Talk:Mand (psychology)

Yeah, sorry this page is being moved from the disambiguation page and the entry on Verbal Behavior. Your bot is too dang quick! Michaelrayw2 (talk) 23:46, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Etymology

What is the etymology of this word? Equinox (talk) 12:11, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm writing this relying only on my memory of reading Skinner's book "Verbal Behavior" and my memory of writing about this work in my Master's thesis of 1974, called "B.F. Skinner's Concept of Mind." It is my clear recollection that Skinner explained his coinage of this term by referring to the related meanings of existing words such as "demand" and "command". In French, which Skinner knew, the word "demander" does not have the same forceful implications as "demand" in English, and Skinner included requests and suggestions within the category of mands.

A verbal utterance categorized as a mand has the property, or the function, of (usually) influencing someone in the presence of the speaker to provide the speaker with the thing named by the mand. When a mand is nonverbal, as when it is a gesture or signal, it still clearly specifies the thing or action that is being demanded. It is said that a mand specifies or names the reinforcement that the speaker wants someone to provide. Therefor many mands, and especially the mands learned by young children, are nouns. The example often cited is of a child saying "Milk" to a relevant adult, such that the adult then gives milk to the child. But a mand may be complex, as in utterances such as "Bring in the groceries." It does not have to be simply a noun -- it can be a noun clause, or a whole sentence, but it is my impression that a mand will usually be some grammatical structure which can be treated as a nominalization. Exceptions to this appear to occur in the case of direct orders or commands, such as "Stop". Linguistically, a verb used as an order is usually analysed as a truncated form of a sentence such as "You stop", and the whole sentence is treated as a nominalization. But, one could also claim that "Stop" is the name of the desired behavior. Or, this may be a situation where Skinner's categories cannot be made to fit a traditional grammatical analysis.

My emphasis on the nominal quality of mands may be in error, but that is how I remember it. In "Verbal Behaviour", Skinner intended to provide an alternative to traditional grammar, with a focus on how each kind of utterance was related to outcomes which the speaker would find reinforcing. That is what he was referring to when he used the phrase "functional analysis" as he was interested is how each kind of utterance functioned to provide reinforcement to the speaker.

Skinner's terminology did not simply mirror the familiar categories of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on. He did not address the linguistic phenomenon of "form classes" or "parts of speech." His system has points on contiguity with the traditional concepts of grammar, but it can not be simply translated into traditional grammatical language.

My 1974 Master's thesis is quite brief, and is now available on Research Gate (https://www.researchgate.net), where it could be searched by its title or by my name. Janice Vian, Ph.D. (talk) 04:34, 22 September 2017 (UTC)