June 23, 2016

June 23, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my eight response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). Many times in the history of science new findings weren’t accepted as people were mired by their old beliefs. Our technological society is based on science, yet most of us have no clue how this all came about and how science contradicts all our ideas about ourselves and about reality. The gap between what we know and what we believe is so big that it is creating many problems.

It makes no sense to write about the “Epistemological Barriers to Behaviorism” without addressing the fact that superstition has always hindered each scientific development. Behaviorism is not special in that sense. Although epistemological barriers have been and continue to be a stand in the way, they could never prevent development of science.

I think it is a misunderstanding to assume an “epistemological obstacle to the Copernican system is to be found in its displacement of the earth as the center of the universe.” The fact that people couldn’t directly perceive the earth revolving around the sun and around its own axis was never really the problem. The real problem was and has always been how we have talked with each other.

What has always been the problem is that educated speakers, produce Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and, in one way or another “challenge” the uneducated “listener’s “views of a single, unmoving and unchanging Heaven.” In NVB the sound of the speaker’s voice is perceived by the listener as an aversive stimulus. We have yet to acknowledge that this contingency has never been and is never going to be conducive to learning. 

As long as the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) of the speaker was lacking, he or she was unable to provide an appetitive learning- contingency to the listener. I think that listeners will readily accept the “Copernican, heliocentric account” from a skilled SVB speaker. They always did.