February 21 , 2016

February 21 , 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, p. 207) Skinner writes “The human species has probably not undergone much genetic change in recorded time. We only have to go back a thousand generations to reach the artists of the caves of Lascaux.” It wasn’t until about that time (17,000 before present) that our vocal cords are believed to have come under functional control of our environment.  These Upper Paleolithic works of art which depict primarily large animals and typical local and contemporary fauna that corresponds with the fossil record were found in 1940.  It is believed these depictions of hunting scenes and animals led to the development of language. 

Preceded by eons of time in which humans were only capable of producing and responding to sound, the development of language is a relatively recent event in evolutionary history.  However, “We have seen what happens when a child grows up in an impoverished environment (p. 207); language couldn’t occur if our environment didn’t stimulate us to have it.” Thus, unless autism is viewed as a contingency-based disorder of verbal behavior, we have no options of treating it. What is missing in the environment of the autistic due to which language learning doesn’t occur? We know unequivocally that improvements can be made by making a behavioral analysis. 

By tracing back, identifying and manipulating the environmental variables of which autistic behavior is a function, we can increase a person’s verbal behavior and decrease the maladaptive behavior which happens instead.  Although we have behaviorism to back up such interventions, what is still missing is an understanding of the autistic’s response to the sound of the person who teaches him or her. 

Evolutionary speaking only one of two responses are possible: either the child responds to threat or it responds to safety. In other words, there occurs Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), in which the speaker effects the listener with an appetitive contingency or Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the speaker effects the listener with an aversive contingency.  The high rates of NVB and the low rates of SVB of the parents and the teachers are hypothesized to cause and maintain autistic behavior!  Conversely, an increase of SVB and a decrease of NVB is believed to increase language acquisition.  Verbal reports of those who work with autistic children consistently validated this view.

February 20 , 2016

February 20 , 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, p. 207) Skinner writes “It is only autonomous man who has reached a dead end. Man himself may be controlled by his environment, but it is an environment which is almost wholly of his own making.” I disagree with this statement. The autonomous man hasn’t reached a dead end yet. After all, he sets the stage for Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which can be heard everywhere.  Autonomous man seems to be winning as very little is heard from those who set the stage for Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). 

The reason we don’t hear much at all from those who set the stage for SVB is that our listening behavior was primarily conditioned by NVB. As we are, we are basically incapable of listening to SVB.  This doesn’t mean, however, that we have a hearing defect; it simply means that we keep re-creating the environments in which we can’t listen to each other, since as individual speakers, we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak. We keep creating environments in which we argue, fight and compete as we don’t really know how to create the environments which will reliably give rise to the conversations in which we all feel validated, understood, respected and listened to. 

As long as we are unaware and uneducated about the SVB/NVB distinction we remain incapable of maintaining the environment in which SVB can continue. By default, we create environments that can only produce NVB. Skinner writes “When a person changes his physical or social environment “intentionally” – that is, in order to change human behavior, including his own – he plays two roles: one as a controller, as the designer of a controlling culture, and another as the controlled, as the product of a culture (p. 207).”  It is because of NVB, which always separates the speaker from the listener, that we have a problem distinguishing our role as a controller and as the controlled, which gets confused in the conflict between ‘a self’ and the other (self). We come to terms with this identity problem in SVB.

February 19, 2016

February 19, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, p. 193) Skinner writes “Perhaps the last stronghold of autonomous man is that complex “cognitive” activity called thinking. Because it is complex, it has yielded only slowly to explanations in terms of contingencies (italics added).” He is warning and educating readers about the apparent simplicity of explanations that are referring to an inner autonomous self which presumably causes behavior. He emphasizes complexity because he is unknowingly also debunking our course-grained way of talking which cannot allow this complexity to be properly communicated. 

Skinner is in my opinion trying to replace Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) with Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). In NVB the speaker defends his thinking that is believed to be caused by a behavior-creating inner self, known as a person’s identity. In SVB, however, the speaker has no need for an identity as there is no aversive stimulation at all. 

We make a big deal about what we think, as we believe to be who we think we are. In SVB our identity is analyzed and resolved while we speak. We believe to be who we think we are and keep referring to “autonomous man” as we have been and have continued to be conditioned by NVB. We could not find out about the contingencies of which our behavior is a function long as NVB continued.  

NVB dispositionalizes and disembodies us, whereas SVB situationalizes us and attunes us to the environment within our own skin, our body. In NVB we get carried away by what we say and we disconnect from our experience while we speak as we are aversively affected by our environment, by others speakers.  When NVB is stopped in an environment which makes SVB possible we can at long last begin to acknowledge that there is neither a speaker nor a listener inside of us, only joined speaking and listening behavior in the here and now.

To put it in Skinner’s words “The picture which emerges from a scientific analysis is not of a body with a person inside, but of a body which is a person in the sense that it displays a complex repertoire of behavior (p.199).”  As stated, contingencies determine whether we will engage in SVB or in NVB. Moreover, “The contingencies are not stored; they have simply left a changed person (p. 196).” 

Only those who repeatedly explore the SVB/NVB distinction will be changed by it. The most important change occurs because of the conversation in which we can acknowledge that there is no self that causes our behavior. Of course, such a conversation needs to be ongoing for it to have an effect. Although we occasionally achieve SVB, we don’t have it in a skillful, deliberate and conscious manner.

We only have SVB in an accidental, once-in-a-blue-moon kind of fashion. Behaviorists who don’t know about the SVB/NVB distinction produce similar rates of NVB as non-behaviorists. The sentence “What is being abolished is autonomous man – the inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literature of freedom and dignity (p. 200)” is clearly directed at what has been written. It is an argument which has its origin in NVB.  

Written words can be a function of SVB, but SVB is not learned by reading about it, but by engaging in it. In SVB we talk with each other and nothing needs to be “abolished” or “defended” as we all enjoy the absence of “a possessing demon.” Skinner urged us to dispossess autonomous man, so that we could “turn to the real causes of human behavior (p. 201)”, but he didn’t know about the SVB/NVB distinction.  Only if we talk with one another can we “turn from the inferred to the observable, from the miraculous to the natural, from the inaccessible to the manipulable (p. 201).” This line of reasoning is a function of NVB. In SVB the observable, the natural, the manipulable are expressible and apparent. In SVB we are able to realize that NVB, our way of talking which was based on aversive contingencies, limited what we could see, verify and manipulate.  Thus, only SVB makes the contingency clear of which it is a function. 

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.