July 13, 2016

July 13, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my twenty-eight response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). Presumably “A goal of radical behaviorists is the simplification of seemingly complex behavior into a parsimonious and powerful set of analytic terms.” This goal could not be achieved since radical behaviorists didn’t know about the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) / Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction.

Skinner’s operant science has created a new verbal community with its own language. It is no exaggeration to state that due to their new, advanced language, radical behaviorists got totally stuck with what they perceived as “their special place in the hierarchy of” a small subset of “living organisms” called scientists.

“Simplification of seemingly complex behavior” requires more than “a parsimonious and powerful set of analytic terms.” It requires SVB; spoken communication which is without aversive stimulation. NVB which relates to hierarchical differences involves threat and intimidation.  

Nonhuman animals induce with vocalizations either positive or negative affective experiences in conspecifics and humans do the same thing.

“Humans are taken to be similar to other animals in many important ways: As a species we are subject to the selection of physical attributes through evolution and the contingencies of survival, and as individuals our behaviors are subject to selection by the consequences those behaviors have in our ontogenic evolution (Skinner, 1981)”.

How we talk with each other seems complex, but “the number of basic kinds of explanations possible for human behavior involve a few basic principles with selective contingencies being at the core of these.“ The SVB/NVB distinction can teach us a lot about our behavioral history. The amount of SVB and NVB instances in each verbal episode tells us about the circumstances we have been conditioned by in our lifetime.