June 30, 2016

June 30, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fifteenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). The authors state quarely “From a folk psychological position, to attempt to reduce the causes of action to a small set of explanatory mechanisms, particularly a small set that has a large degree of overlap with explanations of the behavior of nonhuman animals, would deny the uniqueness of human existence and would not do justice to the complexity of human behavior.”

Presumably then it is only this different explanation, to which the folk psychologist seem to object. I think this is an oversimplification of what really happens. After all, it makes an enormous difference how this “small set of explanatory mechanism” is talked about. Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), “reduction” of “the causes of action”, will always be perceived as denying “the uniqueness of human existence.”

NVB never did any “justice to the complexity of human behavior” as it simply couldn’t. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), on the other hand, the speaker communicates his or her words with a tone of voice which pleases, invites, stimulates and validates the listener. In NVB, however,  the speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener as offending, hurting, threatening, attention-grabbing, coercing and oppressing.

The authors, who write like speakers, don’t account for how the speaker speaks. The listener or reader’s objection is not that “A simple set of explanatory principles would not do justice to the diversity and complexity of how people interact with the world, either alone or in groups.” How the speaker speaks and how the writer writes is at issue.

 

The NVB speaker/writer does not and cannot speak/write with the listener/reader. The NVB speaker/writer separates him or herself from the listener/reader. Separation of the speaker/writer and the listener/reader “would not do justice to the diversity and complexity of how people interact with the world, either alone or in groups.”