June 27, 2016

June 27, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my twelfth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). These authors, who don’t know anything about the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) / Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction, try to understand why students have problems accepting behaviorism and why folk psychology still remains such an epistemological barrier.

Once we know about the SVB/NVB distinction, we realize that NVB maintains all our superstitions and that SVB is a scientific way of talking. Also, the “Fundamental Attribution Error” which deals with a person’s tendency “to place greater emphasis on internal explanations for behavior rather than on external ones” (Jellison & Green, 1981), must be explained differently.

Why is it that “Internal explanations of behavior are common and serve to minimize the role of environmental variables?” It is because of how we talk. In NVB, we minimize the important role of our public speech in our private speech. Presumably, how we talk with ourselves is caused by us, but this absolutely wrong. We talk with ourselves privately, that is, we think, in the same way as others have talked with us publicly.

As a consequence of our involvement in and our exposure to NVB public speech, we acquire negative self-talk. Our thinking about ourselves and each other is negative because in NVB the speaker separates him or herself from the listener. Separation of the speaker and the listener involves conflict between people, but also within each person.

It is because of NVB that, when we observe someone’s else’s actions, we have the tendency to overestimate the influence of that person’s internal characteristics on behavior (disposition) and to underestimate the influence of the situation. Also, it is because of NVB that when we explain our own behavior we use situational attributions. In SVB we recognize that other people just like us are affected by the situation.   

June 26, 2016

June 26, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my eleventh response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). “The extent to which a student initially finds an approach acceptable or problematic” is determined by how the teacher speaks. If a teacher has Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the student will find his or her approach acceptable, but if he or she has Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the student will find his or her approach problematic.

“Folk psychology as an explanatory system is not likely to be eliminated in the near future (Horgan & Woodward, 1990; Richards, 1997; Churchland (1991)” since people know damn well when they are being spoken at or when they are being spoken with. The fact that everyone who is introduced to the SVB/NVB distinction agrees with it shows there is validity in folk psychology which we have yet to acknowledge.

The authors underestimate the power of folk psychology as a “framework of concepts” that is “roughly adequate to the demands of everyday life.” If it was only “roughly adequate” people wouldn’t hang on to it. Why are mental events “thought to play the most important causal roles in human action?” It is because of how we talk, that is, it is because we mostly keep having NVB.

With NVB “there is little reason to move beyond the inner life of the person as the source of explanations for his or her behavior”, only SVB gives us the reason to do this. In SVB we include our private speech again into our public speech. What explains the tenacity of folk psychology, in spite of all the scientific evidence? 

Why is it that “Folk psychology takes these internal causes to be so important, ubiquitous, proximate, and powerful that there is little emphasis upon environmental or external causes of human behavior?” Assumed “internal causes” refer to private speech, which, in NVB is kept out of public speech. Thus, folk psychology could continue because of the separation of our private speech from public speech. 

June 25, 2016

June 25, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my tenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). Even today, in 2016, we still have creationists, who argue that “the species were fixed because

God would only make a perfect creation.” The authors state “the notion of an ever-changing species contained in Darwin's account ran directly counter to this theological view.” As one person is saying this and the other person is saying something else, all our attention goes to what we are saying and presumably we then have a difference of opinion. 

Nobody is listening to anybody when our so-called communication is based on a struggle for attention.  Moreover, we all want others to listen to us. While we emphasize the importance of listening to others, we have Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) in which we are NOT listening to ourselves. We only do that during Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB).

We are familiar with the saying: it is not what you say, but how you say it, but this saying doesn’t make any difference in monitoring how we sound while we speak. Such a saying expresses a listener’s perspective which is generally not listened to by the speaker. Speakers are bound to be offended when they are made aware by the listeners of how they dominate and force the conversation with the way in which they sound.

Telling speakers that they need to sound better doesn’t result into SVB. It only stimulates more NVB, which is always based on 1) struggle for attention, 2) outward orientation, and 3) fixation on the verbal. We, the speaker and the listener, can only come together during SVB in which each speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. 

The paper, which is a written version of NVB didn’t make a dent in dissolving “epistemological barriers.” It is because of NVB “the student of psychology comes to the field with commitments rooted in folk psychological beliefs.” Teacher’s need to address how he or she speaks!

June 24, 2016

June 24, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my ninth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). I have talked with enough people to be sure that nobody has really any problem accepting the fact that the world is not flat or the center of the universe.

It is because of how we talk that many don’t understand nor accept Darwin’s that theory “removed humans from their special place at the pinnacle of the biblical hierarchy of animals, stipulating that the processes of evolution through natural selection that operated on all animals had operated, and continues to operate, on humans as well.”

Amazingly, this conclusion has not been made; those who understand, but who still have superstitions, maintain these by their way of talking. Addressing “epistemological barriers” without even addressing the fact that they are a function of how we talk with each other is nonsense.  

The world is not in a chaos because of different conflicting theories or philosophies, but because of how we talk. The point I am making is that we are not talking as long as our theories and philosophies don’t match. We only assume we are talking, while we maintain our outdated beliefs.

The way of talking which makes us hang on to falsehoods is Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). It is a way of talking in which the speaker demands the attention from the listener. During NVB different speakers with different beliefs struggle to get each other’s attention. The struggle for attention and attempts to dominate the conversation are characteristics of NVB. 

The scientific way of talking, in which we are looking at and listening to the facts, is Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). During SVB communicators have a positive effect on each other because of how they sound. They agree that barriers are always caused by aversive-sounding speakers. They are intellectually engaged as no attention is drawn to negative emotions. SVB is scientific because we maintain our positive emotions.  

June 23, 2016

June 23, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my eight response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). Many times in the history of science new findings weren’t accepted as people were mired by their old beliefs. Our technological society is based on science, yet most of us have no clue how this all came about and how science contradicts all our ideas about ourselves and about reality. The gap between what we know and what we believe is so big that it is creating many problems.

It makes no sense to write about the “Epistemological Barriers to Behaviorism” without addressing the fact that superstition has always hindered each scientific development. Behaviorism is not special in that sense. Although epistemological barriers have been and continue to be a stand in the way, they could never prevent development of science.

I think it is a misunderstanding to assume an “epistemological obstacle to the Copernican system is to be found in its displacement of the earth as the center of the universe.” The fact that people couldn’t directly perceive the earth revolving around the sun and around its own axis was never really the problem. The real problem was and has always been how we have talked with each other.

What has always been the problem is that educated speakers, produce Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and, in one way or another “challenge” the uneducated “listener’s “views of a single, unmoving and unchanging Heaven.” In NVB the sound of the speaker’s voice is perceived by the listener as an aversive stimulus. We have yet to acknowledge that this contingency has never been and is never going to be conducive to learning. 

As long as the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) of the speaker was lacking, he or she was unable to provide an appetitive learning- contingency to the listener. I think that listeners will readily accept the “Copernican, heliocentric account” from a skilled SVB speaker. They always did.