December 7, 2015

December 7, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my seventh response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (O’Donohue et al., 1998). Like other behaviorists, these authors reiterate that behaviorism, like Darwinism, “removes humans from a special place in the hierarchy of living organisms.” However, they have no understanding about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). They don’t realize that a certain way of talking, NVB, maintains our “special place in the hierarchy of living organism.” In NVB the speaker and the listener are set apart by hierarchical differences. More precisely, hierarchical differences prevent the joining of our speaking and listening behaviors.

Hierarchical differences cannot be maintained when our speaking and listening behaviors are joined. Surely, “Humans are taken to be similar to other animals in many important ways: As a species we are subject to the selection of physical attributes through evolution and contingencies of survival, and as individuals our behaviors are subject to selection by the consequences those behaviors have in our ontogenetic evolution (Skinner, 1981).” Our problem is not that we cannot see ourselves as “similar to other animals”, but that we don’t hear that we are similar and that our similarity is apparent in the simple fact that our verbal behavior is selected by its consequences.

We have high rates of NVB as NVB is reinforced. If SVB was reinforced we would have high rates of SVB. “Selective contingencies” that explain these response classes are clear: in threatening environments we engage in NVB and in safe environments we engage in SVB. We will see ourselves as “similar to other animals” once we hear we are similar to each other as humans, but this will only happen as we engage in SVB. SVB only occurs due to a contingency of reinforcement, but cannot occur with a contingency of punishment. SVB is possible due to the absence of aversive stimulation. In SVB, the speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener-other-than-the-speaker as well as the speaker-as-own-listener as an appetitive stimulus. The contingency which sets the stage for SVB includes and expresses the environment that is within the speaker’s skin, but in NVB this crucial part of the environment is excluded, not expressed and not listened to.