The Descriptivists

Franz Boas an anthropologist set a direction for American linguistics which turned out to be enormously fruitful and which was never seriously disputed until Noam Chomsky (Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Chomsky attended an experimental elementary school in which he was encouraged to develop his own interests and talents through self-directed learning. When he was 10 years old, he wrote an editorial for his school newspaper lamenting the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe. His research then and during the next few years was thorough enough to serve decades later as the basis of Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship (1969), Chomsky's critical review of a study of the period by the historian Gabriel Jackson). He is the founder of the relativistic, culture-centred school of American anthropology that became dominant in the 20th century.  Leonard Bloomfield, 1887-1949. Leonard Bloomfield was born in Chicago to immigrants to the United States from Austria-Hungary. He entered Harvard in 1903, finishing his degree in 3 years. At 19, with his Harvard A.B. in hand, he began graduate work in German studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he served as a teaching assistant. Here he met the linguist Eduard Prokosch, then a young instructor, and almost immediately determined to become a linguist. After two years of work at Wisconsin, he went to the University of Chicago to continue his studies in comparative-historical linguistics and Germanics. He also studied Sanskrit; his uncle was Maurice Bloomfield, a well-known professor of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics, from whom he possibly derived some of his interest.

Boas born in Westphalia began his academic career as a student of physics and geography, and it was through the latter subject that he came to anthropology. Language came to seem especially important to Boas. During his tenure at Columbia University in New York City (1899–1942), he developed one of the foremost departments of anthropology in the United States. Boas was a specialist in North American Indian cultures and languages, but he was, in addition, the organizer of a profession and the great teacher of a number of scientists who developed anthropology in the United States.

In 1914, while a young instructor in Urbana-Champaign, Bloomfield published An Introduction to the Study of Language, a scholarly yet popular book that went through many reprints.

Albert Paul Weiss (1879-1931), an early behaviorist and the most important early voice expressing concern about the need to distinguish between bodily movements and accomplishments, presenting what we here call "the incommensurability problem."

Born in Steingrund, Schlesien, Germany in 1879, Albert P. Weiss (1879-1931) was brought to America as an infant. His parents, German Lutherans, settled in St. Louis where his father worked as an architect. Little else is known about either his family or his early years beyond a report that he came from a happy and affectionate home whose members participated actively in the German/American cultural life of St. Louis. Indeed, as a young man, Weiss himself belonged to a club that met to discuss philosophy. Perhaps this early philosophical interest was one factor that led to his dissatisfaction with an engraving career and decision, at a relatively late age (approximately 27), to enroll in the University of Missouri.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna.  His father was a lawyer, and his mother a strong and intelligent housewife.  His upbringing was old-fashioned and hard-working. Burrhus was an active, out-going boy who loved the outdoors and building things, and actually enjoyed school.  His life was not without its tragedies, however.  In particular, his brother died at the age of 16 of a cerebral aneurysm.

Burrhus received his BA in English from Hamilton College in upstate New York.  He didn’t fit in very well, not enjoying the fraternity parties or the football games.  He wrote for school paper, including articles critical of the school, the faculty, and even Phi Beta Kappa!  To top it off, he was an atheist -- in a school that required daily chapel attendance.

He wanted to be a writer and did try, sending off poetry and short stories.  When he graduated, he built a study in his parents’ attic to concentrate, but it just wasn’t working for him. Ultimately, he resigned himself to writing newspaper articles on labor problems, and lived for a while in Greenwich Village in New York City as a “bohemian.”  After some traveling, he decided to go back to school, this time at Harvard.  He got his masters in psychology in 1930 and his doctorate in 1931, and stayed there to do research until 1936.

Also in that year, he moved to Minneapolis to teach at the University of Minnesota.  There he met and soon married Yvonne Blue.  They had two daughters, the second of which became famous as the first infant to be raised in one of Skinner’s inventions, the air crib.  Although it was nothing more than a combination crib and playpen with glass sides and air conditioning, it looked too much like keeping a baby in an aquarium to catch on. In 1945, he became the chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University.  In 1948, he was invited to come to Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his life.  He was a very active man, doing research and guiding hundreds of doctoral candidates as well as writing many books.  While not successful as a writer of fiction and poetry, he became one of our best psychology writers, including the book Walden II, which is a fictional account of a community run by his behaviorist principles.

August 18, 1990, B. F. Skinner died of leukemia after becoming perhaps the most celebrated psychologist since Sigmund Freud.