May 1, 2015

May 1, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M. S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Today is the first day of May and it is a good moment to write with a new font called “Arial.” I like this fond because it is easy to read. If this writing were speaking, I would say it is easy to listen to. Other fonts take longer to get used to. I don’t recall having written with this font, so this is a new experience for me. Many people have told me when they began to listen to themselves while they speak they realized they have never done that before. In effect, they then talk with a different tone, which may be compared with the different font I now use. I have used swirly letters and block-shaped letters and found this strongly influenced what I was writing. This font feels like a good fit. I am sure I will use it for the rest of the month. It was nice to have used “Latha” font last month. 

“Latha” is spacious, but “Arial” is dense and clear. My thoughts are compatible with this letter type. I am reminded of a dream I had shortly before I woke up. I had crawled underneath a railroad bridge when a train was approaching. Suddenly the rails began to curve and bent away. I ran to get outside the rails, because only there I would be safe from the approaching train. I succeeded. However, some hulk-like character appeared. He held the rails in his hands, as if it was a rope and he was swinging it around like a cowboy. He was aiming at me. He threw his rope at me, but missed and the rails lay in front of me looking like a puddle of melted candle. I was not harmed by the dangers I had faced, but there was neither relief nor excitement about it. I remember thinking that I should be shocked or feel liberated, but there was no such experience. I woke up wondering what this dream might mean. After I got up I went on with other things and it is only now hours later that I am reminded that I had this dream. 

April 30, 2015

April 30, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

I am reading “Cartesian mechanics, conditioning theory and behaviorism: some reflections on behavior and language” by Emilio Ribes (1996). Although this is my response to this specific paper, it might be seen as my response to academia in general. Many papers that were written for audiences other than behaviorists have lamented and continue to lament the limiting effects and “insufficiency of basic definitions” that are used by the respective disciplines. Ribes is aware of this, but doesn’t give any weight to the often overlooked fact that disciplines don’t get stuck with words or concepts written in papers, but individuals have disagreements with each other and, consequently, don’t communicate with one another or merely pretend to be communicating. 

It gets more complicated because this happens across disciplines. The tone of this paper was set by a sad quote from Schoenfeld (1993), who stated “enough to explain why I am saddened and often depressed, by what has been happening to “behaviorism”, to behavior science generally, since 1913. How far have we come since then? Seems to me we may have slipped backwards. It looks to me sometimes, in my more depressed moments, like eighty years of no progress.” Not much has improved since Schoenfield said this. We should given him credit because at least he is talking about his feelings. This is important. Emotion must have its expression. Moreover, it needs to be validated. Without our emotions we de-contextualize science. 

As is clear from the very beginning, this paper is about more of the same: supposedly, something is wrong with the prebuild logic of behaviorism. Here we have another behaviorist intellectual, who argues behaviorists are still stuck with Cartesian mechanics, because they are using the wrong concepts. Really? I don’t agree. This meaningless war of words, which raves in every academic discipline, prevents any real conversation. Moreover, these carefully crafted written words distract us from the importance of our vocal verbal behavior. 

Ribes and other behaviorists extensively warned in their papers against “the central nervous system” becoming “the conceptual surrogate of the soul or mind”, but they don’t recognize that mentalism keeps coming in through the backdoor, as long as written language is considered to be more important than spoken language. Writing an academic paper is like a reflex. One can easily predict this behavior “without any assumption about the neural paths or central mediators”, because it can be explained as “the ordered co-variations between stimuli and responses.” However, our written parsimonious analyses can't help anybody to get along with each other or save a marriage, to the contrary, it discourages and impairs our conversation. Scientists may write about their experiments, but their vocal verbal behavior tells an entirely different story. Emotions or, more precisely, negative emotions, are often the establishing operation for the response called scientific discovery. I hypothesize that attending to negative emotions will not only lead to better and more conversation and discoveries, but will also increase dissemination of research findings, improve teaching, enhance relationship and lead to a sustained focus on operant rather than on respondent behavior.

