April 28, 2015

April 28, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

I had a wonderful long sleep and I feel rested and relaxed. Yesterday, I helped planting beets at Baba’s vegetable farm and felt appreciated. I went to bed early. This added to sound sleep, which I don’t have often these days. In my dream, I was a young man and there was this beautiful nameless girl, who I liked me and let me kiss her. We laughed and had fun and when I woke up, I remembered I was once in love with that girl and got into an embarrassing situation because of it. 

She lived in a building where I sometimes hung out. Her mother had put an empty milk bottle outside the door and underneath it was some money to pay the milkman for a new bottle of milk. I knew I would get caught if I took that money, but I stole it anyway. The door opened as I ran down the stairs and her mother called my name. She demanded I give her back the money. There was no escape. She would have gone to my parent’s house if I wouldn’t have given it back. I walked back up the stairs and gave the money to her and caught a glimpse of her pretty daughter, who was laughing at me. While her mother was admonishing me and telling me she was going to talk with my parents, I felt ashamed, but her daughter was smiling at me. After the news had reached my parents and I had been punished by my father, I was made to go back there and apologize. The girl was again smiling at me from behind her mother.

I was reminded of this girl in this dream. I had never thought of her again  until last night. Although I knew that I liked that girl, I never asked her or contacted her and avoided going to that dreadful place of humiliation. When I had stolen the milk money, it never occurred to me it had something to do with that girl. I remember clearly I was going to get caught, but I felt I had to do it. In the dream, we were reunited and we tenderly embraced and kissed each other. It took me a long time to figure out something forbidden and shameful had joined with attraction. The girl saw and knew my emotion. After that my relationship with women was shaped by their ability to see, acknowledge and reinforce my feelings. 

In my dream, I asked the girl if I should brush my teeth before kissing her? She laughed and asked me why? I said, because I want to have a fresh breath when I kiss you. I had had some coffee and felt it made me smell bad. We didn’t have sex. We did what young people do before they have sex: we hugged and caressed each other and we looked into each other’s eyes. When I woke up this morning, I felt a sense of satisfaction and relief, as if something had come back which had been missing a long time. 

My sexuality is not, as it once was, something forbidden or to be ashamed off. To the contrary, it is light-hearted and innocent. The transition from being a boy to becoming a man was full of feelings of guilt and rejection. I often did exactly what I was not supposed to do and got caught red-handed. Often I acted in negative ways, because I felt it was expected from me to act that way. I confirmed all the beliefs about me. Luckily, I no longer feel trapped by these powerful expectations of others.  

What follows now is the last part of my response to the paper “What is Defined in Operational Definitions? The Case of Operant Psychology” by Emilio Ribes (2003). Smith (1992), who examined the influence of Beacon on Skinner, is quoted as ‘saying’ “human knowledge and human power meet in one.” He spoke of “the declaration of a different kind of knowing, in which the power of producing effects is not simply the by-product of knowledge, but rather the criterion of its soundness.” 

Those who experimented with Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) acknowledged that the continuation of the conversation in which there is no aversive stimulation is very different from the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) we mostly engage in. When individuals feel supported to listen to themselves while they speak, they find themselves capable of thinking and speaking simultaneously and are able to recognize that they are what they think, that thinking is a behavior which creates their person- hood. Consciousness, which is an effect of one behavior on another behavior within one person, is expressed during SVB. 

In the section “The analysis of private events” Ribes reiterates Skinner’s insistence on the inclusion of private events in the experimental analysis of behavior. He writes “Assuming that private events could be discriminated like any other physical event, Skinner “spelled out the conditions required by a verbal community to identify (discriminate) them to teach a subject to discriminate private physical events in terms of a verbal self-report (tact).” However, there is a great difference between a verbal community which teaches us empathy versus one that tells us not to cry and to suck it up.

If our family or community is one in which toughness and insensitivity is praised, this is bound to give rise to more instances of NVB. Only to the extent that we receive love, care, bonding and sensitivity, will we be taught to tact that kind of behavior and have more instances of SVB. In other words, in environments in which NVB dominates, people are not as likely to identify what they feel, because they are only taught to tact how to be insensitive; for them tacting insensitivity means being sensitive.

