February 11, 2015

February 11, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is a third response to “B.F. Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior: a chronicle” (2007) by E.A. Vargas, J.S. Vargas & T.J. Knapp. Before he wrote what he considered to be his most important book “Verbal Behavior” (1957), Skinner had a table discussion about “the merits of behaviorism” with the famous mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. This authoritarian man conceded that “behaviorism might deal effectively with all the aspects of behavior with the exception of one, language.” It makes no sense that, on the one hand, behaviorism “might deal effectively with all aspects of behavior”, but, on the other, wouldn’t be able to deal with verbal behavior. Such a statement is as obviously wrong as asserting that behaviorism might account for chess playing and singing, but not for riding a bicycle. 

The special place historically given to language has prevented us from understanding it as not in any way significantly different from other behavior. Moreover, arrogant people like Whitehead, engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). He verbally attacked Skinner by presuming that he couldn’t account for the negatively-loaded nonsense-sentence “No black scorpion is falling on this table.” There was definitely an explanation for his domineering, bombastic, intimidating way of communicating: Skinner’s radical behaviorism exposed and demolished his fictitious explanations! 

This writer’s extension of Skinner’s work with Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) involves the exploration of situational variables that set the stage for optimal communication and analysis of NVB, that is, how we maintain superstitions, ineffective, hierarchical and problematic communication. In SVB we can say and understand more in a shorter time than in NVB.

Skinner’s linguistic labor involved primarily writing. Although he spoke a lot, his emphasis was not, like this writer is, on speaking. While working on his book, he wrote “I think the subject had better be experimental.  I couldn’t say enough on language in an hour to get the point of view across” (Skinner, March 15, 1935). Skinner here states that he needs more time to say what he would like to say. The lack of time he is referring to is characteristic for NVB, which was, and still is, our dominant way of communicating. In SVB, however, we have all the time in the world, we give each other time and we are able to take time to speak. Although this writer recognizes that Skinner was aware of these constrains, it was not Skinner’s goal to do anything about it.  He had other 'operant' fish to fry.

The experimental exploration of the SVB/NVB distinction involves speaking and listening. This writer agrees with Skinner that reading and writing are not sufficient in “getting the point across.” What Skinner’s statement addresses is what this writer calls verbal fixation. In NVB we talk mainly about what we say and not about how we say it. We get too wordy and have no sense of our body in the here and now while we speak. 

In SVB, by contrast, in which we embody our sound, we enhance the positive experiences of our body by the way in which we speak. Instead of getting stressed, frustrated, fearful, tense, angered and irritated, as we always do in NVB, our sound, which is in the here and now, makes us more aware of our relaxed body from which it emerges. What makes SVB possible is: listening to our sound while we speak. It makes us attentive and capable of understanding each other. 

When Skinner states “the subject had better be experimental” what he is indicating is more attention needs to go to nonverbal phenomena, to what affects us directly. This is what happens in SVB. By paying attention to how we sound, we become attuned. Skinner writes “Underneath what seems like a lot of complexity (which is really only novelty) there lies an immense simplification”(Skinner, June 21, 1935). Then he invented “a rather elaborate apparatus for experiments on humans“, the “Verbal Summator” (Skinner, September 25, 1935). With this apparatus participants would listen to meaningless, nonverbal utterances until they thought they understood what was being said. 

Each speaker is, of course, him or herself a Verbal Summator, who is only understood to the extent that the listener is capable of making sense of his or her sounds. It is easy to recognize the importance of nonverbal aspects of spoken communication when we compare English and Chinese, because they sound so different. However, within the English and the Chinese verbal community there are two other communities: the SVB and the NVB community, who also speak two entirely different languages.

Although we may verbally speak the same language, this prevents us from recognizing that nonverbally, that is, in how we sound, we often are not attuned and incapable of understanding each other. As long as our indirect verbal behavior doesn’t accurately express our direct nonverbal behavior, we remain entangled in our own and in each other’s verbal behavior. Only in SVB we can disentangle, because in SVB there is alignment between our verbal and nonverbal expression. In NVB such alignment isn’t possible. 

Skinner made the hard-headed “strategic decision” to ground “his highly theoretical and sure-to be controversial analysis” of verbal behavior in his basic operant research. He openly admitted in a letter to his friend Fred Keller “I’ve had a long run and tiring run of experiments” (Skinner, December 6, 1936).  This writer has done the opposite of Skinner. He refused for years to write about SVB and NVB and insisted we should speak about it. What he now writes about it is born out of his interactions.


His decision to write about it grew out of his slowly evolving understanding of radical behaviorism and more recently, behaviorology. There really is no need for experimental validation of SVB and NVB, because these response classes are already accounted for. What is needed is writing which makes speaking more likely. If this writing has that result then we can verify the importance of the SVB/NVB distinction. Darwin’s theory of natural selection doesn't depend on approval by creationists; the “analysis of verbal behavior rests on the foundations of analysis of operant behavior.”