“Since verbal behavior is defined in terms of the mediation of the reinforcement of the speaker by the listener, the behaviors of the two individuals cannot be separated. In this sense, it should be understood that verbal behavior is an episode” (1957, p.2). During such an episode, the verbal behavior of the speaker doesn’t produce “mechanical effects in the environment”, because the listener “mediates the consequences (or reinforcement) of the speaker’s behavior.” Skinner gives an example that it is only after the listener was induced by the pattern of sounds produced by the speaker to give him a gives a glass of water, after mediation, that the listener “produces mechanical effects that reinforces the verbal behavior of the speaker”, that is, the listener hands the speaker the glass of water. In this way Skinner illustrates that the “distinction of verbal and nonverbal behavior is based upon the mediation of the mechanical effects that must follow any operant behavior.” Another way of describing this verbal episode is that the speaker’s verbal behavior was reinforced by the listener’s nonverbal behavior. 

“Non-mechanical effects of behavior are functional to the extent that they mediate the initial or ultimate mechanical effects of a particular behavior of the speaker.” This example doesn’t tell us what happens when the response of the listener is verbal, when the listener becomes the speaker. Mediation of the first speaker by the listener results in another non-mechanical, indirect effect, which then is mediated by the speaker who becomes a listener. When speakers become listeners and listeners become speakers, this turn-taking depends on mechanical, directly acting, nonverbal effects. 

No matter how verbal the speaker may be there is always an immediate nonverbal effect on the listener, which affects his or her ability to attend to what the speaker is saying. The speaker’s kind request will most likely be mediated very differently than the speaker’s coercive command. The former evokes a willingness to help, while the latter elicits fear and obedience. As stated, non-mechanical operant effects would occur in the former, but the latter episode would be characterized by mechanical respondent effects. 

The distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) makes these direct and non-direct acting effects of vocal verbal behavior tangible. I agree we should equate verbal behavior with “any behavior that is followed by social consequences.” I also agree with Ribes comment on Skinner’s restriction of verbal behavior. Indeed, Skinner “does not distinguish between verbal and any kind of social behavior.” He wrote “A preliminary restriction would be to limit the term verbal to instances in which the responses of the ‘listener’ have been conditioned …(with) the further provision that the ‘listener’ must be responding in ways which have been conditioned precisely in order to reinforce the behavior of the speaker.” Since Skinner includes speaking, writing and reading in his definition of verbal behavior, he was in the case of a ‘speaker’ assuming “the behavior of the listener refers to a special topography of the speaker’s behavior.” 

I disagree with Ribes that Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior loses value, as “the listener’s behavior becomes redundant since the form of the speaker’s behavior becomes the necessary and sufficient condition to identify verbal behavior.” Ribes forgets that the behaviors of the speaker and the listener cannot be separated, that is, in the case of the speaker being his her own listener, they exist in one and the same person. Rather than calling Skinner’s definition redundant, I say it is brilliant, because “the further provision that the ‘listener’ must be responding in ways which have been conditioned precisely in order to reinforce the behavior of the speaker”, illustrates that the listener has to be conditioned by the speakers from the verbal community to respond to them in a particular way. Ribes is incorrect in stating that “the form of the speaker’s behavior becomes the necessary and sufficient condition to identify verbal behavior,” but he is correct that “the form of the speaker’s behavior” is important, because it conditions the behavior of the listener. 

Skinner wrote his great book Verbal Behavior (VB) as “an orderly arrangement of well-formed facts, in accordance with a formulation of behavior derived from and experimental analysis of a more rigorous sort” (1957, p.11). It didn’t suddenly occur to him, but it was an inevitable result of his empirical work. I don’t think it is without reason that he referred to VB as his most important work. However, many people, Ribes included, have problems understanding the (reinforcing) behavior of the listener as “not necessarily verbal in any special sense” (1957) and resist the construal of the behavior of the speaker as “lever-pressing”, that is, as acting on the environment. 

Before I continue with my writing I want the reader to imagine that what he or she is reading is actually said. I want the reader to imagine that he or she is listening to a speaker who is saying this text. I want the reader, who is then a listener to think about what he or she would say in response this. 

The ‘flaws’ detected by Ribes are areas of interest which need to be further researched. Writing about it would be only more writing. I am interested in talking about the questions raised by Ribes. We need to talk about the fact that “According to the definition, mechanical effects directly produced by the speaker, are excluded from the field of verbal behavior”, because by talking about it, we will experience what the dearth of these direct effects means. In vocal verbal behavior, absence of aversive stimulation makes SVB possible.

  

Skinner anticipated complaints from people like Ribes who have to be in denial about the continuity of behavior in order to be able to pander to the special place of human beings in the natural world. “The pigeon or the rat behaving in the operant chamber” as “speaker” is “showing verbal behavior, while the experimenter setting up the contingencies and its administration is the listener, the nonverbal component of the episode.” Skinner even wrote in a footnote saying “there is consolation in the facts that such a relation as that represented by an abstract tact is susceptible to laboratory study.” 

