July 8, 2016

July 8, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my twenty-third response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). It is not the “number of these barriers” which “may prevent students from ever becoming “used to it,””(to radical behaviorism), but rather, it is the absence of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and the high rates of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) in teaching, which induces negative affect and prevents learning.

One only needs to read some of the blatant “misrepresentations” of radical behaviorism by Chomsky to get a sense of the visceral repulsion he must have felt when he first heard about it. I can attest to that as I once had a brief phone conversation with him. I was naïve to think that he might be interested in learning about listening to ourselves while we speak, what I now call Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB).

I had written Chomsky an email which apparently peaked his interest and his secretary had scheduled a time for us to talk. As I didn’t know anything at that time about radical behaviorism, this was not part of our conversation. However, Chomsky apparently already knew that I was a behaviorist. Our ‘conversation’ lasted less than one minute. 

Since he had shown interest in my view about how the sound of the speaker affects the listener, I felt no hesitation to bring his attention to the sound of his dreadful, antagonizing, NVB-voice. He immediately said he wasn’t going to talk about that and then he hung up on me. It is only in retrospect I came to interpret Chomsky’s bullyish reaction as solid proof that I am indeed a behaviorist. He instantly realized that talking about the sound of his voice required him to be open with me.