January 15, 2015

January 15, 2015

Written by the locus Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writer started reading Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner (1957). He had attempted to read it two times before, but began reading what others had written about it, because he found that easier. Something has changed in his approach. Before, he used to be much more prone to stick with only one book or article. In spite of the fact that he is a slow reader, he would finish that one article or book and feel a sense of stress coming from feeling that intend, which often was not achieved. Now he is much more at ease reading multiple articles and books at once and moving from one to another.

The foreword of VB by E.A. Vargas was so intriguing that this writer has already read three of his papers. Vargas explains the difference between how the behavior of organisms can affect their world directly, non-verbally, that is, without words, and indirectly, verbally, that is, mediated by others. Drawing on the continuity of behavior, he describes our similarity to nonhuman animals, who affect their world “through the actions of other organisms by virtue of membership in a given community of organism.” While observing the behaviors of birds and fish, this writer always believed that humans too are members of a community. Unlike other organisms, religious, political and social communities are essentially verbal communities. Within each society there is a dominant culture and there are sub-cultures, which reinforce or punish, that is, which socially construct the verbal behaviors of their members.

What people say to each other within these verbal communities only makes sense to them, because they decide “the forms of verbal actions that are effective and maintains their meaning of events.” Moreover, “whether a speech episode occurs” within these communities “depends on the probability of any of the nested relationships occurring.” People are inclined to say something if there is someone who listens to them. However, if the verbal community to which one belongs doesn’t provide that possibility, a verbalizer may try out another community or even create new one. What may be “improperly shaped verbalizations” in one community, may be considered proper in another. 

The verbal community in which the tendency toward reconciliation is seen as a weakness, mainly reinforces those verbal behaviors which fall in the category this author calls Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). By contrast, only in the verbal community which views reconciliation as a virtue, a moral value, will the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) response class be reinforced. The child, who gets what it wants by throwing a temper tantrum, may still behave verbally. There is functionally no difference between the angry child “who communicates his desires” and the adult, who gets what he or she wants, with his or her threatening, intimidating and de-manding NVB, which sure enough results into “a reinforcer as exacting as the speaker desires.” 

“Exact tacting”, supposedly, is only necessary in certain verbal communities. However, believers in God also need medical doctors to cure their diseases and pilgrims traveling to Mecca in airplanes use I-phones, the products of modern science. The verbal behavior of scientists “requires a verbal community across time and space shaping successive generations of verbal behavior.” The “fine tuning” of “the detail and inclusiveness of such verbal behavior” has led to very specialized, institutionalized ways of communicating, which couldn't hone in on the crucially important distinction between SVB and NVB. NVB is an "institutionalized" way of talking, but SVB cannot be institutionalized.

In addition to all our sciences, there are verbal communities which are involved in “criminal inquiry that investigates the causes of illegal actions”, there are those that focus on “the literary criticism that attempts to tie down the reasons the reader behaves as she does to a text” and then there also the behaviorological communities which focus on verbal behavior, on “the autoclitic” which “evolved through making the listener behavior more effectively by coming into contract with the circumstances that control the speaker’s verbal behavior.” Many have known that “the speaker is reinforced by more accurate behavior on the listener’s part”, but neither the radical behaviorists nor the behaviorologists have “become a more effective partner in the verbal transaction”, because nobody has yet paid any attention to the “controlling circumstances”, which are at work while we speak with one another. 

Although “any number of verbal communities” of writers, producers, actors, poets, painters, dancers, comedians, musicians and sculptors have “set in motion efforts to contact the contingencies controlling the verbalizer’s behavior – whether spoken, written or gestured”, due to science, our attention has moved away more and more from our spoken to written verbal behavior and, as a consequence, we often unknowingly confuse the latter with the former. 

Also while reading this text “the reader understands its meaning only by understanding the controls over his or her own reading behavior, and where these overlap with those of the writer.” If the reader gets what this writer means by SVB and NVB, it will become apparent that “the point of where controls intersect” is “an artificial one based on locality that ignores behavioral function.” In other words, to really understand this writing, the reader would have to behave in similar ways as this writer behaved under the conditions that controlled his writing behavior. However, although the reader may fully understand from this writing, that “every act of reading then is to that extent and act of writing; every act of listening an act of speaking”, it is still a  different matter when this understanding is reiterated while we are talking. 

Such understanding could only be achieved by SVB, not NVB. Skinner, as a humanist, unknowingly referred to SVB. This writer fully agrees with Vargas, who wrote “the analysis must move from a portrayal of parties behaving with respect to each other – a writer and a reader for example – to the description of properties of certain classes of behavioral phenomena in relation to each other.” He even wants to go a step further. Before we move away from “a writer and a reader”, which we certainly should, we must first have the conversation in which can move away from a speaker and a listener. Only then will we be able to make sense of SVB and NVB, a “description of properties of certain behavioral phenomena in relation to each other.” We must explore the “system of verbal relations” of our vocal verbal behavior.

Skinner’s verbal behavior has affected Vargas’ verbal behavior, which in turn affected this writer’s verbal responses. However, this writer has only heard Skinner speak, but he has never heard Vargas speak. Moreover, like any other reader, this writer has only read Vargas’s description of a written and not of a spoken “system of verbal relations”, which “would begin to root out paradoxes and difficulties over which people continually trip, such as the overemphasized, even artificial, distinction between the localities called “speaker” and “listener”.” When “at certain points of the flow of verbal behavior, certain controls are in place”, Vargas, like Skinner, seems to be describing SVB. if these controls shift “and exert their effects at certain points of the sequence and not at others”, he refers to NVB. 


The “abstract principle” that “it makes little difference for the verbal relations involved whether verbal behavior is taking place between two loci or within one” is not true for how most communicators experience their daily conversation. In most interactions it matters a great deal who is the assigned speaker and who is the assigned listener. Stated differently, most of our interaction is NVB. Only during SVB it doesn’t matter “whether verbal behavior is taking place between two loci or one.” 


The oneness experienced by communicators in SVB is tangible and evident by what they say and how they say it. Any shift of control instantly determines the separation again between the speaker and the listener, which defines NVB. “It would help analyze the system of verbal relations when at one locus, since we would not have to ask such questions as how a speaker acting as his own listener reinforces himself (even if that were possible) or mediates his own behavior.” 


The analysis Vargas describes cannot be achieved by writing about it. The speaker acting as his own listener requires that the speaker brings out his private speech into his public speech. By listening to the sound of his self talk, the speaker can trace back his private speech to the public speech from which it originated. Once this is done SVB occurs. Once the SVB/NVB distinction has been explored it will be evident that SVB is based on the oneness of the speaker and the listener, brought about by the speaker as his own listener. Furthermore, NVB, like the terms “speaker” and “listener”, are “simply the necessary components of a heritage from [our] verbal community.”