June 6, 2016

June 6, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

The question “What do you do if your usual procedures aren’t working?” is answered by the president of the Skinner Foundation, Julie Vargas with a statement by her father. He described science “first of all as an attitude. It is a disposition to deal with the facts, rather than what one has said about them.” 

Julie asks “What are “facts?” She answers “Facts are descriptions about how the world works”. I think about Skinner’s words. According to him, what we say about the facts is not as important as what we do with them.

If we take into consideration the sad fact that most spoken communication in academia is Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), it is understandable Skinner didn’t care very much for what people said about the facts. 

Dealing with the facts of behavior was more important to him than talking about it in a Noxious Verbal Behavior manner which ignores the facts, which shuts us up and which makes environmental variables inaudible.

Skinner pretty much felt that his involvement in NVB was a total waste of time. It is important that we now finally learn to recognize NVB as an unscientific way of talking. It is only in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) that we can talk about and thus acknowledge the facts. 

We can only have scientific conversation as long as we engage in SVB and adhere to the facts about speaking and listening. Each time the speaker aversively affects the listener, our communication breaks down. NVB is NOT communication, but coercion, separation, alienation,  domination, exploitation, alienation and dissociation.

The most important fact about our spoken communication is that it can only occur in an environment which is free of aversive stimulation. So-called communication or NVB, which goes on in aversive environments, has been accepted as normal as we don’t know how to create and maintain the environment in which SVB can occur.