June 26, 2016

June 26, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my eleventh response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). “The extent to which a student initially finds an approach acceptable or problematic” is determined by how the teacher speaks. If a teacher has Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the student will find his or her approach acceptable, but if he or she has Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the student will find his or her approach problematic.

“Folk psychology as an explanatory system is not likely to be eliminated in the near future (Horgan & Woodward, 1990; Richards, 1997; Churchland (1991)” since people know damn well when they are being spoken at or when they are being spoken with. The fact that everyone who is introduced to the SVB/NVB distinction agrees with it shows there is validity in folk psychology which we have yet to acknowledge.

The authors underestimate the power of folk psychology as a “framework of concepts” that is “roughly adequate to the demands of everyday life.” If it was only “roughly adequate” people wouldn’t hang on to it. Why are mental events “thought to play the most important causal roles in human action?” It is because of how we talk, that is, it is because we mostly keep having NVB.

With NVB “there is little reason to move beyond the inner life of the person as the source of explanations for his or her behavior”, only SVB gives us the reason to do this. In SVB we include our private speech again into our public speech. What explains the tenacity of folk psychology, in spite of all the scientific evidence? 

Why is it that “Folk psychology takes these internal causes to be so important, ubiquitous, proximate, and powerful that there is little emphasis upon environmental or external causes of human behavior?” Assumed “internal causes” refer to private speech, which, in NVB is kept out of public speech. Thus, folk psychology could continue because of the separation of our private speech from public speech.