December 6, 2015

December 6, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my sixth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (O’Donohue et al., 1998). Skinner wrote “We have not advanced more rapidly to the methods and instruments needed in the study of behavior precisely because of the diverting preoccupation with a supposed or real inner life” (Skinner, 1975, p.46). 

Although this is true, I want to restate it: “We have not advanced more rapidly to the methods and instruments needed in the study of behavior precisely because” we are used to a Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) way of talking. Our NVB doesn’t and can’t accurately express the behavior of the “organism as a whole.” We need to have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) to be able to do that. Moreover, the switch from NVB to SVB doesn’t depend on the use of behavioristic terminology. 

Since the shift from NVB to SVB, like any other change of behavior, is determined by environmental variables, it is explained by radical behaviorism. Stated differently, radical behaviorism makes more sense when there is SVB, but it didn’t and couldn’t make sense due to NVB. 

Behaviorists emphasize (but due to NVB often ‘beat a dead horse’) the student must “look to the environment for the origins of behavior.” I say the student must listen to the environment; he or she must listen to the speaker, especially when he or she is him or herself the speaker. Only in SVB the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. Only the SVB speaker is capable of accurately expressing that part of the environment to which only he or she has access. 

By listening to him or herself while he or she speaks, the speaker-as-own-listener can and will be expressed. Without this special focus on the speaker-as-own-listener, that part of the environment which is within the speaker’s own skin cannot be accurately expressed. Without listening to ourselves while we speak, we will dissociate from the environment within our own skin and become disembodied communicators.

Naturally, the neural behavior of the speaker was and continues to be changed by the different environments he or she is in. Thus, the speaker was conditioned by previous conversations to either have more instances of SVB or NVB. Our tenacious “preoccupation with a supposed or real inner life” is because we did not accurately express how we were affected by our current and our previous environments. Once we have more SVB, our body changes and with that our environment changes.