July 25, 2016

 July 25, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my fortieth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). I remember having an animal lab in my first and only class on learning during my undergraduate study in Psychology at California State University Chico. My knowledge base about radical behaviorism was zero. I couldn't understand what we were doing squeezed into this lab. Looking back I figure many students must have felt the same way. It was hard to grasp these difficult and new behaviorist concepts (such as negative and positive reinforcement and punishment) in a pigeon lab which barely fit the large size of people in our class. Although the teacher was nice and I passed with a B, I wasn't able to learn much. 

I think that linking clinical topics to animal topics (instead of the other way around), could prove to be “a fruitful path to have students actively study a behavioral perspective.” Skinner developed his operant science due to his empirical work with animals, but radical behaviorists have ignored the problems involved in how people talk with each other for way too long. 

The author’s suggestion that “with cognitive psychology there are fewer barriers, and what barriers do exist are more easily overcome,” has proven to be totally wrong. SVB is a matter of having no barriers at all, but in NVB all the communicators actively maintain their barriers. The issue is not, as these authors suggest, if we are having more or fewer barriers. 

We make a big mistake if we believe that addressing “epistemological obstacles” is “unconventional” and therefore better than conventionally addressing the worth of radical behaviorism as a “psychological framework”, by providing evidence that “can be marshalled in its favor or disfavor.” SVB teaches us that there is nothing unconventional about the barriers we experience while we communicate; NVB is our only barrier.