October 10, 2015

October 10, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my fourteenth response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). Another way of addressing what I was writing about was that the molecular perspective sets the stage for Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), while the molar perspective sets the stage for Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).  Although I haven’t talked with them, the paper tells me the authors are capable of some SVB, as they didn’t see any reason to build their career around the molar-molecular distinction. 

Had I become familiar with his work years earlier, I would have, like the authors “nothing to add to Skinner’s position as supplemented by normative philosophy of science.” However, as I was not drilled into rigid behavioral thinking, I was able to come up with the SVB/NVB distinction. This distinction became clear to me as I made public , to myself, my private speech. I began to listen to my own sound, while I speak and thus I discovered SVB and NVB, in which I don’t listen to myself while I speak. It is the transition from private speech, which can’t be listened to, to public speech, which can be listened to, which sets the stage for SVB. Contingencies involving the exclusion of private speech from public speech keep setting the stage for NVB. SVB assigns an important role to private stimuli, because private stimuli are part of speech. “Our approach to conditioning assigns an important role to internal (private) stimuli (viz., Field; McIlvane & Dube), including those produced by motivational operations (viz., Michael). Clearly, such stimuli are essential to any comprehensive account of behavior.”

I disagree with the author’s “emphasis upon the control of behavior by environmental [external] stimuli” and consider this as a consequence of the high rates of NVB, which surrounds them on a daily basis. If they had higher rates of SVB, they would have found, that internal stimuli are more rather than less “directly manipulable” than external stimuli. Moreover, had they known about the SVB/NVB distinction, they would have been able to have more SVB and would have found a multitude of internal variables, which are “readily subjected to experimental analysis.” In SVB we verify that our “private events are ultimately traceable to the action of events that originate in the environment.”

During SVB, the listener and the speaker recognize that the listener, who mediates the verbal behavior of the speaker, as well as the speaker, who is reinforced by the listener, are indeed each other’s environment. In other words, neither the speaker nor the listener causes his or her own behavior. During SVB conversation this is not merely an interpretation, but a tangible shared experience, which is entirely different from the absence of such an experience in NVB. The contrast between SVB and NVB is such that there is very little left to be guessed. Our conversation is an empirical event when internal stimuli are expressed in our public speech as vocal verbal behavior in SVB.

Absence of SVB made these authors write “It is primarily with regard to interpretation rather than experimental analysis that internal stimuli make an appearance in LCB.” The reason that nothing about SVB was published in peer-reviewed journals is because I found this writing more important and reinforcing. I don’t want to be judged about what I say by what I write. I rather have the opposite: judge what I write by what I say, by how I speak. Engage in SVB with me and everything I write here will become clear. Without engaging in SVB, you will think that this doesn’t conform to what you know about behaviorism. If that happens to be the case, so be it. This writing is the cumulative record of my behavior. These results are mine alone. You can have SVB too, but you can’t accomplish these results by reading and writing. There needs to be SVB interaction between you and me. 

We keep having NVB as we don’t differentiate between SVB and NVB. Once we do that it becomes clear that we want to have SVB, but we simply don’t know how to have it. It is no exaggeration to state that we are deprived of SVB. If we achieve it all, we only do so in an accidental, momentary fashion. We have never achieved SVB deliberately, reliably, consistently, skillfully and consciously, yet this is the only way in which it can be maintained. Our inability to achieve and maintain SVB makes us do all sorts of other things, which don’t accomplish it and prevent us from accomplishing it. These behaviors, all related to NVB, need to be decreased before we can increase SVB.

“In our formulation, deprivation may affect behavior in several ways (LCB, pp. 35–36). For one, by depriving an organism of contact with a stimulus, that stimulus typically becomes a more vigorous elicitor of behavior.” Emergence of pathological behaviors can be explained. “As such, the stimulus is able to function as a more effective reinforcer because its presentation evokes a larger behavioral discrepancy.” This evocation of a “larger behavioral discrepancy” leads to development of adaptive as well as maladaptive behaviors. NVB is a maladaptive behavior that prevents positive interaction and relationship. If we replace “stimulus” with person or speaker and if, because of his or her NVB, “the organism”, that is, someone else or the listener, is “deprived from contact with that stimulus”, that is, from the speaker, it becomes apparent that the speaker’s verbal behavior plays a crucial role in the maintenance of maladaptive behaviors of the listener. NVB speakers can’t ever endorse SVB. The listener who is always aversively influenced by such a NVB speaker will inadvertently behave ineffectively.

If the condition of inescapable aversive stimulation continues, it will surely create pathological behavior. It has been fascinating for me to work at a psychiatric hospital, where I was able to introduce patients to SVB. Nobody reinforces SVB more than those who are presumed to have a mental illness. How is this possible? Although they are troubled, about one thing they are clear: they immediately recognize SVB. While I was a Ph.D. candidate and gave groups during my practicum at John George Psychiatric Hospital in San Leandro, California, the staff stood by and was amazed by my ability to communicate calmly with so many people so quickly and so effortlessly. I started a conversation with just one person, but soon others would gather as they noticed something unusual was happening. Patients urged me to teach SVB to the hospital staff. They told me the staff mainly gave them NVB. I withdrew from my Ph.D. study as I could not tolerate the high rates of NVB in academia. At the time, I was still ignorant about behaviorism, but because I withdrew from this hostile Ph.D. environment, I was able to discover and study on my own the science which explains what I have practiced for years.