July 28, 2016

July 28, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

Here is my second response to “Verbal Behavior” by B.F. Skinner (1957). The book contains two “Forewords”; one by J. Michael and another by E. Vargas. This is my response to Vargas, who provided important historical context. According to him Skinner “was not optimistic about the reception of his analysis.” Skinner said in a letter to F.S. Keller “I feel hopeless about convincing the linguists.” 

This makes me think how very different I am from Skinner. I would never write or say that I am hopeless about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Also, I am not trying to convince anyone. Convincing someone is characteristic of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). We can only engage in SVB if we have nothing to prove. It doesn’t surprise me that Skinner would say this about what he considered to be his most important book. 

He wouldn’t have said this if he wasn’t trying to prove a point. To his friend Keller, however, he wrote “What I am doing is applying concepts I’ve worked out experimentally to this non-experimental (but Empirical) field.” This second statement doesn’t sound pessimistic at all. Skinner confidently states what he was doing. In SVB, communicators are supportive of each other and thus between Skinner and Keller there can be SVB. 

Linguists are not supportive of behaviorists and behaviorists aren’t supportive of linguists either and this lack of support sets the stage for NVB. Moreover, even behaviorists (or linguists) among themselves aren’t supportive of each other. Vargas writes that “Even behavioral scientists, including those calling themselves “behaviorists” have not been convinced of the value of his analysis of verbal behavior.”  

The preceding sentence contains again that word: “convinced.” We are not going to have SVB because we are convinced. As long as we are trying to convince each other or believe to be convinced, we will engage in NVB. Convincing each other or ourselves is not part of SVB, as there is agreement instead of struggle between the speaker and the listener. 

According to Vargas “It seems to have been difficult to have accepted or to have understood two fundamental matters: that verbal behavior is shaped and maintained by the same selection mechanisms that shape and maintain nonverbal behavior, and that, concurrently, verbal behavior is distinguished by certain characteristics that call for a separate analysis” (italics added). There is a great difference between accepting versus understanding these “two fundamental matters.” 

Acceptance will make understanding possible, but the absence of acceptance will make understanding impossible. Also, of course, it is possible to accept things without understanding it, but it is impossible to understand things without accepting it. The only exception to this is when there is to trust that the understanding will eventually come. 

If trust isn’t addressed first, learning isn’t possible and understanding cannot arise.  The real issue of verbal behavior is not about these “two fundamental matters”, but about the trusting situation which will give rise to understanding. In other words, SVB must replace NVB before we can learn anything. To the extent that this remains unacknowledged we keep making it seem as if what we say is more important than how we say it. 


Interestingly, these “two fundamental matters” explain this.

If “verbal behavior is shaped and maintained by the same selection mechanisms that shape and maintain nonverbal behavior” then the how ofwhat we say “is distinguished by certain characteristics [SVB &NVB] that call for a separate analysis.”  The two response classes SVB and NVB are a crucially important extension of Skinner’s verbal behavior. 

Vargas writes about the “selection by consequences and its mediation by a verbal community.” He states that “Language, verbal practices and the conditions that give them meaning, requires a culture—a verbal community. The verbal community distinguishes the human organism.” 

Another level of analysis than culture is needed to make sense of language. We learn from our parents, family members and from the members of the local community. Their way of interacting directly shapes our verbal behavior. If they engage in SVB, we learn to have SVB, but if they engage with us in NVB, we will learn to have NVB. 

Cultural differences, therefore, can be measured as a ratio of SVB and NVB in each verbal episode. American culture has a higher rate of NVB than Dutch culture. The SVB/NVB distinction will make our cultural differences tangible. Our verbal community instructs us to achieve and maintain particular rates of SVB and NVB. Thus, literacy involves much more than achieving “the prescribed standards of verbal behavior.” 

We would all benefit from low rates of SVB as behaving verbally requires the behavior of others. When everyone only thinks of oneself, the stage is set for NVB. Thus, the fact that “verbal behavior requires other behavior” always reserves a place for SVB albeit a small one. 

The less importance SVB has in any society, the more problems there will be among its people. “Skinner treats verbal behavior as a natural phenomenon, not mystical, but not reducible, either to the language of physics or even biology. ” Verbal behavior should also not be reduced to NVB, as NVB makes the concept of social mediation totally irrelevant. 

