March 12, 2016

March 12, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In “Humble Behaviorism” Neuringer (1991) writes “Yet, behaviorists are criticized for reducing al meaningful psychological phenomena so a single class, that of behavior.” What this means is that behaviorists always only want to talk with non-behaviorists about the terms they are using. This verbal fixation is typical for Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The negative responses and rejection which is so often received by behaviorists, is not because of what they say, but because of how they say it. This comes out in the way they speak as well as in the way they write. The implied criticism, that behaviorists may even have less Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) than non-behaviorists, is most likely true. After all, behaviorists are better scientists than those who are still stuck with the explanatory fictions which hide in the verbal garb of “meaningful psychological phenomena.” Of course, behaviorists feel superior to non-behaviorists; only the science of human behavior focuses on “an actively changing organism under control of prior and consequent environmental events.” This superiority, which would be accepted as the reality in SVB, is another indication of NVB, in which all the communicators, that is, the speakers and listeners as well as the writers and the readers, are and remain hierarchically separated. The NVB speaker’s tone of voice is experienced by the listener as an aversive stimulus from which he or she wants to move away.