December 7, 2015

December 7, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my seventh response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (O’Donohue et al., 1998). Like other behaviorists, these authors reiterate that behaviorism, like Darwinism, “removes humans from a special place in the hierarchy of living organisms.” However, they have no understanding about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). They don’t realize that a certain way of talking, NVB, maintains our “special place in the hierarchy of living organism.” In NVB the speaker and the listener are set apart by hierarchical differences. More precisely, hierarchical differences prevent the joining of our speaking and listening behaviors.

Hierarchical differences cannot be maintained when our speaking and listening behaviors are joined. Surely, “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 contingencies of survival, and as individuals our behaviors are subject to selection by the consequences those behaviors have in our ontogenetic evolution (Skinner, 1981).” Our problem is not that we cannot see ourselves as “similar to other animals”, but that we don’t hear that we are similar and that our similarity is apparent in the simple fact that our verbal behavior is selected by its consequences.

We have high rates of NVB as NVB is reinforced. If SVB was reinforced we would have high rates of SVB. “Selective contingencies” that explain these response classes are clear: in threatening environments we engage in NVB and in safe environments we engage in SVB. We will see ourselves as “similar to other animals” once we hear we are similar to each other as humans, but this will only happen as we engage in SVB. SVB only occurs due to a contingency of reinforcement, but cannot occur with a contingency of punishment. SVB is possible due to the absence of aversive stimulation. In SVB, the speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener-other-than-the-speaker as well as the speaker-as-own-listener as an appetitive stimulus. The contingency which sets the stage for SVB includes and expresses the environment that is within the speaker’s skin, but in NVB this crucial part of the environment is excluded, not expressed and not listened to.   

December 6, 2015

December 6, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my sixth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (O’Donohue et al., 1998). Skinner wrote “We have not advanced more rapidly to the methods and instruments needed in the study of behavior precisely because of the diverting preoccupation with a supposed or real inner life” (Skinner, 1975, p.46). 

Although this is true, I want to restate it: “We have not advanced more rapidly to the methods and instruments needed in the study of behavior precisely because” we are used to a Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) way of talking. Our NVB doesn’t and can’t accurately express the behavior of the “organism as a whole.” We need to have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) to be able to do that. Moreover, the switch from NVB to SVB doesn’t depend on the use of behavioristic terminology. 

Since the shift from NVB to SVB, like any other change of behavior, is determined by environmental variables, it is explained by radical behaviorism. Stated differently, radical behaviorism makes more sense when there is SVB, but it didn’t and couldn’t make sense due to NVB. 

Behaviorists emphasize (but due to NVB often ‘beat a dead horse’) the student must “look to the environment for the origins of behavior.” I say the student must listen to the environment; he or she must listen to the speaker, especially when he or she is him or herself the speaker. Only in SVB the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. Only the SVB speaker is capable of accurately expressing that part of the environment to which only he or she has access. 

By listening to him or herself while he or she speaks, the speaker-as-own-listener can and will be expressed. Without this special focus on the speaker-as-own-listener, that part of the environment which is within the speaker’s own skin cannot be accurately expressed. Without listening to ourselves while we speak, we will dissociate from the environment within our own skin and become disembodied communicators.

Naturally, the neural behavior of the speaker was and continues to be changed by the different environments he or she is in. Thus, the speaker was conditioned by previous conversations to either have more instances of SVB or NVB. Our tenacious “preoccupation with a supposed or real inner life” is because we did not accurately express how we were affected by our current and our previous environments. Once we have more SVB, our body changes and with that our environment changes. 

December 5, 2015

December 5, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my fifth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (O’Donohue et al., 1998). “The radical behaviorist must assume that it is “the organism as a whole that behaves” (Skinner, 1975, p.44). Behaviors such as thoughts, beliefs and desires must be examined in relation to the organism’s environmental setting.” 

You, my dear reader, most likely only have had a few experiences of yourself “as a whole that behaves.” Accidental, fleeting moments in which you were able to acknowledge the truth of this assertion were usually explained as some kind of ‘religious’ experience as you didn’t  have any scientific language to describe it. However, once you know the difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), you will know that SVB is the speech of discovering, acknowledging and understanding the reality, while NVB is the speech of covering up, dissociating from and wrongly describing the reality.

As long as you don’t know the difference between SVB and NVB, you will have no other choice than to continue your non-scientific discourse, in which you think and believe that you can create your own reality. Due to NVB, you still believe that you can look inside of yourself to see why you are doing something wrong. Only to the extent that your NVB has been stopped could SVB stimulate you to listen to and speak with your external environment, as speakers, who listened to themselves while they spoke, stimulated you to listen to yourself while you spoke.