That the NVB speaker is presumably always allowed to coerce the listener indicates a hierarchical relationship in which verbal behavior will not be treated as a natural phenomenon as the speaker is able to force his superstition on others. Social mediation while speaking requires that the speaker and the listener are equals and that each of the communicators can be experienced as the speaker-as-own-listener. 

Vargas states that “Behavior, both nonverbal and verbal, is shaped and maintained by physical and biological worlds, but in addition to these domains of phenomena, a social world shapes and maintains behavior.” He follows in the footsteps of Skinner, who derived his theory of verbal behavior from his laboratory work with nonverbal animals. The “experimental relations discovered there” led to the interpretations, which formed the “basic assertions of the functional relations between verbal behavior and other behavioral and verbal events.” 

Skinner’s interpretive work couldn’t lead to the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). That distinction would only become apparent after one had failed to speak and wasn’t listened to. The SVB/NVB distinction could only emerge from struggle and after one had investigated and understood why one’s speech didn’t have the effect one wanted it to have and after one had desperately explored why one wasn’t able to listen and understand. 

Neither Skinner nor Vargas had to struggle with their speaking and listening behavior to the extent that they had to became aware of two ways of speaking that are experienced by the listener. Consequently, they mainly adhere to the speaker’s and not the listener’s point of view.

If Skinner or Vargas had really wanted to provide “experimental evidence for any of the propositions advanced” they would have had to explore live conversations in which the effects of the speaker on the listener could be verified. To explore the listener’s experience of the speaker would require the listener to become a speaker and the speaker to become a listener. In other words, this would require SVB. 

In NVB experimental evidence cannot be obtained as speakers and listeners are assigned to their roles due to hierarchical differences. It is evident that SVB and NVB “are directly shaped” by the organisms “contact with an immediate milieu,” but the experience of this process by the speaker and the listener is the only way in which one can gather evidence.


Such experimental evidence requires there is turn-taking. 

As communicators explore and describe the nature of speaking and listening while they are speaking and listening, they agree that SVB is useful, but NVB is useless communication. Furthermore, it is only during SVB that communicators find that they are building each other up, whereas in NVB they find that they are tearing each other down. These are significant differences which are easily identifiable. 

The aversiveness of the NVB speaker’s sound mainly elicits reflexive or respondent, negative emotional behavior in the listener, while the comforting, soothing sound of the SVB speaker’s voice evokes operant, novel, emotional behavior in the listener. Only of SVB we can say “A system, of contingent interdependent relations, arises from the interactions of actions and events as they dynamically and reciprocally affect each other over time.” NVB is not “a system, of contingent interdependent relations.” In NVB, there are no “interactions of actions and events” which over time “dynamically and reciprocally affect each other.” 

In NVB communicators behave verbally, but they don’t reciprocate each other. NVB is mistaken as communication, it is a one-way-street, which only goes from the speaker to the listener. In NVB there is no turn-taking in which the speaker can become the listener and the listener can become the speaker. 

“Behavior of one organism determines the behavior of another, but only because the other the second organism contacts directly the relation of the first organism’s behavior to other events.” Vargas gives an example of “direct” effects by describing behavior of a deer, who also hides and becomes quiet after observing that marmosets suddenly scatter and hide as a predator appears. Direct fearful responses map onto NVB. SVB deals with indirect peaceful responses as “the organism may also affect its world through the actions of other organism by virtue of membership in a given verbal community of organisms.“ 

Vargas goes on to describe that “membership in a community may also occur culturally.” He mentions “Amish, Buddhist, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim” and “Protestant” and adds “capitalists, communists, fascists” and “socialist”, but he completely ignores the important fact that in each of these verbal communities there are people who have SVB and NVB. Thus, within each verbal community there are two communities. 

Each of these communities consequates differently “how members behave verbally with respect to particular features of an immediate milieu or with respect to the properties of verbal utterances.” In NVB, “consequating behavior mediates” a different relationship “between what is said and what occurs” than in SVB. During NVB “what occurs”, what happens nonverbally, is of greater importance than “what is said”, what happens verbally. The emperor, who orders his slave “to pass the grapes” doesn’t need to speak and simply waves or points his hand.

Obeying demanding nonverbal behavior equals survival; someone who is inferior consequates gestures made by a superior. This is unlike verbal behavior, which “exerts no direct mechanical or chemical force on the physical properties of its immediate world.” Whether the other person is needed “to pass the grapes” or is forced “to pass the grapes” makes a big difference.  In both cases the slave will “pass the grapes”, but in SVB it will be because of verbal behavior, while in NVB it will be because of nonverbal behavior. 

