May 21, 2015

May 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Today’s writing is my fourth response to “Behaviorism and the Stages of Scientific Activity” by J. Moore (2010). By reading and studying this paper, it became clear to me that my theory of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), unlike most mentalistic theories, has passed through three different developmental stages. It is true for SVB that “verbal processes at the earlier stages establish a large degree of stimulus control over verbal processes at the later stages.” My “theoretical verbal behavior” is parsimonious and not controlled by any “mischievous factors.” I am not using metaphors to make my point and if I do, I only do so to demonstrate how distracting they are and should be avoided In spite of rejection, my insistence on vocal verbal behavior, on talking, as well as my resistance against and my problems with, writing, protected me from falling victim to mentalism, even before I knew anything about behaviorism. Listening to one self while one speaks dislodges any false notion of having a self.

The fact that neither the speaker nor the listener has a behavior-causing inner self, is the most revolutionary characteristic about SVB and is also the reason why I have experienced so much rejection from others. However, those few people who, due to their own behavior history, were ready to engage in the conversation that dissolves any sense of self, they reinforced me. When I discovered SVB, I called it “Language Which Creates Space” as I was involved with people who practiced meditation. I was an oddball in the company of esoteric people, who didn’t want to talk with me. As long as we were meditating, things were fine, but when meditation came to an end and we were drinking tea, someone would say something I experienced as disturbing as it seemed to destroy the meditation. The moment someone opened their mouth we were back to square one and our usual arguments and petty talk would come right back. People reluctantly talked about ‘being in their mind’ and were supposedly in the process of ‘getting out of their mind.’ They all agreed that talking itself made us ‘identify with our mind’ and weren’t into it. 

Since I was, because of the family in which I grew up in, into talking, I was frustrated when the meditation would go away because people were talking or because they didn’t want to talk. My notion of meditation was that there must be a way of talking, which creates and maintains it, but my attempts failed and I only got into arguments. People were getting tired of me and I was getting tired of them and I was thrown out. I got frustrated as meditation was absent in my conversations with others. Alone and rejected, I began to talk out loud with myself. Because I had been trained as a classical tenor singer, I was used to listening to myself, but this time I was listening to the sound of my voice while I was speaking. At that time this was a totally new experience for me.

To my surprise, when I listened to the sound of my voice while I talked with myself about my depressing situation, I felt peaceful and calm. My attention for the sound of my voice made me aware of what and how I was talking. I was saying to myself: this is how I want to talk! I felt relieved and reassured that I was able to talk like this with others. All I needed to do was to listen to my voice while I speak. However, this turned out to be extremely difficult, even almost impossible. Again and again, I lost my calm voice and was speaking with a voice which sounded upset, agitated, frustrated, fearful and negative. I wanted to speak with my happy voice, with a sound which made me feel at ease, meditative and focused, but I lost it again and again and again. Each time this happened, I went back to my attic and tried to listen to myself and each time, I found back again the sound which made me completely quiet. 

One friend, who was willing to listen to me, let me explain how I wanted to talk with him. He liked it and encouraged me to continue with it. Because of him I got a couple people together with whom we explored the process of listening while we speak. In SVB each speaker is listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. In SVB the speaker is his or her own listener, but other listeners can also hear if and when the speaker is listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. When the speaker is no longer listening to him or herself, while he or she speaks, he or she is producing Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the speaker separates him or herself from the other communicators, who are his or her environment, by assuming the existence of an inner self. 

Being disconnected or isolated from others is a negative emotion and causes us to speak with a sound which is experienced the listener as an aversive stimulus. Oneness with the environment, by contrast, based on feelings of safety, well-being and support, makes us produce an appetitive sound, with which everyone agrees. When the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks, others agree with 100% inter-observer reliability that he or she is listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. Others feel the relaxation of the speaker when he or she produces SVB, but others also feel the sense of stress, anxiety and fear, when the speaker again produces NVB.

SVB is vocal verbal behavior which is no longer controlled by the mentalistic belief in a behavior-managing self. SVB makes us and keeps us conscious. NVB, on the other hand, makes us and keeps us unconscious and causes us to repeat verbal patterns, such as our belief in the inner causation of behavior, repeated in an automatic manner. NVB takes the life out of us and makes us talk in a mechanical, predetermined manner. SVB stimulates awareness and enables us to pay attention to whatever we focus our attention on, but NVB demands, holds and drains our attention and makes us feel depleted.