Only in SVB do we come to terms with “the hitherto inexplicable” and are we able to “reduce any supposed inner contribution which has served in lieu of explanation” (Skinner, 1975, p. 47). The common belief that “explanations reside inside the organism” is maintained by one particular way of talking. Unless you identify NVB as the response class that is based on negative emotions, which are the consequence of hierarchical differences, you will not be able to discover, explore, enjoy and create the environments and the people who maintain SVB as your way of talking will be based on fear, anger, hate, shame and guilt. Lack of scientific progress in psychology has resulted not only from the fact that radical behaviorism was misunderstood and misrepresented. Neither radical behaviorism nor psychology has accurately described or explained the high rates of NVB which prevent scientific discourse.

December 4, 2015

December 4, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my fourth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (O’Donohue et al., 1998). I will pick and choose some lines from this paper to elaborate on the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The common belief that “behavior originates within the person rather than in the environment” makes you think, when you speak, that you cause speaking and, when you listen, you cause listening. Neither one is true. 

You only speak and listen simultaneously if the environment stimulates you to do so. If this is the case you will have SVB, but if this is not the case you will have NVB. In SVB speakers and listeners acknowledge that they are neither causing their speaking nor their listening behaviors, but in NVB, the speaker and listener insist they cause their ‘own’ behavior.

NVB is of course also determined by environmental variables, but by entirely different environmental variables than SVB. However, when we engage in NVB, neither the speaker nor the listener is interested in the environmental variables that cause it. Such an interest is only possible in an environment which is free of aversive stimulation, which gives rise to SVB. In other words, we can only understand NVB if we have SVB and as long as we keep having NVB, we can’t understand it.

Why we have SVB or NVB is explained by me, as a radical behaviorist, “by environmental events, not by events within the individual.” It isn’t difficult to understand that safe and supportive environments give rise to SVB and hostile and threatening environments elicit NVB. To talk about these very different environments and not about what is presumably “inside the organism” requires a behavioristic language which can lead “to a description of environmental contingencies.” 

You are not used to the open, sensitive and intelligent conversation in which what you say or listen to is explained by the environment you are in and have been in. To the contrary, you have been conditioned by the environments you have been in to believe that you cause your own behavior. This is why you mostly engage in NVB and only have SVB once in a while. In other words, you are used to being in and maintaining the environments that produce NVB, but you don’t know how be in and how to maintain environments which make SVB possible. This is why, when you engage in SVB for the first time, you may think that you are having some kind of exceptional spiritual experience, which happens without any doing on your part and affects “the organism as a whole.”

December 3, 2015

December 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my third response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (O’Donohue et al., 1998). Skinner describes negative emotions: "We both strike and feel angry for a common reason, and that reason lies in the environment....Moreover [feelings] are immediately related to behavior, being collateral products of the same causes, and have therefore commanded more attention than the causes themselves, which are often rather remote" (Skinner, 1975,p.43). 

This statement has relevance for the extension of Radical Behaviorism with the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)/Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction. If we change the above statement into a positive emotion, we get: we love, care and support each other and feel happy, safe and hopeful “for a common reason and that reason lies in the environment.” 

Skinner describes NVB, but I describe SVB. Skinner describes negative feelings, which are “are immediately related to behavior”, which are “collateral products of the same causes, and have therefore commanded more attention than the causes themselves, which are often rather remote.” Since we all try to get rid of them, our negative feelings have commanded more attention from us than our positive feelings. 

In contrast to our negative emotions, whose causes of are “often rather remote,” as they are “collateral products of our genetic and environmental histories”, our positive emotions are always caused by variables in the immediate environments. If the speaker’s voice sounds nice, according to the listener, the listener is immediately affected. If, however, the speaker’s voice is perceived as an aversive stimulus, this will also immediately affect the listener, but this prevents any type of directness.

The NVB speaker speaks from a behavioral history of not being listened to, due to which only the listener-other-than-the-speaker was emphasized. This is why the NVB speaker only focuses on making others to listen to him or to her and why the listener who is conditioned by NVB speakers is trying very hard to only listen to others. In each case the attention of the speaker and the listener is focused on the other. The SVB speaker, on the other hand, speaks from a behavioral history of being listened too, which shaped and reinforced his or her behavior of the speaker-as-own-listener. Thus, in SVB the focus of both the speaker and the listener is on him or herself and because of that the SVB speaker is easier to listen to.