November 24, 2015

November 24, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

During the final weeks of this semester the atmosphere in my classes has changed and students are much more verbally involved. In each of my four classes they have submitted their term papers. I look forward to reading them. The energy is charged now that they have spoken, albeit in writing. I notice they are more involved in speaking too. It might be a good idea to have them write a short mandatory paper earlier in the next semester. Their writing increases their speaking behavior. This could make them more verbally stimulated from the beginning. 

I read “Separate but interlocking accounts of the behavior of both speaker and listener: when the listener speaks is there more to listening then just listening?” by C.A. Thomas (2004). Separate accounts of the speaker and the listener give rise to Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), while interlocking accounts give rise to Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). The author, like Skinner, doesn’t know about the SVB/NVB distinction (my extension of radical behaviorism) and still believes there is such a thing as “Separate but interlocking accounts of the behavior of both speaker and listener.” However, during speech, SVB and NVB don’t co-occur. Only SVB provides an interlocking account. A separate account, on the other hand, only occurs in writing, which cannot give us an interlocking account. It is important to note that Skinner wrote “Our interest in the listener is not; however, merely an interest in what happens to the verbal stimuli created by the speaker. In a complete account of a verbal episode we need to show that the behavior of the listener does in fact provide the conditions we have assumed in explaining the behavior of the speaker. We need separate but interlocking accounts of the behaviors of both speaker and listener if our explanation of verbal behavior is to be complete. In explaining the behavior of the speaker we assume a listener who will reinforce his behavior in certain ways. In accounting for the behavior of the listener we assume a speaker whose behavior bears a certain relation to environmental conditions. The interchanges between them must explain all the conditions thus assumed. The account of the whole episode is then complete. (Skinner, p.34, 1957)" Skinner wanted a complete explanation of verbal behavior, but he didn’t discover the SVB/NVB distinction.

  

“The complete explanation of verbal behavior” can only be given when we listen to ourselves while we speak, that is, when we engage in SVB. As long as we, as Skinner and Thomas, remain overly involved in and concerned with writing and reading, we are merely chasing a shadow. The question which is raised by Thomas “When the listener speaks is there more to listening then just listening?” can only be answered if the listener speaks. My answer to this question is YES, as a listener who doesn’t speak doesn’t listen as well as a listener who speaks. Why? Such a speechless listener cannot hear him or herself. When we can’t hear ourselves we can’t hear others. We can only hear ourselves when we speak. In other words, we must speak to hear ourselves.

Self-listening-while-speaking enhances other-listening-while-speaking. That is SVB in which there is turn-taking between the speaker and the listener. However, the opposite is also true: other-listening-while-not-speaking makes it impossible to self-listen, as one is not speaking. That is NVB in which there is no turn-taking between the speaker and the listener. There is more to this question “When the listener speaks is there more to listening then just listening?” When the listener speaks, there is more to speaking than just speaking!! The difference between speaking at or speaking with the listener depends on whether the speaker is listening to him or herself while he or she speaks.

“In explaining the behavior of the speaker we assume a listener who will reinforce his behavior in certain ways.” An account of the speaker without the listener doesn’t make any sense. The speaker and the listener must be considered together. However, this doesn’t and can’t occur in NVB, it only happens in SVB. The listener-who-is-the-same-as-the-speaker “will reinforce” the speaker’s “behavior in certain ways”; he or she automatically reinforces him or herself. Likewise, the listener-other-than-the-speaker reinforces the speaker’s behavior, as he or she really listens and experiences total agreement with the speaker.

“In accounting for the behavior of the listener we assume a speaker whose behavior bears a certain relation to environmental conditions.” If the speaker affects the listener aversively, as is the case in NVB, the listener will behave differently as when the speaker affects the listener positively, as in SVB. Unless we acknowledge the difference in the interchanges between the speaker and the listener in SVB and NVB, we will never have a complete account of the whole episode. Although Skinner never indicated the SVB/NVB distinction, his account of our verbal behavior seems to be based more on SVB than on NVB. He says “The interchanges between them must explain all the conditions thus assumed. The account of the whole episode is then complete.”

Thomas writes “In his treatment of verbal behavior [Skinner] asserts that one cannot properly elucidate the functions for the responding of speaker without taking into account the responding of the listener and the ecological contingencies in which the behavior is emitted.” Such a statement refers to SVB. To really talk about and agree on these matters there would have to be a situation free of aversive stimulation that would allow us to actually engage in that conversation. “Skinner (1957) laid out a functional model of speaker behavior” as he, unlike others, thought out loud and was automatically reinforced for this.