Our voice is the independent variable and what we say is the dependent variable; a change in our voice changes the conversation. Skinner wrote “When I said “explanation”, I simply meant the causal account. An explanation is the demonstration of a functional relationship between behavior and manipulable or controllable variables.”  SVB and NVB is not only “a system of behavior in terms of which the facts of science can be clearly stated”, it is also a system that can be tested experimentally. The fact that we haven’t done that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t do it. "Third-stage theorizing" doesn’t depend on anyone’s confirmation. Like Skinner, I say “my reinforcers were the discovery of uniformities, the ordering of confusing data, the resolution of puzzlement.” Most certainly, my theory of SVB doesn’t “include elements that are not expressed in the same terms and cannot be confirmed with the same methods of observation and analysis as the facts they are said to address.”

May 20, 2015

May 20, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Today’s writing is my third response to “Behaviorism and the Stages of Scientific Activity” by J. Moore (2010). I am well aware that it sounds pedantic to claim that we don’t know how to maintain Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), that is, scientific vocal verbal behavior. We have acquired scientific written verbal behavior, but in our way of talking we have yet to become scientific. Scientists and scholars continue to write and read about events they would much rather talk about. However, they have been unsuccessful in talking about it. Many books and papers would never have been written, if we could talk properly about the events that are written about. It is like the difference between texting versus calling someone. Sending a text message gives the texter/speaker, a sense of control over the behavior of the reader/listener and this is why people rather text each other than talk with each other. The same is true for writing books or papers. The authors, Skinner included, wish to stick to their talking points and only bring those across. As such they would like to claim something that cannot be refuted by any reader.

The forcefulness of an argument in a conversation is always accompanied by an aversively-sounding voice. Listeners want to escape from such a noxious stimulus, because it threatens them. Thus, in real conversation, a speaker’s speaking is only as good as a listener’s ability to hear and understand what the speaker is saying; reinforcement of the speaker depends on the listener.

Verbal behavior, as Skinner defined it, is “behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons” (Skinner, 1957)The fact that the writer wants to control the behavior of the reader or that the speaker wishes to control the behavior of the listener seems to oppose Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior. Skinner’s definition, which was further elaborated with the additional words that this other person, who reinforces the speaker “must be specifically trained to provide such reinforcement,” tells us that the slave is only capable of reinforcing the slave owner to the extent that he or she was specifically trained to provide such reinforcement. Let there be no mistake about this: the slave was beaten, tortured, humiliated, threatened etc. until he or she obeyed and mediated the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) of his or her master. 

Stated differently, the behavior of the slave owner didn’t lead to an emitted response, but to an elicited response, that is, it resulted in an increase of respondent behavior of the slave. Since the behavior of the slave owner is not operant behavior in the sense that it was reinforced by an emitted response of the slave, it shouldn’t be considered as verbal behavior. Moreover, since the slave is only to behave non-verbally, to do the work and not to behave verbally in any significant way, this slave owner’s way of talking is different from when he or she is talking with a family member. This example makes clear how the slave owner might have SVB with his wife and children, while having NVB with his or her slaves. Similarly, Nazi death camp guards were able to maintain normal family relations while gassing millions of Jews in the concentration camps during the Second World War in Germany. Since the behavior of the slave is respondent behavior and since the threat of the slave owner’s coercive behavior can only be decreased by the slave’s repeated slavish responses, this behavior of the slave is reinforced by negative reinforcement. It occurs because the aversive stimulus, the threat of the punishing presence of the slave owner, will be reduced once the slave exhibits his or her slavish behavior. Furthermore, the slave is likely to have this behavior more often in the future, because he or she wants to avoid or as much as possible remove any of these negative consequences. And, he or she wants to survive. 

Although perhaps less life threatening in everyday conversations, the NVB of the speaker elicits primarily respondent behavior in the listener. Only in SVB is the speaker reinforced by the mediating responses of the listener evoked by the speaker. Poincare (1913), who also had a big influence on Skinner’s way of thinking states “Experiment is the sole source of truth. It alone can teach us anything new. It alone can give us certainty….Merely to observe is not enough. We must use our observations and to do that we must generalize…The scientist must set in order. Science is build up with facts as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” The houses we built, the relationships we had, were based on NVB and just “heaps of stones”. Imaginary bridges, built with NVB, were doomed to collapse, because they couldn’t hold the traffic of so-called relationship, in which the speaker dominated, oppressed and exploited the listener.

