June 5, 2016

June 5, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

I received the latest edition of Operants, the online magazine of the B.F. Skinner Foundation. On the first page, the president, Julie Vargas, raises the question: what do you do if your usual procedures aren’t working?

Let’s face it, our spoken communication isn’t working. Behaviorism and behaviorology are not well-accepted and are most of the time not even part of the conversation. In spite of the empirical evidence people are not open to the facts about the science of human behavior. 

Those who are informed about behaviorism primarily talk among themselves. Actually, that is not true either, there is not enough real conversation going on. There is an almost sectarian quality to those few who are familiar with the workings of operant conditioning. 

Sadly, even behaviorists or behaviorologists have mainly Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) instead of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) among themselves and with others. This distinction matters as it depicts the difference between unscientific and scientific ways of talking.

Only in writing have behaviorists and behaviorologists adhered to their science, but not in their speaking. Julie Vargas, who answers her own question and writes a president’s column, brings her private speech into her public speech. Interestingly, by writing about it, she describes what needs to happen to make SVB possible. 

In NVB our private speech is excluded from our public speech. Thus, behaviorists and behaviorologists are just as stuck as everybody else with the false notion of a behavior-causing self. Once behaviorists and behaviorologists explore the SVB/NVB distinction, they will have to admit to this crucially important fact.

Unless we change the way we talk, we cannot extinguish our pre-scientific inner self. As even behaviorists haven’t changed their own way of talking, they weren’t able to change other people their way of talking. Only to the extent that they were able to change their own way of talking were they capable and have they been capable of changing other people their way of talking.