Ribes insists that the definition of VB is incorrect, not because it doesn’t “identify the instances of the defined behavior”, but because he dismisses Skinner’s empirical work. It is for folks like him that Skinner wrote “The animal and the experimenter are a small but genuine verbal community.” Rather than rejecting Skinner’s definition, I want to extend it with my two subsets of vocal verbal behavior, SVB and NVB, which define two easily observable response classes. I am part of that “small but genuine verbal community,” which creates and maintains SVB and decreases NVB.

April 29, 2015

April 29, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

I am still responding to a paper by Emilio Ribes (2003) “What is defined in operational definitions? The case of operant psychology.” I thought I would get to the section about verbal and nonverbal behavior right away, but ended up responding to what preceded it. I now arrived at the section which is called “The operational foundation of classificatory concepts in operant psychology”, which covers the aforementioned topic. I realize while writing about this paper that I read it carefully, with a lot of attention. I could never afford myself this much time while I was in graduate school. 

I agree with Ribes that “the dichotomies between operant and respondent behaviors, contingency-shaped and rule-governed behaviors, public and private events, and verbal and nonverbal behaviors” are “also operationally based concepts and that the criterion used for their definition depended exclusively on observational limitations to identify the correlation of a stimulus event with a target response.” I would like to add that our way of talking creates and maintains many observational limitations. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the conversation which is rich in turn-taking between the speaker and the listener, and low in instances of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which turn-taking is absent, such dichotomies do not occur. 

The elephant in the room of human relationship is NVB. Scientific investigation requires SVB; NVB is biased and must be controlled. While discussing, that is, writing about, respondent and operant behavior, Ribes uses Skinner’s (1938) definition of elicited behavior as when “it can be shown that a given part of behavior may be induced at will (or according to certain laws [the laws of reflex]), by a modification of in part of the forces affecting the organism….only one property of the relation is usually invoked in the use of the term – the close coincidence of occurrence of stimulus and response.” 

If we would finally arrange to have the conversation, which is necessary to  observe this, we would find it is the sound of the speaker’s voice, which either determines an appetitive or an aversive contingency for the listener. What else can the “close coincidence of occurrence of stimulus and response” in our vocal verbal behavior mean? It means that “a given part of behavior”, the reflex of the listener, which “may be induced at will” by the speaker, affects what the listener says. The speaker’s tone of voice determines if the listener will be able to emancipate into a speaker, whether he or she will dare to say something, will feel safe enough to say something or will not say anything at all. The speaker’s tone of voice either invites and enriches conversation or it will stop it in its tracks. The latter is an example of NVB.

Ribes also uses Skinner’s definition of emitted behavior to make his point. “An event may occur without any observed antecedent and still be dealt with adequately in a descriptive science. I do not mean that there are no originating forces in spontaneous behavior but simply that they are not located in the environment. We are not in a position to see them, and we have no need to. This kind of behavior might be said to be emitted by the organism. An operant is an identifiable part of behavior of which it may be said, not that no stimulus can be found that will elicit it (there may be a respondent the response of which has the same topography), but that no correlated stimulus can be detected upon occasions when it is observed to occur.” Operant behavior is about postcedent effects, which invisibly increase or decrease future probability of that behavior. Let’s see how “the definition and classification of behavior in two classes, respondent and operant” came about.

According to Ribes it was “based on a particular operational criterion: the detection by an observer of a stimulus eliciting a response.” If we map it onto our vocal verbal behavior, “the definition and classification” of the respondent class of behavior is based on whether the listener, the observer, detected a stimulus, a speaker, who was eliciting a response, in the listener. However, Skinner and other behaviorists are more into observing, that is, into seeing, than into speaking and listening. The speaker as his or her own listener while we speak is a phenomenon that yet has to be fully explored.

It shouldn’t go unnoticed there is a scientific sanctioned bias for observing over listening. Since we overemphasize seeing in our scientific observation, we are inclined to hang on to our old beliefs, which are summarized by the old saying ‘seeing is believing.’ Moreover, because words are visible, we consider what is written as more important than what is said. In operant conditioning, however, there is, nothing to see; the stimuli that cause operant behavior are “not located in the environment.” Thus, by listening, in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), we become aware of how the speaker affects the listener. 

