July 20, 2016

July 20, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my thirty-fifth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). “To study human behavior, the radical behaviorist asserts that all behavior is caused by environmental variables.” However, many people are bound to read the invalidation of their private speech in such a statement. This statement may appear to “deny so much of what is seemingly uniquely human” and seems to reject outright “what people value”, as it aligns with Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the speaker separates him or herself from the listener and in which our public speech excludes our private speech.

The joining of the speaker and the listener and the inclusion of our private speech into our public speech can only occur during Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Although most people are unaware of the SVB/NVB distinction, they have a sense of how they are affected by previous conversations.  It is so difficult to figure out how we are affected by public speech as NVB doesn’t allow us to link our private speech to our public speech. We have all been frustrated about our inability to identify the “environmental variables” of which “our inner world” is a function, as NVB has continued and increased that struggle.

It is only in SVB that our struggle is absent. Unknowingly, Skinner was talking about SVB. He said “the fact that behavior is determined gives humans the opportunity to reciprocally affect their environment.” Such reciprocal effects do only occur during SVB. In NVB, on the other hand, the speaker talks at instead of with the listener. Therefore, NVB is a uni-directional process, but SVB is a bi-directional process.

I agree with Skinner that “Humans can arrange contingencies that will further the species and the values that members may hold, such as freedom and personal dignity”, but I disagree with “To accept the task is to change, not people, but rather the world in which they live" (1975, p. 48). I think our way of talking must be changed from NVB to SVB. The world in which we live is primarily the world of our private speech and the only way to change that world is by changing our pubic speech.