February 18, 2016

February 18, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, p. 192) Skinner writes that “consciousness is a social product.” However, “The privacy which seems to confer intimacy upon self-knowledge makes it impossible for the verbal community to maintain precise contingencies.” What is missing from this analysis is that “precise contingencies” can only maintained by what I call Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), but ceases to exist once we engage again in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

We are only conscious of how we talk when we are not threatened. Since most conversation is based on aversive contingencies, we are mostly mechanical and unconscious about how we talk. It is hard to believe that this is the really case, but once the SVB/NVB distinction becomes clear, there is no way of denying it. Most conversations are stress, anxiety, distraction, fear, flight or anger-inducing as the speaker’s voice affects the listener with an aversive contingency.  

Maintenance of “precise contingencies” requires that we constantly stimulate each other to listen to ourselves while we speak. Thus, in SVB we communicate our shared sense of well-being. Our acquired self-knowledge involves the maintenance of this knowledge by how we talk.  “Introspective vocabularies are by nature inaccurate (p. 192)”, because what we are dealing with is private speech which is no longer understood as part of public speech. Consequently, NVB maintains the belief in the privacy of the inner autonomous man.

In SVB private speech is considered as caused by public speech and is therefore not seen as separate from it. Our vocabulary to describe the environment within our own skin improves to the extent to which environments stimulate us to express private speech again as public speech. Inaccuracy of our current vocabulary is due to the ubiquity of NVB in which we separate our private speech from public speech.

February 17, 2016

February 17, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, p. 192) Skinner writes “Without the help of a verbal community all behavior would be unconscious. Consciousness is a social product. It is not only not the special field of autonomous man, it is not within range of a solitary man.” If skinner would have addressed the role of our vocal verbal behavior in being conscious, his efforts to “de-homunculize” man would have been more successful. What is the verbal community’s role in producing a conscious speaker? The verbal community creates and maintains the contingency which stimulates the conscious communicator.  

Verbal communities condition conscious and unconscious speakers.  We overestimate the extent to which conscious communicators are produced as we ignore the importance of two universal ways of talking.  Conscious speakers engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), but unconscious speakers engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Without this distinction man didn’t and couldn’t “de-homunculize.” 

The SVB/NVB distinction is more likely to be found by “a solitary man”, who sits alone and who listens to himself while he speaks, than by someone who keeps talking with others. The contingency that stimulates us to listen to ourselves while we speak is most easily created and maintained while we are alone, but it seems almost impossible to be maintained while we talk together.  Thus, without our aloneness “de-homunculization” didn’t and couldn’t happen.  

Only when we listen to how we sound while we speak we notice that we say different things when our sound changes. Our sound is always in the here and now and listening to it can only occur in the here and now. We become conscious of our way of talking only as long as we keep paying attention to how we sound. Of course, we can do this together, but each speaker must listen to him or herself while he or she speaks, otherwise the contingency which makes the SVB possible will fall apart. When speakers don’t listen to their own voice while they speak, they inadvertently coerce others to listen to them.  

February 16, 2016

February 16, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, p. 187) Skinner writes “The inner gatekeeper is replaced by the contingencies to which the organism has been exposed and which selects the stimuli to which it reacts.” Skinner and other behaviorists, who did the experiments with pigeons in which they made them “attend to one object and not to another, or to one property of an object, such as its color, and not to another, such as its shape (p.187)”, acquired what is commonly described as confident behavior.  In Skinner it seems very evident that confidence also generalized to the way in which he spoke. 

In spite of the recognition which Skinner received, it didn’t lead to an environment in which he or other behaviorists began to pay closer attention to the importance of how we speak with one another. Prior hostile contingencies affect us in such a way that we fixate on the verbal, remain on guard and stay on the surface and therefore are unable to explore the vocal aspects of what we say while we speak. 

 

Since we don’t know under what circumstances we have SVB, we don’t often have it. As long as we feel threatened or negatively affected during our conversations, we are not able to learn the skills necessary for SVB.  We produce high rates of NVB and low rates of SVB as we don’t know how to decrease the former and increase the latter.  “The fact remains that it is the environment which acts upon the perceiving person, not the perceiving person who acts upon the environment (p. 188).” As this remains unaddressed, we continue to increase our NVB.  It makes no difference whether we are dealing with hostile politicians, scientists who are struggling to get funds for their research or people who have been diagnosed with a mental disorder; they are all trapped by contingencies that give rise to NVB.

February 15, 2016

February 15, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, p. 185) Skinner suggests “We must know how the environment works before we can change it to change behavior. A mere shift in emphasis from man to environment means very little.” Although Skinner went to great length to explain why in the science of human behavior “the environment takes over the function and role of autonomous man (p. 185)”, he never spoke of the two ways of talking, which emphasize or ignore this science. 

Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the speaker aversively influences the listener, is simply too coarse to address the complexity of environment-behavior functional relations.  The public speech which is necessary to convey radical behaviorism is Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB).  Only in the absence of aversive stimuli do we and can we engage in SVB. Moreover, SVB can only be prolonged to the extent that we can maintain the environment in which it occurs. 

Although he has never talked about this, Skinner’s public speech contained a lot of SVB and relatively little NVB. Most behaviorists, however, were mainly affected in their private speech, but not in their public speech. Their public speech contains as much NVB as non-behaviorists. The fact that they became knowledgeable about behavioral science makes them have more NVB than people who are not that adamant about what they know. 

Novice behaviorists learn how to write and speak in their new language, but their NVB public speech was never addressed, let alone corrected. Consequently, most rejection of behaviorism in academia has nothing to do with resistance against behaviorism, but with the way in which its representatives have talked about it.  Most criticism is based on misunderstanding of behaviorism. Why did this misunderstanding occur? Why do many people still demonize it? The misunderstanding of behaviorism in particular and of science in general is a function of our unscientific way of talking called NVB.