August 3, 2016

August 3, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fifth response to “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). In his paper Day lays out the basic tenets of radical behaviorism before he explains how they relate to and can be reconciled with phenomenology. After “focal interest in the control of behavior” Day describes “the focal awareness that any scientist is himself a behaving organism.” He states that the scientist him or herself can and must be also his or her own object of study. 

“Science at heart is either the behavior of scientists and the artifacts of such activity and scientific behavior is in turn presumably controlled by much the same kind of variables as those which cover any other aspect of complex human behavior.” However, only if the behavioral scientist monitors his or her own responses will he or she be effective. 

Not every radical behaviorist is as aware of his own verbal behavior as Willard Day, who writes “The radical behaviorists faces the fact that the ultimate achievement of his scientific activities is for the most part either verbal behavior or a new set of acquired behaviors which hopefully enable him to control nature more effectively.” As long as the radical behaviorist doesn’t make verbal behavior his or her focal interest, he or she will be unable to decrease NVB and increase SVB, which will enable him or her to control nature more effectively. 

Although Skinner considered his book Verbal Behavior (1957) his most important publication, radical behaviorists for the most part have not capitalized on their own verbal behavior, as they continue to downplay the importance of their way of talking as a means of teaching and acquiring new behaviors to control nature more effectively. 

During Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) the speaker explores and often realizes that he or she is saying something he or she has never said before. During Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), on the other hand, the speaker mechanically repeats what he or already she has said many times before and isn’t aware of it. Thus, in only NVB we repeat “the psychological distinctions that are modeled after linguistic practices uncritically acquired simply in learning to speak the lay vocabulary.”

In SVB can we talk and think about what we talk about and how we talk about it. Only in SVB will we be “conscious of the fact that much psychological talk reflects stereotyped conceptions both of the nature of the knowing process and of the relation between our knowledge of things and the structure of whatever it is that is taken to be the object of psychological investigation.” I emphasize that Day refers to how we talk about things. As long as we have been able to continue with our NVB, we were unable to discuss and explore our way of talking. 

Since we didn’t engage in SVB a whole lot, we weren’t able to trace our verbal behavior to our current and to our previous environments. It is fascinating to read Day’s description of the radical behaviorist as he, of course, describes himself. Reinforced for the refined verbal ability that is necessary to control nature more effectively, Day, like Skinner, unknowingly has recognized and avoided NVB and implemented SVB. 

Day was “suspicious of primitive animism, which embodies nature with man-like powers, strengths and forces, as well as of facile determinism, which views the aim of research as isolating the fundamental elements of nature which are thought of as existing in in some kind of mechanical interrelationship.” He was not into such superficialities. 

As the behaviorist is often misunderstood and misrepresented “His resistance to such hidden epistemology leads at times to an obstinate refusal to think in terms of a particular common-sense theory of what it is to have knowledge about one or another subject matter.” Only NVB stimulates such “obstinate refusal” also known as counter-control.