My Seventh Response to Fraley

Dear Reader,

This is my seventh response to “On Verbal Behavior: The First of Four Parts” (2004) by Lawrence E. Fraley. Here is what I believe is true for any subject that is being taught in schools, colleges and universities: if the teacher is able to establish Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) in the class and is therefore teaching his or her subject with passion and compassion, the student is going to be interested and capable of learning. It is obvious to me that this is generally NOT the case. Most teachers engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), that is, they merely demand the student’s attention and they act like celebrities.

When it comes to teaching behavioral science, it is NOT, as thirteen-in-a-dozen teachers like Fraley seem to suggest, a matter of whether students are “receptive to science.” Fraley is the typical example of a very knowledgeable, but cookie-cutter, inflexible, verbally-fixated and topic-obsessed teacher, who is obviously not very creative in experimenting with new ways of teaching, which would lead to better results. The more I read Fraley, the more a picture of him emerges of someone who writes elaborately in an attempt to deal with his frustration about teaching. Fraley is not alone in this matter as most of what is written, is in fact written as it cannot be said. Stated differently, most of what is written reflects our involvement in NVB, in which no one can say what they want to say.

Fraley writes “The introduction of new technical terms can sometimes prove effective”, but he doesn’t realize it is primarily the newness and the freshness of his own speech that brings this about and not so much what he says. Naturally, what he says is better understood when he says something in a way which is both appealing to himself as well as to his students. Interestingly, in the example, he says something he didn’t come up with himself. It is only when he refers to what someone else (Vargas) has said that he is, unknowingly, temporarily, out of his own (NVB) rigid pattern of speaking. “For instance, the term verbalizer in place of speaker better incorporates the non–vocal yet public forms of verbal behavior, such as the manipulative behaviors of a person who is exhibiting sign language. The term mediator in place of listener better suggests the important functional role played by that party in the conditioning of a verbal operant. That is, mediator stresses that party’s contingent provision of the behavior–changing consequences of the verbalizer’s verbal behavior. Insofar as the consequences of the verbalizer’s verbal behavior are mediated by the mediator, those terms closely fit the functional reality of a verbal episode. Nevertheless, the terms speaker and listener continue to appear frequently in the scientific literature of verbal behavior, and readers should remain prepared to interpret them interchangeably with verbalizer and mediator in most contexts.” What Fraley doesn’t understand and what even Skinner is not aware of, is that SVB is absolutely required to explain and understand that only “Insofar as the consequences of the verbalizer’s verbal behavior are mediated by the mediator, those terms closely fit the functional reality of a verbal episode.” In other words, Fraley and Skinner actually would like to engage in SVB, but, due to their NVB conditioning, neither one gets there.