December 5, 2015

December 5, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my fifth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (O’Donohue et al., 1998). “The radical behaviorist must assume that it is “the organism as a whole that behaves” (Skinner, 1975, p.44). Behaviors such as thoughts, beliefs and desires must be examined in relation to the organism’s environmental setting.” 

You, my dear reader, most likely only have had a few experiences of yourself “as a whole that behaves.” Accidental, fleeting moments in which you were able to acknowledge the truth of this assertion were usually explained as some kind of ‘religious’ experience as you didn’t  have any scientific language to describe it. However, once you know the difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), you will know that SVB is the speech of discovering, acknowledging and understanding the reality, while NVB is the speech of covering up, dissociating from and wrongly describing the reality.

As long as you don’t know the difference between SVB and NVB, you will have no other choice than to continue your non-scientific discourse, in which you think and believe that you can create your own reality. Due to NVB, you still believe that you can look inside of yourself to see why you are doing something wrong. Only to the extent that your NVB has been stopped could SVB stimulate you to listen to and speak with your external environment, as speakers, who listened to themselves while they spoke, stimulated you to listen to yourself while you spoke.

Only in SVB do we come to terms with “the hitherto inexplicable” and are we able to “reduce any supposed inner contribution which has served in lieu of explanation” (Skinner, 1975, p. 47). The common belief that “explanations reside inside the organism” is maintained by one particular way of talking. Unless you identify NVB as the response class that is based on negative emotions, which are the consequence of hierarchical differences, you will not be able to discover, explore, enjoy and create the environments and the people who maintain SVB as your way of talking will be based on fear, anger, hate, shame and guilt. Lack of scientific progress in psychology has resulted not only from the fact that radical behaviorism was misunderstood and misrepresented. Neither radical behaviorism nor psychology has accurately described or explained the high rates of NVB which prevent scientific discourse.