New York: Macmillan.

Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York:Appleton-Century-Crofts.

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B - CATANIA,C.(2002) - The Verbal Behavior of Place