The “four-term contingency” only makes sense in environment which is free of aversive stimulation in which SVB can occur. “Initial stimulating events (the presence of the grapes, an audience, etc.), the verbalizing action (for example, gesturing or speaking or writing “please pass the grapes”), the consequating action that mediates the verbalization (passing the grapes), and the consequence (obtaining the grapes).” The NVB, coercive, nonverbal emperor instills negative emotions in the slave, who is negatively reinforced for his or her nonverbal obedience. 

Vargas also gives an example of a child throwing a temper tantrum to illustrate how such behavior can easily become the manner in which the child “communicates his desires.” He states “The teacher and therapist deal constantly with and attempt to correct, these improperly shaped verbalizations.” I happen to be a teacher and a therapist and I know a thing or two about “Such “speech” – denoted “mands” by Skinner.” My whole point is that unscientific NVB, in which we constantly de-“mand” each other’s attention, consists of “improperly shaped verbalizations.”

Vargas writes that “the institutionalized effort to augment the control of the immediate world over what is said about it, so more effective control can ensue over that world, is now called “science”” (italics added). If we really are going to make a scientific, “institutionalized effort” over what we say about our world, so we can increase control over that world by our way of talking, we can’t keep on demanding with our biased, forceful NVB and we need to learn how to have SVB. 

I disagree with Vargas, who believes “Once verbal behavior begins to have effects on the physical and biological world about it through the behavior of others, it can have effects independent of that world. It becomes sufficient only to affect others.” It is not sufficient (for speakers) to “only to affect others” (listeners) as how we affect others determines whether our verbal behavior is sufficient or not. 

NVB is insufficient as “verbal actions” that act as coercive stimuli “in sequences of “verbalizations” independent of their relation to the world about them.” Echoing these verbalizations “easily leads to superstitious behavior, as actions to verbal utterances become confounded with the events and objects to which the utterances refer.” The philosophical implication of SVB is not the verbalizer’s proper tacting, but his or her ability to properly affect and regulate the body of the mediator with the sound of his or her voice. Modern mutually reinforcing behavioral control will replace our outdated NVB.

Vargas provides another example to illustrate that “The controls over a verbal action define its meaning.” He explains the multiple meanings of the statement “Polly wants some spinach.” Each of his explanations concerns some speaker. The fact that Vargas, but also Skinner, took a speaker’s perspective, isn’t altered “if a young child named “Polly” says it, if Polly’s mother says it to Polly’s father who is sitting next to Polly at the dinner table, if an actor reads it from a script while addressing another actor, if a parrot mimics it, or a reader reads it.” 

This strict speaker’s perspective also continues in the explanation “The young child named Polly may have been hungry when she stated that she wanted more spinach.” Regardless of whether she “may have been feeding it surreptitiously to her dog both for the dog’s sake and to please her parents,” in each case it was the speaker, who said “Polly wants some spinach.” Vargas only pays lip-service to the listener’s perspective when he writes “Listeners and readers tend to infer these controls by observing the circumstances (or learning of these circumstances) under which a person says or writes what is said or written and by taking into account what they know of the person.” 

Even when the listener is mentioned, it is to observe rather than to listen to what the almighty superior speaker is saying. This reference to visual (nonverbal) stimuli (observing the circumstances) instead of auditory (verbal) stimuli seems justified as the “Listeners and readers” are simultaneously addressed. This mixing up of “Listeners and readers” weakens any reference to the listener’s “control over a verbal action.” A listener’s perspective is only mentioned as an afterthought, but, even then, the speaker is still considered to be more important than the listener. “And the speaker attempts to help the listener understand by indicating the controls under which he makes his statement.” Speakers who engage in NVB are not helping the listener. 

Dear Reader,

Dear Reader, here is the second part of my response to Vargas' Foreword to Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957).I teach that the listener can help the speaker by letting him or her know how his or her voice is affecting him or her. If the listeners experience the speaker’s voice as an aversive stimulus, as is the case of NVB, the speaker can explain things until he or she is blue, but his or her “attempts to help the listener understand” are simply not working. 

