October
7, 2015
Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S.
Verbal Engineer
Dear Reader,
This
writing is my eleventh response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers
Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). To hammer home my message that we, no matter how much we
talk, to our own detriment, ignore auditory stimuli, how we sound, but get
carried away by visual stimuli, by what we say, here is another one of
Skinner’s statements, which clearly indicates that he, like most of us, was
conditioned by NVB: “I am not overlooking the advance that is made in
the unification of knowledge when terms at one level of analysis are defined
(‘‘explained’’) at a lower level.” (underlining added by me). Skinner, who is
known to choose his words very carefully, didn’t and couldn’t write: ‘I am not
deaf to’ the “advance that is made in the unification of knowledge”. Although
he surely had a lot of SVB, he apparently had not enough of it to be able to
write about the great importance of the sound of our voice in “the unification
of knowledge.”
I think that Skinner would
agree with me that the SVB/NVB distinction is worth exploring. He stated “I
agree with Carmichael [1936] that those concepts which do not make
physiological formulation impossible and which are amenable to growing
physiological knowledge are preferable, other things being equal, to those that
are not so amenable (p. 440).” SVB does “not make physiological formulation
impossible.” Moreover, is makes physiological experience possible. In SVB, the
speaker obtains physiological, that is, experiential knowledge, which is both shared
and agreed upon by the listener. Skinner is referring to this bi-directionality
when he states that “neuroscience benefits from a science of behavior at least
as much as a science of behavior benefits from neuroscience.” I like to rephrase
that into ‘the speaker benefits from the listener at least as much as the
listener benefits from the speaker.’ We can have SVB.
Instead of lamenting about
the “potential benefits of the integration of behavioral and neural
observation”, I propose the integration between the speaker and the listener,
while we speak, because only that will make this “the integration of behavioral
and neural observation” into a reality. Stated differently, due to the ubiquity
of NVB, we haven’t been able to make much progress with the unification of the
sciences. This is not at all surprising since scientists are mainly involved in
writing and reading, but not in talking and listening. In other words, scientists
as well as academicians and scholars are almost never astounded by what anyone
says. They seem to have lost the ability to be amazed. However, behaviorists
should take note of the fact that “Prior behavioral work had indicated that, in
addition to temporal contiguity, putative reinforcing stimuli were effective
only if, speaking nontechnically, the reinforcer was ‘‘surprising’’
(Kamin, 1968; Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) (underlining done by me). I find it
fascinating how these authors are struggling trying to write something which
obviously needs to be said.
Lack of surprise is
characteristic for NVB, but SVB will once again fill us with wonder. SVB too can
be defined as “surprise” and “may be given”
the same “technical definition at the behavioral level as a discrepancy between
the response evoked by the reinforcing stimulus (the unconditioned response, or
UR) and the level of that same response in the environment in which
the operant and reinforcer occur (the conditioned response, or CR) (cf.
Vaughan).” Described here is that the voice
of the speaker can induce positive affect in the listener’s body. Although many
words are spoken this is a nonverbal phenomenon. The “surprise” experienced by
the listener, is absence of NVB, that is, the induction of negative affect. In
SVB there is attunement between the speaker’s experience and the listener’s
experience; they experience the same response. Thus, SVB can also be explained
as an experience in which the environment within the skin of the speaker is
understood to be one with the environment that is within the skin of the
listener. The oneness of the natural world can finally be accurately expressed
in SVB.
Although behaviorists agree
that “a putative reinforcer strengthens environment–behavior relations when there
is a contiguous CR–UR discrepancy (Donahoe, Crowley, Millard, & Stickney, 1982;
cf. Rescorla, 1968), problems have remained with “measurement of the CR and
UR.” I think that this is caused by NVB. It can and it will be solved by
SVB. Rather than correlating behavioral
measures to “the underlying neural activity that mediates conditioning”, we can
correlate SVB and NVB with sets of our own experiences which are either positive
or negative. In SVB we have no complete, but definitely an increased access to our
personal history of reinforcement which “mediates” our “conditioning.”
“General principles arise as
inductions from the experimental
analysis of particular public
observations.” I think behaviorists need to make inductions that are
based on public listenings rooted in SVB, in which speakers listen to
themselves while they speak. To make this happen, they must put a moratorium on
their biased emphasis on public observations. In other words, behaviorists must
stop visualizing.