August 5, 2016

August 5, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my seventh response to “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). It is so helpful to read this paper as it allows me to illustrate the difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The radical behaviorist is someone who is “content for the most part simply to describe whatever natural consistency he can actually see, and to hope that the report he makes of his observations will in turn generate ultimately more productive behavior in the control of human affairs.” 

Someone who knows the SVB/NVB distinction, however, would not describe “whatever consistency he can actually see,” but whatever consistency he can actually hear. Indeed, someone who recognizes the SVB/NVB distinction would never be “content for the most part to describe whatever natural consistency he can actually see.” Such contentment omits an analysis of consistencies which cannot be seen, but which can only be heard. The distinction between SVB and NVB requires each speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks.

Without the activation of the speaker-as-own-listener we will remain unknowingly trapped by NVB. SVB, which is “more productive behavior in the control of human affairs,” will be possible only when we can distinguish between SVB and NVB, but we don’t and can’t listen to this difference as long as the speaker-as-own-listener is not activated. 

“Only the analysis of behavior” which is based on listening “will lead someday to a more trustworthy set of guidelines for the acquisition of knowledge.” For most radical behaviorists that day has yet to arrive.

The lack of attention for listening is quite apparent in the words which Day uses. He asks the reader to “consider several illustrations of this point of view” (italics added). However, this overemphasis on visual stimuli, which, of course, again and again sets the stage for NVB, is not unique to radical behaviorism. Once one starts looking for it, one finds references to visual stimuli everywhere in most other scientific papers, but there is hardly any mention anywhere at all of auditory stimuli. 

It is no exaggeration to state that it seems as if radical behaviorists are kind of tone-deaf. “The statement made above that science is the behavior of the scientist is not viewed by the radical behaviorist as a reductionist treatment of what might be viewed as an ontological assertion” (italics added). I am curious what radical behaviorist would hear when they would finally be able to pay attention to listening?  I think I know it already: like everyone else, they would be surprised to find out how much NVB and how very little SVB they keep having. 

What is viewed as an “ontological assertion” and is “regarded instead as a highly abstract description of what we are probably looking at when we identify events as constituting science” (italics added) doesn’t tell us anything about “the focal awareness that any scientist is himself a behaving organism.” We urgently need a vocal awareness that the  behavioral scientist is not only a talking, but also a listening organism.

Once we know about the SVB/NVB distinction it becomes obvious why Skinner repudiated “reference theories of meaning.” Such theories are based on explanatory fictions that consist only of verbal acrobatics, the main characteristic of NVB.  It is not so strange after all that even radical behaviorists have continued to “”mentalize” [while they talk] environmental events, as where reinforcers are endowed, often in the thinking of avowed Skinnarians, with some sort of demoniacal power to forge the chains of reified conception of conditioning.” 

Reification, the treatment of something abstract as if it is something concrete, is a product of NVB, the conversation in which the speaker and the listener are separated and cannot come together. By the way, the speaker and the listener, of course, don’t exist, only speaking and listening exist. In SVB speaking and listening occur at the same rate.