“The core of argumentation of Skinner focused upon two issues, the truth value of observation based on public agreement and the ontological status of private events.” SVB and NVB relate to these two important issues, but public agreement about these two can only be obtained due to SVB. The distinction or rather the rift between radical behaviorism and methodological behaviorism was and could never be resolved, because of NVB. This distinction, which, as Malcolm (1971) has stated, is “questionable”, has weakened and continues to undermine the importance of the science of human behavior. 

“Analysis of private events passes through the analysis of how the verbal community identifies their occurrence and reinforces the individual for properly reporting his or her private events in the form of a discriminated verbal operant (the self-descriptive tact).” What happened to the behaviorist community is no different from what happens to any other verbal community. Those who are conditioned by and therefore more involved in NVB only have limited, at best, inaccurate descriptions of their private events. Unable to remediate the consequences of their inaccurate descriptions, they inevitably learn to avoid self-descriptive tacts altogether and are of course reinforced for that. 

Like Stevens and Skinner, I agree that we must study “private events scientifically” that is “the terms denoting them should be identified through public concrete operations.” Although SVB and NVB can only be identified when we have SVB, they are publicly observable phenomena, which co-occur iwith entirely different private events. Certainly, “private events are not causes of behavior”, but those who keep eliciting NVB will always tell you otherwise. It is important we recognize the enormous role of NVB in psychopathology. As long as we keep writing about ontological assertions versus epistemological assertions and have NVB instead of SVB, we keep beating around the bush.

It is only because we are conditioned by and used to NVB and because we don’t know how to create and maintain environments in which we will reliably increase our SVB, that we accept as a given that “the verification of the utterance “I am excited” is different for the person experiencing excitement and for the one observing that person.” I claim that this difference is absent in SVB and only occurs as a consequence of NVB. To the extent that our private events and concurrent private speech are not reciprocated by others, a wedge is driven between private speech and public speech. Another angle to look at this is that during SVB we are conscious about the same behavior. 

We may not be familiar with it, but this doesn’t mean we can’t talk from a third-person perspective in a first-person manner. To believe otherwise, is to assume that conscious communication is impossible. When speakers listen to themselves while they speak, they are conscious of their sound, which is produced and listened to in the here and now. In SVB a sense of well-being is shared and continued by all the communicators.  

April 27, 2015

April 27, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

I am reading one more paper by Emilio Ribes. I don’t think I will read another one of his papers after this one. I remember that he said that it makes no sense to consider verbal and nonverbal behavior separately. Many other behaviorists have said the exact same thing. It seems to me as if he was repeating an old story. However, if we are going to engage in a conversation with each other, of course, we must differentiate between our verbal and our nonverbal behavior. It is because we nowadays seldom talk with each other, that writings like that begun to have a life of their own.


Writing about talking creates the illusion that we are talking, but it doesn’t help us understand the problems we are getting stuck with while we are talking. Ribes and Wittgenstein are people who are stuck and who also get others stuck with words. Unless we reconsider nonverbal behavior separately from verbal behavior, we get carried away by academic, scientific, political, cultural and linguistic jargon. The more we write, the less we talk. 

Today I respond to the paper “What is Defined in Operational Definitions? The Case of Operant Psychology” (2003). This paper by Ribes is about “the operational origin of the dichotomies between respondent and operant behavior, contingency-shaped and rule-governed behavior, private and public events, and, verbal and nonverbal behavior.” I skimmed through the paper very quickly and got to the last dichotomy, which is important for how we talk together. 

By mentioning Skinner, who was influenced by Stevens, who promoted Bridgman’s operational analysis as a general methodology of science, the reader is informed about the context of Bridgman’s analysis. Evidently, Bridgman was also impacted by Einstein’s relativity theory. He reasoned that “operational analysis was itself a relativistic enterprise constrained by the limits of human activity in relation to the physical world.” Not the conversation with his wife, children, students or colleagues, but “the conceptual revolution brought about in physics at the turn of the century and into the first quarter century of modern physics” was the context for his operational analysis. 

Let’s contrast this with the context in which I discovered the importance of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). These subsets of vocal verbal behavior began to occur to me because I hated how other people sounded. I got in trouble for addressing this matter again and again. It was initially a process of negative reinforcement, which led me to escape and avoid NVB. Relieved and satisfied to have accomplished that I produced SVB and began to pay attention to the environments in which this could occur. It happened out of necessity. I never choose or planned this. 