Like Skinner, I plant my tongue in my cheek, because I “proceed in a rather Baconian fashion.” The SVB/NVB distinction doesn’t owe anything to any other theoretical approach, not even behaviorism. Behaviorism represents me and I am not needed to represent it. I  am satisfied and reinforced by “manipulating variables selected for study through a common sense exploration of the field.”

To engage in SVB is to experiment and will give the experimenter a certainty which could not have been obtained in any other way. Skinner who boldly stated “Behavior can only be satisfactorily understood by going beyond the facts themselves…Theories are based upon facts; they are statements about organizations of facts….With proper operational care they need nothing more than that.” In SVB, what we say matters – because   of how we say it. It is a spoken theory. Thus, SVB is not, “any explanation of an observed fact which appeals to events which take place somewhere else, at some other level of observation, described in different terms, and measured, if at all, in different dimensions.” Thus, SVB has nothing to do with written verbal behavior. Written theories which refer to events in “the real nervous system, the conceptual system, or the mind” have “led to the continued use of methods which should be abandoned.” Moreover, the small amount of talking that went into teaching these nonsensical theories “which have not stimulated good research on learning and misrepresented the facts to be accounted for” and “gave false assurances about the state of our knowledge”, was mainly based on NVB. SVB questions and debunks these theories. It is as if Skinner was speaking about SVB, when he stated “But such a construction will not refer to another dimensional system and will not therefore fall within our present definition. It will not stand in the way of our search for functional relations because it will arise only after relevant variables have been found and studied. Though it may be difficult to understand, it will not be easily misunderstood, and it will have none of the objectionable effects to the theories here considered. We do not seem to be ready for theory in this sense” (underlining added). I don’t agree with Skinner that we are not ready for such theory. SVB is a matter of experiencing verbal behavior, understanding it is secondary. Once we have SVB, it is effortlessly self-evident and reinforcing. We are not ready because of our NVB. SVB, by contrast, heralds a new era in scientific activity.

May 19, 2015

May 19, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Today’s writing is my second response to “Behaviorism and the Stages of Scientific Activity” by J.Moore (2010). My writing yesterday only led me to the second page of the paper. In the Psychology classes that I teach, I cause Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Although the results I get with my students are  not always the same, SVB is repeatedly achieved and acknowledged.  One student beautifully described SVB as “bringing a positive mood into the room.” He is the caretaker of someone, who waited for the doctor in the hospital and was assigned to watch over this schizophrenic patient. While talking with this patient he realized the regulating response he created in that patient with the sound of his voice. “When we have discovered the laws which govern a part of the world about us, we are then able to deal effectively with that part of the world. By predicting the occurrence of an event we are able to prepare for it. By arranging conditions in ways specified by the laws of a system, we not only predict, we control: we “cause” an event to occur or to assume certain characteristics (Skinner, 1953.)” Thus, SVB absolutely qualifies as a “scientific conception” which is “not passive knowledge” and “is not concerned with contemplation.” It is practical and important in interaction, because it produces “reinforcers from nature”, that is, a natural response of a body due to an appetitive stimulus, a voice. Although I can’t always precisely predict this response with each student, I can so to speak plant a seed, which over the course of a semester begins to grow and which often manifests in their papers, in which they then tell me how much they are affected by SVB. 

“The first step in building a theory is to identify the basic data” says Skinner (1947/1972), who was inspired by Mach. The basic data are Voice I, the sound we have when we produce NVB, according to the listener, or Voice II, the sound we have when we produce SVB, according to the listener. It is the listener’s perception of the speaker which determines whether it is SVB or NVB. If the listener says it is NVB, it is also NVB to the speaker, but if the listener says it is SVB, then and only then, is it SVB to the speaker. The speaker doesn’t determine whether it is SVB, although the speaker can learn to have SVB more often by having listeners acknowledge and reinforce it.  

As we have not considered these crucially important universal subsets of vocal verbal behavior, we have arrived at the second stage of theory building, which supposedly involved the relations among data, but which was based on the exclusion of the most relevant data, that is, how we sound while we speak. According to Skinner, the science of mechanics could only get off the ground, because Galileo was “restricting himself to a limited set of data.” It is just as hard for us today to restrict ourselves to Voice I and Voice II, while we talk, as it was for Galileo to be only concerned with “the positions of bodies at given times, rather than with their color, hardness or size.” This was of tremendous importance in the process of theory building, because then, and only then, was Galileo able to proceed “to demonstrate the relation between position and time – the position of a ball on an inclined plan and the time which had elapsed since its release. Something else then emerged – namely, the concept of acceleration. Later, as other facts were added, other concepts appeared – mass, force, and so on.” Since it is so easily dismissed, disturbed or made impossible, we have not continuously and deliberately explored what talking would be like when we are and remain at ease with one another. 

