July 4, 2016

July 4, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my nineteenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). What do the authors mean when they write that “cognitive psychology does not require the student to fundamentally challenge his or her original beliefs regarding the causal status of mental events?” Students of cognitive psychology don’t have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the kind of conversation in which it can be explored and verified that behavior is not caused by mental events.

Like other behaviors, mental events too are caused by environmental variables. There is no need to “fundamentally challenge” the student’s “original beliefs regarding the causal status of mental events.” What is needed is to stop Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the interaction in which the speaker challenges and thus aversively affects the listener.

In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) we get clear on the fact that behavior is a function of the environment. In other words, behavior is a function of other communicators, who are our environment during our spoken communication. That “cognitive psychology presents no barriers to” folk psychology is beside the point. The real issue is that NVB has never been viewed as the mechanism which is maintaining “this framework.”

According to the SVB/NVB distinction “the key process” we must focus on is not information processing, but spoken communication, which occurs not inside, but outside of the organism. There is no difference between our private and our public speech as to how they are caused. What cognitivists call “human intelligence” is merely verbal behavior, which occurs only under the circumstances in which it can occur. 

It is a sad thing we still believe that intelligence originates inside a person as this prevents us from experiencing the conversation and relationship of which it is a function. Of course, intelligence, as part of our verbal behavior, is a social construct and we need to have SVB to verify this.  In SVB the speaker speaks and the listener speaks with the speaker.