Ribes is partially correct when he states “concepts classifying behavior were based on the observational limitations of the experimenter.” When it comes to vocal verbal behavior, the experimenter, who, as speaker, is also his own listener, must listen because his or her observations will only be as valid as what he or she is capable of hearing. Just as data don’t depend on theory and just as theories only determine which data will be selected, so too will our way of listening select what we hear. The fact that previous conditioning led to a particular way of listening, doesn’t mean that we have a permanent hearing defect or that we cannot change our way of listening. The above statement is written in the past tense, as if it concerns a problem we have dealt with, but nothing is further from the truth. It is certainly true that the inability of the experimenter, who, as a speaker, is not listening to him or herself while he or she speaks, who, therefore, is limited in his or her ability to fathom what his or her effect is on the listener, gives rise to mentalistic concepts that presumably classify behavior. As we have seen (pun intended), these concepts have fallen on psychologically deaf ears. We haven’t made much progress in terms of reliably improving our vocal verbal behavior, that is, our relationships with one another, which depend on our ability to talk.

My argument is that although radical behaviorists have created useful concepts that classify our behavior, much is lacking in their vocal verbal expression of these. It is astounding that even radical behaviorists haven’t been able to point out mankind’s neurotic fixation with stimulus-response processes, which dominate, impair and ultimately destroy human interaction. Increased emphasis on “a stimulus following the behavior” is only possible if environments in which we teach operant conditioning become free of aversive stimulation. 

The aforementioned is yet to be achieved. By “holding the definition [respondent/operant] at an operational level” Skinner considered the reflex not as a theoretical concept, but as “a fact”, “an analytic unit, which makes an investigation of behavior possible.” Ribes points out that “Skinner defined the limitations of the observer in trying to identify the environmental or other variables functionally related to behavior and the possibility of explicitly manipulating their occurrence.“ Although the respondent/operant distinction doesn’t inform us about “the properties of the behavior being identified”, it brings into focus the behavior of the scientist him or herself. Ribes’ complaint that Skinner’s “distinction resulted in nothing more than a classification of the observer’s limitations and procedures” alerts us to his inability to admit and investigate his own limitations as an observer “in trying to identify the environmental or other variables.” Most likely Ribes is not a fluent speaker.

Let’s see (not hear) what Ribes says (writes) about contingency-shaped and rule-governed behavior. Again, it seems to come down to the “observer’s possibility to identify or not a previous reinforcing stimulus as responsible of the occurrence of a new behavior.” Skinner’s distinction “between behaviors that are followed directly by consequences and behaviors that are evoked by contingency-related antecedent stimuli” leads Ribes to conclude that it “resulted from the observational difficulty of identifying the consequence (or reinforcer) that leads to the acquisition of a new response.” I like to point out, however, that the “observational difficulty” doesn’t imply the experimenter’s inability to hear him or herself and only illustrates Ribes’ disagreement with Skinner on logical grounds. If it happened in actual conversation this would be a typical example of NVB. Not surprisingly, Ribes repeats the same old argument as before: “My main argument is that the concepts of contingency-shaped and rule-governed behaviors only reflect the limitations of the observer regarding the “origins” of the behavior under analysis, not the suggested different functional properties of the behaviors distinguished in such a way.” 

The assumed shortcomings of Skinner’s take on this are detailed in another paper, which I now feel compelled to read (I thought this would be my last reading of Ribes, who I find rather tedious, but I guess I was wrong). I will read it, but I will save my comments for later. From his choice words, it was apparent that Ribes wrote that paper, because he wants to somehow strongly disagree with Skinner. After reading more than half the paper I didn’t find anything I hadn’t already read in his other papers. “Instructions, rules and abstractions; a misconstrued relation” (2000), informed me that “the usefulness of the distinction between rule-governed and contingency-shaped behaviors is questionable”, but the paper didn’t explain why (I suggest father-issues? I will may be read it later, but I don’t think it will change much for me.

Going back to “Operational Definitions” (2003), I have now arrived at the section which is about the distinction between private and public events. I find it fascinating that Ribes writes “According to Skinner, private events had the same physical and functional properties as those that occurred outside the body” (italics added). By writing in this manner, he seems to be referring to a behaviorism in which this similarity is questioned (his kind). Also the fact that he refers to his interview with Skinner comes across as if he has a problem with what Skinner had told him during the interview.

