November 23, 2015

November 23, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In yesterday’s class students were asked to fill out feedback forms about my teaching. It only took about ten minutes. When I came back into class, I noticed an enormous difference. They had given their opinion. They had expressed what they thought of me and had brought their private speech into public speech. The atmosphere in the class had shifted and a deeper dialogue took place which had not happened and could not have happen before.

In today’s writing I address some of the points which were made by Jay Moore in his tutorial “Cognitive psychology as a radical behaviorist views it (2013).” In this tedious paper, he explains that the essentials of cognitive psychology, which, in my opinion, would be better summarized as inner-agent-psychology, have been with us since ancient Greek times and were passed on by the likes of Descartes, Kant, Freud, Piaget and Chomsky. I refer only to few parts of this paper as they are relevant to my extension of radical behaviorism: the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)/ Noxious Verbal Behavior(NVB) distinction.

I am not interested in how cognitive psychologists view radical behaviorists in the same way that I am not interested in how NVB communicators view SVB communicators. As someone who has been exposed to, who knows about and is capable of producing high rates of SVB, I am well aware that it makes absolutely no sense at all for me to waste my time on those who are, due to their behavioral history, only capable of producing high rates of NVB and very low rates of SVB. Their view of SVB is meaningless, but explaining their view becomes meaningful, the moment we are able to consider the facts about their NVB from a SVB point of view.

When Skinner wrote “Cognitive science is the creation science of psychology, as it struggles to maintain the position of a mind or self” (1990, p. 1209), he wasn’t describing a “referential, symbolic view of verbal behavior,” according to which “terms refer to or symbolically represent things in another dimension called meaning”, but he was expressing “a behavioral view of verbal behavior”, according to which “meaning is a function of contingencies.” An English speaker only uses the word “meaning” under circumstances in which the word meaning has meaning, that is, when he or she is in the company of other English-speaking speakers. Moore states “for the speaker, meaning is a function of the contingencies which control the emission of the term.”

In the example of the English speaker, the word meaning only has meaning in the company of another English speaker. However, the word meaning loses its meaning - even if it is repeatedly spoken in the company of an English listener - if this listener is not allowed to mediate, to confirm, to agree with, to validate, the meaning of the word meaning. In other words, if the English listener is not allowed to be an English speaker, the meaning of the word meaning will be lost to the listener, that is, it will be imposed on the listener by the coercive, insensitive speaker.

This is exactly what happens in NVB in which the speaker affects the listener with a negative contingency. In NVB the speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener as an aversive stimulus. The separation between the speaker and the listener, which is caused by the sound of the speaker’s voice, also determines that the verbal behavior of the speaker is no longer mediated by the listener. Moore writes “For the listener, meaning is a function of the contingencies into which the term enters a form of verbal discriminative stimulation.” How is the listener to verbally discriminate, if he or she is repeatedly punished for becoming a speaker and is reinforced to dissociate? The listener who cannot become a speaker is unable to discriminate the meaning of the word meaning. As long as this listener remains under control of the aversive contingency created by the speaker, he or she will remain confused about the meaning of the word meaning. Only the contingency, in which such confused, dis-regulated listener can become a speaker, can reveal the coercive, abusive, alienating meaning of the word meaning, which was forced upon the listener by the speaker, who kept punishing him or her for speaking.

I disagree with Moore, who writes “The bottom line is that we miss events and relations in the one dimension that are relevant to our understanding of behavior.” (underlining added by me). I think understanding is overrated at the expense of experiencing. I think that "we miss events and relations" having to do with our” experience of our own vocal verbal behavior. Understanding is secondary to experiencing vocal verbal behavior and without experiencing it our understanding is totally wrong. Moreover, only the listener who is stimulated to become a SVB speaker is able to experience his or her own vocal verbal behavior in such a manner. The contingency which stimulates the listener to become a voice-experiencing speaker, is the one in which the speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener as an appetitive, positive, reinforcing stimulus. In SVB speakers speak with, but in NVB speak at the listener. NVB is selected because as of yet we don’t know how to create the contingencies in which SVB can occur. Will we continue to be changed by environments to engage in NVB or will we learn to create and maintain environments which can give rise to SVB? If these written words are spoken in the described manner we will have SVB.