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.