SVB only occurs when the contingency which makes it possible is accurately described. It was after many years, after I had stopped having contact with my family, after I had immigrated to the United States, after I had withdrawn from my graduate psychology study (ABD: All-But-Dissertation) that I discovered radical behaviorism and the terminology which explained what I had been going through. By discovering radical behaviorism I found scientific validation. 

Einstein highlighted “the true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it.” I would say that we should observe, or rather, that we should listen to what a man says about it. I think that we can only find true meaning by what someone says about it. Although this mostly is not the case, I think that what we say about a term can be identical to what we do with it. If what we say about a term is identical to what we do with it, we achieve SVB, but if what we say about a term is different from what we do with it, we will engage in NVB. 

Based on the many seminars I have given over the years I believe that we mainly engage in NVB. Our problem is not that we can’t achieve SVB, but that we keep thinking that talking is not doing. Although Bridgman and Ribes in their writings “explicitly acknowledged that concepts were inevitably linked to human experience”, they consider the operational analysis of concepts as “not related to criteria regarding the public verification of properties or events.” In other words, like ‘true’ academics, they throw out the ordinary conversation.

Stevens who “adhered to the conception of truth by agreement” was into written, but not spoken agreement. Academically speaking (pun intended), the former is presumably more important than the latter. This has many negative consequences. When only in principle “there are no rules for prescribing, selecting and validating operations that identify the properties of objects or events to which concepts are applied”, it becomes difficult to talk about it. Of course, in day-to-day interactions there are rules “for prescribing, selecting and validating operations.” They may not be explicitly stated, but the “properties of objects or events to which concepts are applied” have to be identified. 

According to Stevens “the only difference is that scientist’s standards conform to those of his associates.” It is important to recognize that this so-called conformity only applies to what is written, to de-contextualized language. Thus, discussion between pragmatics and semantics leaves out the unacknowledged fact that, Bridgman and Stevens, like everyone else, mainly engage in NVB.

Indeed, “the operational definitions and the operational analysis of concepts are two different things.” Bridgman’s operational analysis, like my analysis of SVB and NVB, is “a posteriori identification of the physical and or verbal actions involved in formulating and applying a concept.” I can understand where Stevens is trying to go with “public science”, but I also agree with Bridgman that Stevens’ semantic approach is a dead end. Like Bridgman, Ribes and Skinner, I am only interested in the “operations (or physical and verbal actions) taking place when the concept is used.” A priori identification of concepts prevents SVB. Only an operational, but not a “functional analysis of concepts” can deal directly with our way of talking. We need to define concepts according to their use while we talk. As long as behaviorism wasn’t known we were able to avoid this. Skinner complimented Stevens’ writing and called it “a damn piece of nice work” and described it as “the best statement of the behavioristic attitude towards subjective terms now in print.” 

It should be clear here that Skinner was referring to Stevens’ writing as if he was commenting on the fact that Stevens was having SVB with him. If Stevens would have had SVB with him, Skinner might have been alerted to the fact that it had something to do with how we sound while we speak. Skinner’s voice sounds different than others. His vocal verbal behavior had more SVB instances than other scientists. His tone was almost always calm and pleasant. It is not coincidental that he never sounded angry, anxious, frustrated or negative. His knowledge about literature infuriates his opponents. There is reason why Skinner has such a peaceful tone, why Chomsky sounds so incendiary and why Pinker has such a pedantic and annoying voice. 

“Reproducibility of data” which is essential in operant methodology is equally important for SVB as for NVB. The terms SVB and NVB can be added to “reinforcement”, “extinction”, “discrimination”, “generalization” and “chaining”, Skinner’s list, which illustrates “the theoretical functions given to concepts defined as operation-outcome relations.” The two subsets of vocal verbal behavior in humans called SVB and NVB can also be extended to the behavior of nonverbal organisms and constitutes the “laws of behavior.” In nonverbal organisms we should talk about Sound Non-Verbal Behavior (SNVB) and Noxious Non-Verbal Behavior (NNVB). These distinctions will make us recognize that, although only humans have language, non-verbally they are equal to nonverbal animals. This focus on the nonverbal makes possible the much-needed alignment between our verbal and nonverbal behavior.  