Thomas asks “If the listener vocalizes does that make the listener the speaker?” My answer is again YES, but only in SVB. In SVB, the speaker and the listener are one. In other words, in SVB, the speaker and the listener as well as the-listener-who-is-the-speaker agree, but in NVB there is no such agreement between the speaker and the listener. In NVB “the listener vocalizes”, but it will make him or her a NVB speaker, who doesn’t listen to him or herself, who then separates the speaker from the listener. My answer to the question “Can a speaker actually be responding as a listener even though the response may be a vocalization?” is again YES, but this will only occur in SVB. In SVB the speaker responds as his or her own listener, but in NVB this doesn’t and can’t occur. In NVB we are focusing on and listening to others or making others listen to us, but in either case we are not listening to ourselves. 

Thomas concludes “sometimes the listener speaks, but does not cease responding as the listener making developing approaches to training language acquisition a clearly easier “concept” for both practitioners who design curriculum and those who strive to use it in practice.” The “training of language acquisition” will be greatly enhanced if practitioners, rather than focusing on designing new curriculum, distinguish between SVB or NVB. As Thomas’ conclusion demonstrates, the focus is on written, not on spoken language. As long as we have not engaged for an extended period of time in SVB, we cannot be “fluent members of the verbal community.” By teaching others, we find out things about ourselves: if we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak, others don’t listen. Emancipation of the listener requires that the listener to becomes a speaker. Behaviorists have continued to broadly “disregard the listener’s behavior as receptive” as long as they didn’t properly analyze the speaker-as-own-listener. This can’t be done while writing and reading, it must be done while simultaneously speaking and listening, that is, while engaging in SVB. “Refinement in the study of verbal operants” demands that we have SVB. “A better understanding of the listener operants” creates better speakers.

November 23, 2015

November 23, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In yesterday’s class students were asked to fill out feedback forms about my teaching. It only took about ten minutes. When I came back into class, I noticed an enormous difference. They had given their opinion. They had expressed what they thought of me and had brought their private speech into public speech. The atmosphere in the class had shifted and a deeper dialogue took place which had not happened and could not have happen before.

In today’s writing I address some of the points which were made by Jay Moore in his tutorial “Cognitive psychology as a radical behaviorist views it (2013).” In this tedious paper, he explains that the essentials of cognitive psychology, which, in my opinion, would be better summarized as inner-agent-psychology, have been with us since ancient Greek times and were passed on by the likes of Descartes, Kant, Freud, Piaget and Chomsky. I refer only to few parts of this paper as they are relevant to my extension of radical behaviorism: the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)/ Noxious Verbal Behavior(NVB) distinction.

I am not interested in how cognitive psychologists view radical behaviorists in the same way that I am not interested in how NVB communicators view SVB communicators. As someone who has been exposed to, who knows about and is capable of producing high rates of SVB, I am well aware that it makes absolutely no sense at all for me to waste my time on those who are, due to their behavioral history, only capable of producing high rates of NVB and very low rates of SVB. Their view of SVB is meaningless, but explaining their view becomes meaningful, the moment we are able to consider the facts about their NVB from a SVB point of view.

When Skinner wrote “Cognitive science is the creation science of psychology, as it struggles to maintain the position of a mind or self” (1990, p. 1209), he wasn’t describing a “referential, symbolic view of verbal behavior,” according to which “terms refer to or symbolically represent things in another dimension called meaning”, but he was expressing “a behavioral view of verbal behavior”, according to which “meaning is a function of contingencies.” An English speaker only uses the word “meaning” under circumstances in which the word meaning has meaning, that is, when he or she is in the company of other English-speaking speakers. Moore states “for the speaker, meaning is a function of the contingencies which control the emission of the term.”

In the example of the English speaker, the word meaning only has meaning in the company of another English speaker. However, the word meaning loses its meaning - even if it is repeatedly spoken in the company of an English listener - if this listener is not allowed to mediate, to confirm, to agree with, to validate, the meaning of the word meaning. In other words, if the English listener is not allowed to be an English speaker, the meaning of the word meaning will be lost to the listener, that is, it will be imposed on the listener by the coercive, insensitive speaker.

This is exactly what happens in NVB in which the speaker affects the listener with a negative contingency. In NVB the speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener as an aversive stimulus. The separation between the speaker and the listener, which is caused by the sound of the speaker’s voice, also determines that the verbal behavior of the speaker is no longer mediated by the listener. Moore writes “For the listener, meaning is a function of the contingencies into which the term enters a form of verbal discriminative stimulation.” How is the listener to verbally discriminate, if he or she is repeatedly punished for becoming a speaker and is reinforced to dissociate? The listener who cannot become a speaker is unable to discriminate the meaning of the word meaning. As long as this listener remains under control of the aversive contingency created by the speaker, he or she will remain confused about the meaning of the word meaning. Only the contingency, in which such confused, dis-regulated listener can become a speaker, can reveal the coercive, abusive, alienating meaning of the word meaning, which was forced upon the listener by the speaker, who kept punishing him or her for speaking.

