March 6, 2016

March 6, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my sixth response to “Tutorial on Stimulus Control, Part 1” (1995) by Dinsmoor. He states “Because it operated on the surrounding environment to produce the reinforcing consequence, he [Skinner] called this form operant” [added]. The Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB)of the speaker operate on the environment, on the listener, very differently.

The SVB speaker’s voice has an appetitive effect on the listener, but the NVB speaker’s voice has an aversive effect on the listener. Surely, SVB speakers control listener behavior with positive reinforcement, while the NVB speakers punish listing behavior. Especially in during our conversations we should realize that “stimulus control is always present.” Moreover, “all behavior is under the exquisite detailed control of surrounding stimuli, some impinging from outside the organism, others arising from within its boundaries.” 

As we have not yet acknowledged that SVB public, overt speech will ALWAYS give rise to SVB private, covert speech and NVB public, overt speech will ALWAYS give rise to NVB covert speech, “it is not always obvious in the way we talk and write about the subject” that SVB or NVB “does not occur as random stings of unrelated responses but in organized sequences, called chains, in which each successive response produces the stimuli, internal and external, that determine what comes next.” 

As “control by antecedent stimuli would be much easier to identify than control by the organism’s history of reinforcement”, since “one form of control lies in the present, the other in the past”, the usefulness of the SVB and NVB chains should be apparent to the reader.