June 7, 2016

June 7, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In Operants, the behaviorist’ online magazine, the daughter of B.F. Skinner, Julie Vargas writes about men’s inability to deal with the facts of human behavior. “Science does not include non-material agencies as causes of physical, biological, or behavioral events”. The only reason she needs to write about this fact is that we still can’t talk about it!

If we could talk about facts, there would be much less of a need to write about them. We no longer write about the fact that the earth is round because we talk about it. It should be clear by now that the way of talking which makes dissemination of scientific facts possible cannot be the same as our usual way of talking.

I call our unscientific way of talking Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) because the speaker aversively affects the listener. This happens and is allowed to happen as the speaker is presumably better, higher or more powerful, important or intelligent than the listener.

What the NVB speaker says is true, not because he or she expresses facts, but because he or she can force his or her bias onto the reality, the listener. In NVB there will obviously be no turn-taking. Thus, it is the separation of speaker and listener which perpetuates the pre-scientific idea of a behavior-causing self.

If Vargas had acknowledged this fact, she would address our most important failing “procedure”: how we talk. Moreover, if she would explore the SVB/NVB distinction, she would acknowledge that these universal response classes occur because of two different contingencies.

Rather than beating a dead horse and for the fifth million time lament the belief in a behavior–causing inner-agent, she would describe the contingency which is necessary for the stimulation and maintenance of SVB and discuss the contingency which perpetuates NVB.

Interestingly, Vargas writes “behavior exists within our skins of course.” My question is: to what extent are we allowed to express, and capable of expressing, what occurs within our own skin in our public speech?

We find ourselves mainly in circumstances in which expressing what is within our skin is not allowed, in which SVB is impossible. Thus “the relation between existing actions, their results and the circumstances in which those relations exist” cannot be talked about.