December 31, 2015

December 31, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

Here is my second response to “The Concept of Reinforcement: Explanatory or Descriptive” by Tonneau (2008). The paper doesn’t interest me that much as it is too difficult to understand. If one “phenomenon is properly explained by describing another”, then by describing Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the so-called communication in which we dominate, intimidate, manipulate, exploit and alienate each other, we have explained Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), in which none of these negative things happen.

If Tonneau had understood SVB he would not have written such a tedious paper. This goes for many papers. Most of them were written due to the absence of SVB. Most papers by behaviorists were motivated by an unrecognized longing for SVB, but since they don’t know it is possible, they keep on writing about it. 

Presence of SVB involves absence of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and presence of NVB means absence of SVB. The SVB/NVB distinction can be called circular. Mentalists call behaviorists circular and behaviorists accuse mentalists of being circular. The married couple in the therapy room is constantly arguing; he wants her to listen to him and she wants him to listen to her, but neither one of them is listening to him or herself.   

Most interesting sentence of the paper is “The behaviorist and the mentalist will need to find better indictments against each other than that of circular reasoning.” In NVB we have some kind of “indictments against each other”, but in SVB we simply don’t. I propose for behaviorists and mentalists to have SVB together. 

We are distancing, dissociating from the reality when things are only written and no longer said. Tonneau’s final conclusion just doesn’t cut it. “When encountering a new psychological term, do not ask whether it is descriptive or explanatory. Rather ask, “Descriptive of what?” and “Explanatory with respect to what?” 

SVB and NVB are two easily identifiable and verifiable universal response classes which until now have remained unanalyzed. Why? What SVB describes and explains has remained unknown because our written descriptions and explanations are never the same as our spoken descriptions and explanations. If we would talk with each other, we would find that SVB and NVB really exist. NVB doesn’t prevent SVB, but occurs under entirely different circumstances. Neither the description nor the explanation is important, what matters is whether we are communicating and having SVB or not.