April 9, 2016

April 9, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In “Religion as Schedule-Induced Behavior” (2009) Strand did a great job in trying to make a stand for a behavior-analytic account of religion. He writes “Distinguishing between these two forms of religious behavior [graceful-effortless and effortful-purposeful- functional] is so fundamental to religious scholarship that to ignore it in the service of explaining religion is to explain something other than religion. And yet the distinction is ignored by traditional behavior-analytic (Schoenfield, 1993) and evolutionary (Dawkins, 2006; Dennett 2006) writers of religion” [parentheses by this writer]. 

Strand wrote about these matters and his writing was of course a function of how he has been speaking about these matters. The lack of specificity of how we are able to talk about these matters is determined by our Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Stated differently, Strand seems to want to have a Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), that is, conversation about religion. It is interesting to note here that a SVB conversation must be a behaviorist conversation.  

Unless behaviorists acquire SVB, the science of human behavior cannot improve human relationship. Unlike other behaviorists, Skinner had a lot of SVB. Like Skinner, Strand ‘speaks’ with his writing to this writer. He must have had a lot of SVB that he is able to write like that. His distinction between, on the one hand, foundational, effortless religious behavior as “response-independent”, that is, as respondent behavior and, on the other hand, acquired, effortful, religious behavior as operant behavior, makes total sense. Strand’s analysis that acquired religious behavior “are operants that are functional from the perspective of how the individual interacts within the worldly contingencies”, makes it seem as if there are other contingencies than “worldly contingencies.” What he is referring to is, of course, a person’s covert, private speech, mediated by his or her neural behavior. A person’s covert self-talk is a function of the overt public speech he or she has been engaged in. The person who was mainly conditioned by NVB public speech, inevitably acquires NVB private speech. Thus, acquired, effortful religious behavior derives from NVB public speech and foundational, effortless religious behavior derives from SVB public speech.  What SVB and NVB have in common with these two religious behaviors is that they are both induced.