Ribes wrote about what “Skinner said” and what “Skinner thought.” I have already responded to that unpublished interview in my previous writing. Ribes wrote “except for its public unobservability, private events were thought to be there, waiting to be discriminated, named, and described under the reinforcement contingencies of a verbal community.” Apparently, he doesn’t believe it. I would never use such language. Ribes must have read much more behaviorism than I did, but I am quite sure that private events have been discriminated, named and described by other behaviorists (i.e. Schlinger, Moore, Palmer). However, since most behaviorists are still unaware of SVB, analyses of private events are impaired by “limitations of the observer.”

Once the behaviorist community adopts the tacts SVB and NVB, they will be able to produce a more refined analysis of private events. Right now the ubiquity of NVB determines that private speech is mostly excluded from public speech. SVB provides improved access to private speech, because it includes, enhances and stimulates private speech with public speech. Private speech is a function of our public speech. NVB negative public speech, in previous environments, causes negative private speech in our current environments. 

Skinner was right by assuming that the problem of tacting private events could be overcome by examining “how the verbal community reinforced a tact appropriately correlated with its controlling stimulus properties.” There is no other way: we must learn from our behaviorist verbal community to tact emotions accurately. Thus, SVB is our vocal verbal behavior involving the accurate expressions of our positive emotions, but NVB, is based on inappropriate tacting of negative emotions, which cannot become positive.   

Skinner knew that his analysis of private events would succeed, because his concepts were not based on “whether two people are brought into agreement, but whether the scientist who uses the concept can operate successfully upon his material – all by himself if need be” (1945, 1961). I love Skinner, who acted on his bold statements. I have this in common with him. I find Ribes’ complaint that the private/public distinction leads to “serious conceptual mistakes” nonsense. Remarks as these, which, interestingly, are not made in his interview with Skinner, tell me how conflicted Ribes must be. I don’t get it why he has conceptual problems with the simple notion that what is within our skin must include our physical events and “that private events might control observable behavior?” (italics added). There is no question about it that private events can and do control observable behavior. However, this doesn’t mean that private events cause behavior; our body mediates behavior, but doesn’t and can’t cause it. Of course, there has to be “a correspondence between physical properties of private events and the tacts describing them.” How else can vocal verbal behavior make any sense? What we say will be meaningless as long as our tacts are inaccurate or distracting from what they describe. How we say what we say can also distort the meaning of what we say. Our emphasis on what we say makes us disembody our communication.

At long last I have arrived at the section in which Ribes writes about verbal and nonverbal behavior. I have a lot of time, so I proceed to read, sentence by sentence. This so-called "dichotomy" is “based on an operational criterion.” This is where it gets interesting: “The nature of the operation is not observational.” Ribes freaks out when there is nothing to see. His conceptual clarity is scattered because “The distinction between both types of behavior depends on the agent providing consequences to the operant behavior.” The nonverbal is made visible “as reinforcement delivered through a mechanical device,” but verbal behavior, is “behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons” (1957). In other words, verbal behavior doesn’t “produce direct mechanical effects on the environment”, but our nonverbal behavior does!

“The additional refinement specifying that the mediator of the reinforcement has been especially conditioned to do so by a verbal community does not change the basic operational nature of the definition.” Ribes has no problem with the definition as long as he can continue to visuallize the mediator, as someone else. His conceptual problem seems to arise from when the speaker acts as his or her own listener, when the speaker and listener are the same person, when, unless one looks into a mirror, there is nothing to see.

Ribes is running into problems trying to understand how “The listener, to whom the role of mediating the reinforcer is attributed, becomes a surrogate for the mechanical device dispensing reinforcement.” Rather than pointing out, in abbreviated version, why this is objectionable, he refers to his old papers. It wouldn’t surprise me if these papers weren’t received well. I can imagine  that Skinner never responded. I will read these papers later and write about them if I feel the need to. As stated, I don’t think I will feel the need to.

Ribes concludes his paper by stating “At best, nowadays, operant theory fulfills the role of a conceptual scheme organizing technological operations, although the achievement of control does not seem to be correlated with the parallel achievement of prediction and theoretical understanding.” I find that inaccurate. My reading of Skinner's work, enriched by my knowledge of the SVB/NVB distinction, leads me to think that operant theory correlates perfectly with the achievement of prediction and theoretical understanding. By this time I am getting tired of Ribes. However, I will still read his papers to see if he comes up with anything he hasn’t already written. I advise Ribes and other behaviorists to first say things out loud before writing them down. His writing will improve if he hears how he sounds while he speaks.