April 26, 2015

April 26, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) involves a manner of speaking in which the speaker affects optimal arousal levels for the listener. The arousal level for the listener is neither too high nor too low, but exactly right. Whether or not SVB is produced is determined by the listener. However, the speaker can also be his or her own listener and thus determine if he or she is producing SVB. When the speaker and the listener are one and the same person, it is only for him or for herself and not for someone else that the listener of his or her own speech can determine whether he or she is producing SVB.

As the speaker is capable of discerning he or she is producing SVB, he or she becomes more accurate in discerning if listeners other than him or herself are experiencing SVB. What may be perceived as SVB by the speaker as his or her own listener may be Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) for listeners other than the speaker. SVB occurs when the speaker as his or her own listener as well as the other listeners experience the voice of the speaker in the same positive manner. SVB perceived as SVB by the speaker as his or her own listener, can also first be perceived as NVB by other listeners and later as SVB. This can happen as other listeners are often not listening to the sound of the speaker, but to what he or she says. They often respond to the content of what the speaker is saying. Listeners may say they don’t like what the speaker is saying, but they don’t respond to his or her sound. 

When the listener is focusing on the sound of the speaker, the listener is more likely to perceive the sound of the speaker in the same way as the speaker, but when the listener is not conditioned to listen to the sound of the speaker, disagreement between the speaker and the listener about whether the speaker is producing SVB or NVB cannot be resolved as the attention of the listener keeps going to the content of what is said. If this kind of mediation by the listener happens, the speaker’s attention will very likely be distracted from listening to the sound of his or her voice while he or she speaks. 

If NVB instances happen at a high rate, while SVB instances happen at a low rate, then NVB occurs. If SVB instances happen at a high rate and NVB instances happen at a low rate, then SVB occurs. “When people speak, their speech is not the overt manifestation of an abstract grammar that rules and regulates what can be said or not, or how to say things.” Our speech is not caused by a language acquisition devise and thus the higher or lower rates of NVB or SVB produced by the speaker depend on the conditioning of the speaker's nervous system. Unsafe and threatening environments gave rise to high rates of NVB, the kind of speech in which, speakers and listeners predominantly emphasize the verbal, while escaping from the nonverbal, the environment within the skin. Safe and appetitive environments, on the other hand, set the stage for SVB, the vocal verbal behavior Ribes is referring to when he states “language as actual behavior has no grammar” (1991). 

Although Ribes is right when he states “grammar is not the condition that makes language effective or sound”, he is as verbally fixated as everyone else who was mainly exposed to and conditioned by NVB. It would never  occur to Ribes that only the calm sound of our voice can make our language a “meaningful social practice.” Although our language doesn’t require that it is “ruled by or adjusted to an ideal, abstract grammar”, for it to become more meaningful there must be a continuity of experience of safety and comfort. 

Ribes states “according to what has been said.” without realizing that nothing has been said, only something was written. Like Wittgenstein, he writes about “language as it is spoken in daily life”, but nothing indicates he actually speaks about it. I don’t agree with Wittgenstein who insists that “every sentence in our language is in order as it is.” This illustrates intellectual superficiality, because anyone who engages in conversation with others knows, that most of these conversations go nowhere and can’t go anywhere. Most of our conversations are NVB, which creates, maintains and exploits disorder. 


Only SVB can create order. SVB is not an intellectual accomplishment, but an experiential phenomenon. NVB facilitates the rejection and the abandonment of our experience of well-being. Ribes considers the importance of “language as a medium”, but is too enthralled by Wittgenstein’s “language games” to notice  that language is nothing but a sound produced by our vocal apparatus. He writes about the “acquisition of language” and “understanding and using words (which are tantamount to learning)”, but doesn’t mention the production and the listening to a sound to which we can all be attuned. 

Ribes wants readers to think of “language as an instrument.” He seems to refer to the human voice when he writes “language as an instrument, means effective use in relation to the behavior of other individuals”, but he primarily focuses on “thinking about its functions.” Thus, he only pays lip-service to the fact that “language is the instrument by means of which people relate to each other.” Apparently, Ribes wants the reader to think that “communication is a phenomenon taking place as a special function of language, but not as an equivalent to language,” but no explanation is given anywhere in his writings of an instrument that is producing harmonious positive sounds. 

Before I completed reading the section of the paper “language as a form of life,” I wondered if would contain anything that goes into the importance of sound while speak? The answer, as I expected, was no. Since Ribes is commenting on Wittgenstein’s ruminations about language, he only reiterates his view that “language games not only make up the meaning of words but the meaning of life itself.” What follows is long list of assumptions, but there is no reference anywhere about the important role of the human voice. 

