August 4, 2014

August 4, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

Although verbal behavior, as Skinner has said, is reinforced through the mediation of other people and is thus defined by how it is conditioned, shaped and maintained postcedently, that is, by its consequences, it is equally necessary for behaviorologists to pay attention to form, because traditional terms lack the scientific precision and often entail more than is appropriate for the analysis of a verbal episode. When behaviorologists use the term “verbalizer” instead of speaker and “mediator” instead of listener, this enhances their ability to be considerate about the body that manifests the verbal behavior and the body that is affected by it. Without attention to responses of the body there is nothing to observe. 

The inferred internal agent, which a majority of people believes causes their behavior, is not all of a sudden gone because of the use of different terminology. Although a naturalistic perspective can only be made clear with words that maintain focus on the subject matter, something more is needed. To purge mankind permanently of the ubiquitous superstition that there is a soul or a self that causes our individual’s behavior, requires a new way of communicating, which stresses how verbal and nonverbal behavior-changing consequences of the verbalizer are mediated by the mediator, even if he or she is alone.  

When attempts are made to focus the verbalizer’s attention on the body that manifests easily detectable muscle-driven motor behaviors and mini-scaled neural activity between nerve cells,  which are only assessable by means of special measurement instruments, it is easy to get trapped in the narrowing verbal rules of scientific logic. Moreover, common resistance against these scientific verbal rules may very well be a function of nonverbal secular or non-secular experiences, which are not acknowledged as such. In other words, due to verbal fixation, even behaviorologists fail to see that scientific endeavors can make them biased towards the verbal realm of verbal behavior. 

The focus on the body, intended by words such as "verbalizer" and "mediator", is a verbal attempt to hone in on the nonverbal. When people reject the knowledge that there is no soul or self, what they object to is that their nonverbal experience, which is articulated by their way of behaving verbally, is invalidated. They feel that something which was preciously reinforcing to them was taken away. Since scientists as well as non-scientists are equally conditioned to be more verbal than nonverbal, not much ground has been gained in educating people that the earth is round and that we don’t need to fear that we will fall off. There is a common fear that we lose our language when we become more nonverbal. However, the exact opposite is true: the more we focus on the nonverbal, the better our verbal behavior will be.