The third stage of theory building, as Skinner has argued “are something more than the second-stage laws from which they are derived. They are peculiarly the product of theory-making in the best sense, and they cannot be arrived at through any other process.” I have come to these products of theory-making by continuing SVB and by learning to control and decrease NVB. How did I see NVB was caused and maintained by overestimating the importance of writing and reading and by underestimating the importance of speaking and listening? How was I able to recognize that SVB is scientific vocal verbal behavior and NVB is pre-scientific vocal verbal behavior? How did I know to give my students the instruction to write a paper, which had to start with the sentence “when I listen to the sound of my voice while I speak, then..”, and they would produce a profound paper? How is it that students, due to this assignment, in which they experimented with listening to themselves while they speak, by themselves, attained “a new conception of the individual as a locus of a system of variables” and were able, at least temporarily, to “abolish the conception of the individual as a doer, as an originator of action” and found this not a difficult, but an enjoyable task? I predicted it! 

In my first stage of theory building, I restricted myself to only two subsets of vocal verbal behavior: SVB and NVB. These are my data. In each verbal episode, in each conversation, meeting or lecture, instances of SVB and NVB alternate. Most important aspect about the relationship between SVB and NVB is: they are mutually exclusive. The second stage of theory building involved a continuing going back and forth between SVB and NVB and the inevitable realization that we are momentarily overtaken by something as long as we are engage in NVB and we are coming to our senses, we become conscious only in SVB. When Skinner states “psychologists have never made a thoroughgoing renunciation of the inner man”, he was saying they have not yet renounced NVB. Since Skinner was very aware of what was reinforcing to him and what was not, he was continuously managing his environment and thus he was an advocate of SVB. This is audible in how he sounds. I like to listen to Skinner as he produces much higher rates of SVB while he speaks than anyone else. 

In my third stage of theory building, I mapped SVB and NVB on human development, which ranges from a nonverbal, womb-like sense of safety to a verbal, but mentalistic way of talking, due to which even behaviorists still maintain a belief in a self. It is only in writing that behaviorists have been able to renounce the self, but in talking they have remained as involved in NVB as everyone else. SVB and NVB are “scientific statements” that “are derived from contact with events and are ultimately applicable to events.” To reiterate, SVB and NVB are not just hypothetical constructs, but are “anchored to human behavior.” My first stage of theory building is based on the fact that Voice I is the independent variable, that causes and maintains the dependent variable NVB and Voice II is the independent variable that causes and maintains the dependent variable SVB. If circumstances are such that SVB is reinforced, NVB will not be reinforced; if circumstances are such that NVB is reinforced, then SVB will not be reinforced. Second stage makes clear that SVB and NVB cannot be simultaneously reinforced; from moment to moment, one or the other is reinforced. At the third stage of theory building SVB describes a  new sense of order, which we may have already noted and tried to talk about, but which eluded us due to our lack of knowledge about how to maintain SVB.

May 18, 2015

May 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Today’s writing is inspired by the paper on “Behaviorism and the Stages of Scientific Activity” by J. Moore (2010). In the abstract Moore tells the reader  that he will be ‘discussing’ a “three-stage progression”, which “starts with a) identification of basic data, then moves to b) description of relation among those data, and ultimately concludes with c) the deployment of higher order concepts in statements about organizations of data.” Moreover, Moore views “theory and explanations as examples of verbal processes at the later stages, guided by stimulus control from the earlier stages.” His main point is that “many mentalistic assumptions about causal entities and relations” give rise to theories which lack “the benefit of suitable stimulus control from the earlier stages” which is essential to a behaviorist account.  

Although Moore emphasizes that much of the behavior of scientist is verbal and that “the artifacts in question are verbal products”, he doesn’t mention anywhere in his paper that scientist talk with each other. This fact seems to be unimportant to him, because only “the common terms associated in doing science” supposedly matter. His “analysis of the underlying verbal processes as they have played out over time”, doesn’t contain any remark about the datum scientists used to talk about, but nowadays only seem to write about. When one thinks about how these “first laws and theories of a science were probably rules developed by artisans and craftsmen who worked in a given area”, one envisions people talking with each other. Someone who is good at, and reinforced by his skill, is likely to pass on his trade lovingly and thankfully, to the next generation. 

