December 10, 2015

December 10, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my tenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (O’Donohue et al., 1998). Skinner (1974) stated “A behavioristic analysis does not question the practical usefulness of reports of the inner world that is felt and introspectively observed. They are clues (1) to past behavior and the conditions affecting it, (2) to current behavior and the conditions affecting it, and (3) to conditions related to future behavior.” If you bring your private speech into your public speech, you can learn a lot about the past conditions, the current conditions and the future conditions which affect how you talk and listen.

In Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) the inclusion of your private speech into your public speech is impossible, and, consequently, you are stuck with your private speech (read mental illness) and you end up thinking that you yourself have caused it. To read about these past and current conditions is not the same as to talk about them and one cannot replace the other. Most likely, reading about it creates the impression as if you have talked about it. This writing doesn't claim to dispel that illusion. 

The fact that your behavior is determined by environmental variables doesn’t take away anything from the richness of your experience, to the contrary, it only adds to it. Knowing that your behavior is caused by the environment doesn’t deny what is “uniquely human”, but “it gives humans the opportunity to reciprocally effect the environment.” This means that in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) all the communicators recognize the fact that they are each other’s environment and that, therefore, they either cause each other’s positive or negative way of talking. 

SVB is made possible by the verifiable fact that we mutually reinforce each other. In NVB, on the other hand, the speaker aversively controls the behavior of the listener and the speaker causes the negative changes in the listener, in the environment, which cannot be verified as there is no feed-back. In NVB, the listener, the speaker’s environment, presumably doesn’t cause any change in the speaker. This is factually wrong. 

Although the NVB speaker, who due to a shared history of NVB is allowed to dominate the listener, is reinforced by this listener for his or her forceful way of talking, this NVB speaker is changed by this reinforcing audience. The listener who reinforces the NVB speaker doesn’t really know, but always experiences that he or she is being dominated and therefore also always produces some kind of counter-control. Likewise, the NVB speaker also doesn’t really know, but always experiences that he or she is dominating the listener, while he or she is always also affected by the counter-control exerted by the listener. This only becomes clear in SVB.