ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews and examines some of the major historical events that have led up to the existing controversies. It describes an objective basis for identifying illocutionary acts within a controllable social-experimental setting and demonstrates how repertoires of illocutionary acts are, as mands, affected by verbal reinforcement contingencies. The chapter offers a more thorough theoretical analysis of the interaction of reinforcement and pragmatic principles in the double agent research paradigm and illustrates the value of these principles in the interpretation and prediction of data. By the mid-1960s, basic research on the Skinnerian explanation of verbal behaviour had diminished substantially as operant conditioning researchers shifted their efforts to more applied problems. The reconceptualization of the double agent studies added consideration of the operation of the mand or illocutionary act as an important variable within the verbal conditioning paradigm.