In this scenario much more is going on than merely some “descriptions of the effect brought about by relevant practices” which “were then codified in the form of verbal statements that functioned as verbal stimuli.” Indeed, the aforementioned romantic picture is drastically changed, when Moore adds that the purpose of these verbal stimuli is to “occasion effective action, if only among subordinates.” Verbal stimuli that only serve the purpose to get someone to do as they are told, that is, to only follow orders, are aversive. 

In Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the speaker aversively controls the behavior of the listener. In the example in which the listener is expected to do as he or she is told, as he or she is ordered, the verbal behavior of the speaker results in the nonverbal behavior of the listener. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), by contrast, in which the hierarchical, predetermined role division between speaker and listener is absent, the verbal behavior of the speaker, evokes and invites the verbal behavior of the listener. In SVB, in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an appetitive contingency, the listener becomes the speaker, but in NVB the listener is confined to remaining the listener, by behaving, by obeying, nonverbally. 

The only verbal behavior which occurs in the listener during NVB is private speech, which is anxiously kept out of public speech. Since this NVB covert speech is kept out of public speech as much as possible, it is difficult to trace it back to its origins, which is, coercive, punitive public speech. Thus, the trade that was passed on with love and care led to a different kind of verbal behavior than what was taught in an aversive manner. The former led to SVB, the latter led to NVB. Since the NVB hierarchical way of talking dominated mankind’s history, even today most of our conversations fall into this subset of vocal verbal behavior. Although the goal of NVB is to basically enslave the listener and to make him or her do nonverbally what the speaker wants, this is always achieved by the emphasis on “verbal statements, often taking the form of maxims or other informal expressions (e.g. rules of thumb)”, which would then supplement or replace “private or idiosyncratic forms of stimulus control.” 

As subjective, private speech was to be kept out of supposedly objective public speech, so that “verbal stimuli” could become “public property”, mankind, in the name of scientific progress, maintained the hierarchical structure which causes NVB. Moreover, because we have yet to become scientific about talking, we have with NVB maintained a culturally sanctioned belief in an inner self. 

With the SVB/NVB distinction it becomes easier to see how all sorts of verbal acrobatics are deliberately used to exploit people their nonverbal work. The rules, sanctified now as scientific rules, definitely give us a sense of order, but this is not, in my opinion, the order which Skinner was thinking about when he wrote “Walden II”.  In “Science and Human Behavior” (1953) Skinner writes “ [Science] is a search for order, for uniformities, for lawful relations among the events in nature. It begins as we all begin, by observing single episodes, but it quickly passes on to the general rule, to scientific law…” A different kind of order emerges in speakers and listeners who take turns, whose conversation is based on reciprocal reinforcement. In SVB, the well-being of the speaker and the listener are guaranteed.  'Order' created by NVB and kept in place by coercion, is not scientific. Forcefulness with which this order is superimposed on nature is reminiscent of an angry god-figure, who demands to have things his way. The verbal demands placed on us have been so overwhelming, that we haven’t even started “observing single episodes” of SVB and NVB, because that involves a shift from our verbal to our nonverbal behavior, while we speak. Only if we listen to ourselves while we speak can we identify SVB.

In this writing I am talking with the reader about Moore’s paper. I only talk about Moore or Skinner because behaviorism can explain SVB and NVB. There is a great difference between these subcategories of vocal verbal behavior, which have not yet been mentioned anywhere. I claim that only SVB is scientific and that NVB is always biased. Our way of talking matters a great deal for how science is done and what we are doing with science. We must consider Skinner’s pragmatism. In “Contingencies of Reinforcement” (1969) he writes “Scientific laws also specify or imply responses and their consequences. They are not, of course, obeyed by nature, but by man who deal effectively with nature.” Skinner was not talking about one man obeying another man, but he was speaking about man obeying nature, in order to deal effectively with nature. He stated “Science is in a large part a direct analysis of reinforcing systems found in nature; it is concerned with facilitating the behavior which is reinforced by them…The point of science…is to analyze the contingencies of reinforcement found in nature and to formulate rules or laws which make it unnecessary to be exposed to them in order to behave appropriately.” In my view Skinner was indicating SVB, which is behavior which is reinforced by “reinforcing systems found in nature.” NVB, by contrast, is reinforced by one man’s ability to oppress other men, or by men obeying other men and, most importantly, by continuously demonstrating this by the way in which we talk.