Observing is not the same as listening. Speakers get verbally fixated if they make more verbal statements to explain a point. “It is going to rain” changes the meaning for the listener if the speaker says, “ I heard on the radio that it is going to rain”, “I just looked out the door and it is going to rain”, “ A few drops hit the window so  it is going to rain”, “Let’s have a picnic since the radio said that there is no change that it is going to rain.” It is not only the speaker who controls the verbal action. May be the speaker can ask how the listener is feeling?

“Making the listener behave more effectively by coming in contact with the circumstances that control the speaker’s behavior” might actually require that the speaker stops talking and invites the listener to do some of the talking. Only in SVB “The speaker is reinforced by the more accurate behavior on the listener’s part.” In NVB it is always the attention-demanding speaker who raises the issue of “more accurate behavior on the listener’s part,” but in SVB “accurate behavior on the listener’s part” is a function of the listener’s ability to speak.

It is only in NVB that the lack of listening keeps being brought up as the listener is neither allowed to and often not even supposed to speak. The NVB speaker may be able to force the listener to listen to him or to her and he or she may be able to coerce the listener to do as he or she says, but he or she will always demand “more accurate behavior on the listener’s part” and never feel positively reinforced. “The hunt for these controlling variables is actively pursued in the attempt to become a more effective partner in the verbal transaction.” Those who engage in SVB are not trying to “become a more effective partner.”

During SVB the controlling variables of our vocal verbal behavior are apparent and there is no need to hunt for them. Moreover, in SVB, the whole idea of becoming a more effective partner doesn’t even arise. All such problem-perpetuating talk is part and parcel of NVB, in which the speaker presumably is more important than the listener. 

It was the NVB community who “set in motion efforts to contact the contingencies controlling the verbalizer’s behavior – whether spoken, written or gestured.” The SVB community, on the other hand, never put any effort in contacting the contingencies controlling the verbalizer’s behavior. It effortlessly discovered the contingencies controlling the listener’s behavior. Discovery of the speaker-as-own-listener informs the speaker in ways which the listener who is not speaker is incapable of. In other words, the “more accurate behavior of the listener’s part” refers to the listener who is also simultaneously the speaker.

  

Vargas gets very close, but not close enough, as he reads Skinner and “comes under control of what impelled the writer to write.”  He writes “In deconstructing a text the reader understands its meaning only by understanding the controls over his or her own reading behavior, and where they overlap with those of the writer.” But, reading, of course, is not the same as listening and writing is not the same as speaking. 

It is not a matter of understanding, but of experiencing the controls over our own listening behavior, which will make us listeners realize where they overlap with those of the speaker. Attunement, rather than understanding, will join our speaking and listening behavior. 

Vargas, with his speaker’s perspective, states that “every act of listening” is “an act of speaking,” but every act of speaking is not an act of listening during NVB. This is only the case in SVB. Thus, the “Future analysis of Skinner’s system of verbal relations” depends on the development of the SVB community. The NVB community has hindered exploration of verbal behavior and has maintained its many paradoxes. 

“The overemphasized, even artificial, distinction between the localities called “speaker” and “listener,” is a product of NVB, which is based on the separation of the speaker and the listener by the speaker. Vargas seems to refer to SVB and NVB when he states “At certain points of the flow of verbal behavior [SVB], certain controls are in place and others are not [NVB], and these controls may shift place with others, or in the sequence of verbal actions such controls may exert their effects at certain points of the sequence and not others.”

Only in SVB speakers and listeners can experience and therefore wholeheartedly agree that “it makes little difference for the verbal relations involved whether verbal behavior is taking place between two loci or within one.” Close reading of someone who has extensively studied Verbal Behavior lays bare why radical behaviorists and non-behaviorists alike, “continually trip” over “paradoxes and difficulties.” 

To the extent that they accepted NVB as simply “a heritage” from their verbal community, behaviorists were unable to promote “operant phenomena”. My writing is to enhance with SVB the dissemination of radical behaviorism and behaviorology. I totally agree “the analysis of any further work in verbal behavior will rest on the foundation” that Skinner provides in Verbal Behavior.  The distinction between SVB and NVB was driven by the selection mechanisms that operate in my life.

The more I came to know about the SVB/NVB distinction the more my SVB has been enhanced and the better I have become capable of teaching this to others. Behaviorism and behaviorology have enhanced my knowledge of this distinction and have made me successful in my work as a teacher and as therapist.  I am grateful to the behaviorist community and look forward to talking with behaviorists and with behaviorologists about my extension of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.