I disagree with Moore, who writes “The bottom line is that we miss events and relations in the one dimension that are relevant to our understanding of behavior.” (underlining added by me). I think understanding is overrated at the expense of experiencing. I think that "we miss events and relations" having to do with our” experience of our own vocal verbal behavior. Understanding is secondary to experiencing vocal verbal behavior and without experiencing it our understanding is totally wrong. Moreover, only the listener who is stimulated to become a SVB speaker is able to experience his or her own vocal verbal behavior in such a manner. The contingency which stimulates the listener to become a voice-experiencing speaker, is the one in which the speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener as an appetitive, positive, reinforcing stimulus. In SVB speakers speak with, but in NVB speak at the listener. NVB is selected because as of yet we don’t know how to create the contingencies in which SVB can occur. Will we continue to be changed by environments to engage in NVB or will we learn to create and maintain environments which can give rise to SVB? If these written words are spoken in the described manner we will have SVB. 

November 22, 2015

November 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

What you say to yourself, what goes on ‘inside your head’, what is ‘on your mind’, what you are ‘thinking’, ‘feeling’ and ‘remembering’, is factually a form of verbal behavior, which was once public, but which has receded to and has been reduced to a private event. You don’t think in Russian if you weren’t raised in a Russian verbal community. Therefore, your covert speech is in the language that you grew up in. When you write your private speech in your journal, it becomes public, but you wouldn’t all of a sudden be able to produce a language with which you are not familiar. Although Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) conditioned you to keep private speech out of public speech, your private speech is a function of your public speech and it will always remain inextricably connected with your public speech. To make it seem otherwise is like believing things fall upward, not downward.

We depart from the reality every time we think that what we think is our own doing and is caused by us individually. The only thing we can really do is pretend and that is exactly what we do in NVB: we pretend to be who we present ourselves to be. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) there is nothing to pretend as we can be ‘ourselves.’ We experience and, therefore, we understand that what we say to ourselves is caused by what others have been saying and are saying to us. In other words, with our public speech we cause each other to have good feelings and thoughts, that is, positive self-talk and we cause each other to have negative feelings and thoughts, that is, negative self-talk. 

In the same way we didn’t cause our own language, we don’t cause our own feelings either. When we realize this as a scientific fact, that we are indeed each other’s environment and therefore cause each other’s public as well as private verbal behavior, we find that our SVB increases. It is the lack of this knowledge, the lie that we cause our own behavior, which maintains NVB. We have been and we continue to be burdened by prescientific pseudo-explanations of behavior, which couldn’t and didn’t give us means to increase positive and decrease negative behaviors. 

We continuously revert to coercive behavioral control as we fail to acknowledge how behavior really works. It is out of ignorance that we enforce ‘our view’ on how things are supposed to work. Although we will continue to force each other and ourselves to be something which we are not, the reality of how we talk with each other and with ourselves remains the same and is waiting to be discovered by us: SVB is a real thing.

November 21, 2015

November 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

As already stated, in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) the speaker often prevents the listener, that is, the other person, from becoming a speaker. The ubiquity of NVB is based on the fact that only a few speakers do all the talking. In NVB the speaker is not listening to him or herself. He or she cannot do this as  nothing in his or her environment is stimulating him or her to do this. Therefore, NVB happens in the absence of stimuli which would make SVB possible. If such stimuli were present or made available, instances of SVB would occur. Obviously, producing such stimuli can only occur due to a behavioral history of SVB. Most people, however, have very little SVB in their history.

There couldn’t be much history of instances of SVB because the distinction between SVB and NVB has never been made. Although people have tried to get along and succeeded to some extent, this has not led to a learning process in which SVB was taught. Modern people, who rely on medications to cure diseases, are no longer involved in the fictional explanations, which were once believed to cause the disease. Their way of talking has changed because of scientific explanations. NVB is a pre-scientific way, but SVB is a scientific way of communicating. The separation between the listener and the speaker is absolutely false and the fact that so much of our spoken communication is based on this just shows how problematic most of our spoken communication is.

Low rates of SVB are caused by a lack of speakers. When speakers compete with other speakers they will produce NVB. SVB didn’t and couldn’t be increased in that way. During SVB speakers are no longer competing with other speakers. To the contrary, they mutually reinforce each other. In NVB speaking is basically kept to a minimum. In SVB, on the other hand, there is a tremendous increase in speaking because we are listening to ourselves and therefore to each other. In NVB we don’t listen to ourselves and therefore we can’t listen to each other. Self-listening includes other-listening, but other-listening excludes self-listening. To stimulate more self-listening, more speaking is necessary, but not the kind of speaking we are used to. NVB couldn’t stimulate us to listen to ourselves, because we were not allowed to speak; our private speech, that is, what we could only say and think to ourselves, was no longer considered to be part of public speech.