July 24, 2016

July 24, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my thirty-ninth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). These authors put the horse behind the wagon. “Once these barriers are explicated we believe that there are three strategies that the radical behaviorist can undertake to help the student react to them.” Teachers must “explicate” these “barriers”, but how are they supposed to do that? If they engage in  Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), they will focus on “strategies that the radical behaviorist can undertake to help the student react to them.”

Whether we acknowledge this or not, NVB has resulted into where radical behaviorism and mankind is today. If radical behaviorists are first going to address the importance Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), there is no need for “strategies” to “help students react to them.”

If radical behaviorists would teach SVB, they would kill two birds with one stone; 1) we need to talk with each other to address and solve our problems and 2) we need science to lodge us out of “commonsense antecedent beliefs,” which are insufficient to answer “all our questions about a subject.”  Instead of engaging “in scientific behavior because our current account is in some ways unsatisfactory”, behaviorists should emphasize that we must have SVB, as NVB, our “current account,” is by any scientific standard totally unacceptable.

The suggestions made by these authors haven’t worked. Instead of wasting time over whether or not there is free will or “evidence for determinism,” it is much more effective to teach students about SVB and NVB. Broader acceptance of radical behaviorism will readily be  accomplished by SVB, which concerns the students more directly than animal experiments. “Having students conduct experiments” not with animals, but with humans and with the SVB/NVB distinction “puts them in contact with the reinforcing properties of prediction and control.”