My Eight Response to Fraley

Dear Reader,

This is my eight response to “On Verbal Behavior: The First of Four Parts” (2004) by Lawrence E. Fraley. What happens before you talk is referred to as “Antecedent Control of Verbal Behavior.” Although it may seem that way, it is not ‘you’ who talks, but it is your body which responds in the only way it is capable of responding. “Verbal behavior, being operant, is evoked by stimuli in the environment of the behaving organism. Consider two aspects of an instance of operant conditioning: (a) the momentary structure of the body that is being conditioned—a structure that, at any given moment, is determined by the prior operant conditioning of that body along with a variety of other physiological factors, and (b) the structure of the environment of that body, structured as it is at that same moment. Whatever verbal behavior then occurs to that body is simply the natural and inevitable reaction of that bodily structure to that environmental structure as energy from the latter impinges on the former.” All of this knowledge is needed to acknowledge that you can’t help that you are mainly engaged in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and seldom in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). To have SVB, the structure of your body must be changed. This can only be accomplished if the structure of the environment of your body will bring about such change. The stimulus in the environment, which brings about physiological change, is the sound of our voice. SVB sounds different than NVB.

Only a speaker with SVB can evoke and reinforce SVB in you, but a NVB speaker will elicit NVB in you as well. “Failure to predict accurately an impending behavior is not evidence that nature is capricious, but rather that the sets of variables that respectively define the body and its environment at that moment have not been subject to a full accounting.” We have NEVER paid close attention to how we ourselves sound while we speak, so, it is not at all that surprising that we are not good at predicting accurately the outcome of our so-called conversations. In NVB we don’t really predict, but force the outcome!!! There is nothing scientific about NVB, except that the outcome of our blunt, coercive speech accounts for the tremendous conflict and chaos we see everywhere in our world. Even Fraley isn’t willing to explore the possibility of SVB with me.

Fraley’s refusal to talk with me (or anyone who engages in SVB), is based on one thing only: like everyone else, who doesn’t want to engage in SVB, he wants to continue with NVB, in other words, SVB and NVB are mutually exclusive. “Failure to render accurate predictions measures the ineffectiveness of the behavior of the person who predicts, not lapses in the functional aspect of nature. Given an instance of verbal behavior, we can always ask meaningfully what controlled it. The question pertains to its antecedent (i.e., evocative) environmental stimuli. If our inquiry is informed by a philosophy of naturalism, we anticipate that a valid and reliable answer is possible in terms of measurable variables, and we tend to look for those behavior–controlling antecedent stimuli.” Fraley, may proudly call himself a behaviorologist, but that doesn’t make any difference in his behavior, as he, like other behaviorists, isn’t interested in looking for “those behavior-controlling antecedent stimuli” while talking, while the rubber hits the road. Instead of honestly and scientifically admitting his own inaccurate predictions during a SVB conversation, he prefers to only write about it!

As a self-taught behaviorists, I know about SVB and since I am ALWAYS willing to explore the great importance of the SVB/NVB distinction during a conversation, I feel little affinity with coward behaviorists, who basically back out of the conversation, by pretending to know more about behavior than others. Another often heard excuse for not talking with me is that I haven’t done any research and that I don’t have data. I teach college level psychology courses, with a strong and consistent emphasis on behaviorism. My students come from all walks of life and I don’t have any requirements for talking with anyone. I can and I do talk with everyone and I find it sad, pedantic and arrogant that the vast majority of behaviorists refuse to talk with me.

Are you reading what I am writing? Do you in any way recognize I am talking with Fraley in my writing? He writes “In the past, under similar search conditions, we have so often discovered functional antecedent controls in proportion to the effort expended to discover them that our behavior to reveal such environmental evocatives for a specified behavior now tends to continue unabated (or, as it may be stated in terms of popular fictional constructs, our current expectation that precise controls exist to be discovered is much strengthened).” It is simply not true that the discovery of “functional antecedent controls” continues “unabated”, as we don’t have genuine interaction in which that would be the case. We are never going to write and read our way into SVB. The (over) emphasis in science (not only behavioral science) on reading and writing, that is, on visual stimuli, underestimates the great importance of auditory stimuli in the antecedent control of our verbal behavior. Our gigantic problems with talking and listening will continue as long as we keep engaging in forceful NVB. We can all get very philosophical and academic about it, but the fact of life is that we either engage in SVB or in NVB.