May 3, 2015

May 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Behaviorologists, who insist that the science of human behavior is its own separate discipline because psychology can’t and doesn’t represent them, find themselves beating a dead horse each time they point out that most scientists continue to believe in “mini-deities” in spite of the fact that they acknowledge that “human beings are a product of natural processes.” The reason this keeps occurring is not because of some “cultural fog,” but because of how we talk.

In “What is Reality to an Organic Unit of Behavior” (2014) Lawrence Fraley beautifully analyzes this “I” or “me”, the entity which supposedly manages our body and its behavior from within. Although Fraley has written wonderful works about the “behavior-controlling relations” that maintain our ancient belief in our “personal internal agent”, he doesn’t say anything and doesn’t seem to realize that it is our way of talking about this “personal self-agent”, which maintains the fact that we keep on living “within the bubble of that fiction.” What keeps getting lost in the complex behavior of academic writing is a much more simple behavior, talking, has continued unabated. I say simple, because pretty much everybody can and must do it, even the most successful academic. 

A good example of this is the little heard off personal life of Albert Einstein. When his marriage with his first wife, due to extra marital affairs, was falling apart, he made a misogynistic list of demands presumably in an attempt to keep his family together. He basically insisted his wife would be a slave to him. Unless our interactions show this “mystical agential self” is no more asserted, people will continue to talk out of their asses. Einstein said “there must be something behind the energy” and he pandered, in spite of all his knowledge, to of “a superior spirit” and “a superior mind.” Skinner’s personal life, by contrast, holds up to scrutiny. Everything we know about him was proof he really lived what he knew. One could also detect this in the sound of his voice, when he spoke of “the operant.” From his vocal verbal behavior it was clear “the particular form of that occurring orderly response” was “determined by the current configuration of the responsively sensitive neural bodily structures”.

May 2, 2015

May 2, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M. S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

When I hear a nice song in a language I don’t understand, I feel inspired to write my own lyrics. I have been writing and singing beautiful songs lately. I realize how much I love singing. I like Brazilian and Hawaiian music and I use these melodies to write songs. I would like to be singing with a band and look forward to meeting other musicians, who can play the music I like to sing. 


As a verbal engineer I consider myself to be a natural scientist. I am not someone special, a celebrity or motivated by some higher purpose. Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the kind of vocal verbal behavior in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an appetitive contingency, isn’t possible as long as the speaker has any superstitious ideas.

Getting natural and becoming scientific about ourselves requires another way of talking. Our usual way of talking is Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency. Few people have the behavioral history that allows them to recognize that most talking is unscientific. Even scientists themselves don’t care at all about their way of talking. They may be scientific about their field, but they are as unscientific about vocal verbal behavior as anyone else. Although they are  sophisticated with words and academically approved with degrees, when it comes to talking, they are superstitious, held back, biased and insensitive. 

   

The majority of scientists continuous to believe in an inner self that causes them to behave the way they do. In other words, their education has failed to educate them to be able to talk in a different way. Although they may no longer believe in the supernatural, they have retained the fallacy of seeing themselves as the causal agents of their own actions and, most importantly, they sound like it. During instances of NVB in a verbal episode, the speaker dominates the attention of the listener. The NVB-stimulating speaker is reinforced by the NVB-stimulated listener, who, when he or she becomes the speaker, does the exact same. In NVB  the speaker struggles to retain and dominate the attention of the listener and the listener struggles to pay attention to the speaker. In NVB neither the speaker talks nor the listener listens, they both pretend.

Aversively-sounding scientists and teachers don't and can't teach well, as they don’t behave scientifically while they speak. They may be talking about the natural world, but they act as if they are separate from it. They have done a dismal job educating others about how behavior actually works. This is why most of mankind believes in non-existing entities and can’t solve any of their problems. And, this is also the reason we don’t have a scientific way of talking. 

SVB is a scientific way of talking. It is characterized by the ongoing well-being of both the speaker and the listener. During SVB the listener can effortlessly pay attention to the speaker as there is no aversive stimulation. When a verbal episode contains more SVB than NVB instances the results of such interaction show that no autonomous agent is causing this, but only our way of talking. 

  

Although scientist may agree that the natural world is determined, they have many problems applying this notion to others, specifically to themselves. The most pervasive cultural influence preventing scientific solutions to mankind’s problems determines that scientists talk like everybody else and produce mainly NVB. They have been conditioned to dominate, exploit, manipulate, coerce, alienate, distract, compartmentalize and dissociate, while they speak. 

Nothing keeps our belief in a behavior-controlling inner agent in place like NVB. Unless scientists lead the way with SVB things cannot and will not change. Regardless of many scientific discoveries, nothing has changed in how we interact with each other, because we keep referring to “I”, to “me” or to “you”, without realizing what we are talking about. Neither one of these exist.

A behaviorist account of who we are as individual organisms boils down to our neural and neuromuscular behavior. Neural behavior or thinking is not viewed by most of us as merely another kind of behavior that is determined by behavior-controlling environmental variables. This is not because it is so objectionable or difficult to understand, it is because of how we talk with each other or, rather, it is because of our lack of conversation. Indeed, we are not in the circumstances that would condition us to think otherwise. The assumption that papers, which are read by only a few specialized experts, would be able to change the vocal verbal behaviors of others is ludicrous. Emphasis on written instead of spoken words has prevented and continues to prevent learning.

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.