My Fifth Response to Fraley

Dear Reader,

This is my fifth response to “On Verbal Behavior: The First of Four Parts” (2004) by Lawrence E. Fraley. Understandably, following Skinner’s example, the vast majority of behaviorists (Fraley included) insist on what has by now been proven to be the totally futile attempt of replacing “the traditional terms that are adopted from common language” with precise scientific terminology. It has been an enormous waste of time and effort and continues to make behaviorism unpopular. Moreover, the real issue, the difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), never got any attention.

When a student hears a teacher engage in NVB, he or she will “at once” assume “the presence of an internal but often incorporeal mental agent that initiatively generated whatever vocal behavior was exhibited.” With NVB teaching, the verbally-fixated teacher (who is not listening to him or herself while he or she speaks and is not considerate about the poor listening student, who has to put in a lot of effort to be able to understand the teacher) confirms rather than dissolves the student’s belief in “that mystical perspective”, in which, presumably, “the speaker was more than the body that spoke; the speaker was the mysterious agent within who made decisions about what that body would say.” To put it bluntly, the student who hears the NVB teacher explain, against all conditioning, that there is no behavior-causing self, is bound to think the teacher is talking out of his or her ass!

Students of behaviorism, after they have listened to their lecturing NVB teacher, may eventually acknowledge that “the term listener was often interpreted as an internal agent that, in a more or less autonomous way, considered a speaker’s statement and initiatively decided upon an appropriate reaction.” However, unknowingly or knowingly, they still feel oppressed, and, they will try to counter-control their aversive teacher, who pontificates about “the natural science alternatives to” their “common superstitious indulgences.” Many of them will still adopt the preferred “new technical terms that would not as readily evoke such superstitious miscarries”, but the issue of NVB was never properly addressed. Consider this, dear reader, that behaviorists have never even addressed the forceful way of talking that prevents the dissemination of their science?

I know for sure that you will not be able to read what I have written anywhere else. I truly believe that this emphasis on changing the terminology has done more harm than good. Ernest Vargas may have married the daughter of B.F. Skinner, but, as far as I am concerned, he is just another stubborn behaviorist, who refuses to talk with me. His suggestion to adopt “in courses in verbal behavior at West Virginia University” the “terms verbalizer and mediator in place of speaker and listener,” is just another silly attempt at avoiding to speak more elaborately about the elephant in the room: NVB! It hasn’t been useful at all to change the words “speaker” and “listener” to “verbalizer” and “mediator!” For SVB, we must talk about the speaker as his or her own listener, rather than only talk about the listener who listens to the speaker who is not the listener him or herself.

Although Fraley realizes very well that changing the terminology is not sufficient, he doesn’t tell his readers what else is needed. What is needed is a focus on how we talk, not on what we say, but on how we say it. He writes “The verbalizer is simply the body that exhibits the verbal behavior that is under consideration, and the mediator is the body that behaves in response to the verbalizer’s statement and does so in ways that consequate the verbalizer’s statement. Importantly, by definition, neither of them is anything more. While a number of advantages are gained by adopting these terms, doing so seldom insures that the analytical thought of superstitious students will indefinitely retain the naturalistic perspective.” There is only the way in which students and teachers talk about these matters, but there really is no such thing as “the analytic thought of the superstitious students.”

Fraley knows very well that something is missing in the commonly accepted analysis. This is why he writes “Technical terms can help maintain a naturalistic focus on the subject matter, and that is why they are coined and employed. However, expectations that precisely defined technical terms will keep a student separated from the implications of that student’s own mystical basic assumptions imply a challenge that exceeds the capacity of mere terms.” He acknowledges that something more than terminology is needed to “keep a student separated from the implications of” his “own mystical basic assumptions,” but since he doesn’t know what it is, he can’t tell his reader what it is. I know what it is: SVB is needed to teach behaviorism.