The final section of the paper deals with “language as behavior.” I agree that “Psychology has not recognized that language, although ever-present in human behavior and its context, does not constitute a psychological phenomenon”, but the statement “all of human behavior is linguistic” is mistaken. Only SVB is linguistic, that is, verbal; NVB confines us to nonverbal responding. The fact that in NVB the sound of the speaker’s voice coerces the listener into submission, is not mentioned anywhere. Only something is said about “the groundlessness of believing, especially in small children.” Surely, it is sad that children continue to be conditioned to become adults mainly capable of NVB.      

April 25, 2015

April 25, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writing is my response to “Human Behavior as Language: Some Thoughts on Wittgenstein” by Emilio Ribes Inesta (2006). I am, like Ribes, against the “general conception of language” and I absolutely agree that “Human behavior cannot be understood if we separate language and social practice.” I appreciate the quotes by Wittgenstein and Malcolm. The former wrote about “language games” and the latter conceived of a philosophy in which there are no more knots to untie. Since “language without social practice and social practice without language are senseless”, I insist that we should be talking about these matters. I mean this very literally: we must have a different kind of vocal verbal behavior to be able to realize what these authors attempted to ‘talk about’ in their writings. My argument is that “we separate language and social practice” every time we value our written words as more important than our vocal verbal behavior. 

We talk the way we do, because we have learned to give higher value to what is written than what is said. Although we keep buying into this myth, any child can see the emperor is not wearing any clothes, that is, any nonverbal human being can hear the verbal emperor sounds awful. Surely, we don’t pay attention to how we sound while we speak so that we can get away with our big lie, that we are the narrators, the originators of our own lives, that we choose our own words and that we are individually responsible for what we, for better or for worse, claim to be our thoughts, feelings and actions. It is because we keep telling each other that we have an inner self which causes all our actions that we believe we are individually responsible for what we say and how we say it. The verbal lie called the ‘self’ seems to be the truth, because people everywhere keep repeating it.

Although Ribes correctly states “from this perspective, language, as an essential component of social practice, contextualizes every human psychological phenomenon” (Ribes, 2006), he doesn’t mention the more poignant fact that our sound is needed to contextualize what we say about our experiences. Certainly, “the logic of language is grounded in social practice”; French or Chinese sounds which are only produced and mediated by members of those verbal communities. “The fictitious universal logic of a rational or formal syntax or grammar” is based on our agential, that is, on our academic, scientific infatuation with words. Thus, what we say takes our attention away from how we say it. We imagine we sound the same when we speak English, but the fact is that we are not. Unknowingly, we remove ourselves from reality, from ourselves and each other, by how we sound. 

Dissociation from reality produced by the vocal verbal behavior of the speaker is called Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). He or she controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency. We are punished by NVB as we get imprisoned by words, which disconnect us from the reality. The way out of our verbal prison is by listening to ourselves while we speak. Our voice is needed to makes sense of what we say. We are able to have vocal verbal behavior in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an appetitive stimulus. This is called Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). SVB has different consequences than the vocal verbal behavior in which the speaker’s voice is an aversive stimulus. Neither Wittgenstein nor Ribes get any closer than stating “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” 

Nothing imaginary happens when a speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. Only the speaker, who expresses what he or she thinks, feels or experiences vocally, can listen to his or her sound and is able to come out of the ancient prison of words. When we hear ourselves, while we speak, we are sure that our own “form of life” is either negative or positive. If we still doubt which is which, our voice sounds aversive to us.

Ribes writes that “language is not only what people write and speak, but also the means by which this is done.” The means by which people write are different from the means by which people speak. We cannot compare a pen or a keyboard with the feedback that is produced by the sound of our voice. “The sounds spoken” are different from “the signs written or read.” In the latter, we at best imagine a sound. We imagine the sound we are most familiar with. We are most familiar with NVB. The sound we keep imagining doesn’t represent our well-being. Our well-being doesn’t need to be imagined; it is “self”-evident. When speakers produce SVB, they consider this way of talking with others as causing their thoughts, feelings and experiences and the expression of these. NVB is perpetuated as it maintains our bias. SVB is a natural phenomenon, but it will only become apparent while we talk.