August 5, 2016

August 5, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my seventh response to “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). It is so helpful to read this paper as it allows me to illustrate the difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The radical behaviorist is someone who is “content for the most part simply to describe whatever natural consistency he can actually see, and to hope that the report he makes of his observations will in turn generate ultimately more productive behavior in the control of human affairs.” 

Someone who knows the SVB/NVB distinction, however, would not describe “whatever consistency he can actually see,” but whatever consistency he can actually hear. Indeed, someone who recognizes the SVB/NVB distinction would never be “content for the most part to describe whatever natural consistency he can actually see.” Such contentment omits an analysis of consistencies which cannot be seen, but which can only be heard. The distinction between SVB and NVB requires each speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks.

Without the activation of the speaker-as-own-listener we will remain unknowingly trapped by NVB. SVB, which is “more productive behavior in the control of human affairs,” will be possible only when we can distinguish between SVB and NVB, but we don’t and can’t listen to this difference as long as the speaker-as-own-listener is not activated. 

“Only the analysis of behavior” which is based on listening “will lead someday to a more trustworthy set of guidelines for the acquisition of knowledge.” For most radical behaviorists that day has yet to arrive.

The lack of attention for listening is quite apparent in the words which Day uses. He asks the reader to “consider several illustrations of this point of view” (italics added). However, this overemphasis on visual stimuli, which, of course, again and again sets the stage for NVB, is not unique to radical behaviorism. Once one starts looking for it, one finds references to visual stimuli everywhere in most other scientific papers, but there is hardly any mention anywhere at all of auditory stimuli. 

It is no exaggeration to state that it seems as if radical behaviorists are kind of tone-deaf. “The statement made above that science is the behavior of the scientist is not viewed by the radical behaviorist as a reductionist treatment of what might be viewed as an ontological assertion” (italics added). I am curious what radical behaviorist would hear when they would finally be able to pay attention to listening?  I think I know it already: like everyone else, they would be surprised to find out how much NVB and how very little SVB they keep having. 

What is viewed as an “ontological assertion” and is “regarded instead as a highly abstract description of what we are probably looking at when we identify events as constituting science” (italics added) doesn’t tell us anything about “the focal awareness that any scientist is himself a behaving organism.” We urgently need a vocal awareness that the  behavioral scientist is not only a talking, but also a listening organism.

Once we know about the SVB/NVB distinction it becomes obvious why Skinner repudiated “reference theories of meaning.” Such theories are based on explanatory fictions that consist only of verbal acrobatics, the main characteristic of NVB.  It is not so strange after all that even radical behaviorists have continued to “”mentalize” [while they talk] environmental events, as where reinforcers are endowed, often in the thinking of avowed Skinnarians, with some sort of demoniacal power to forge the chains of reified conception of conditioning.” 

Reification, the treatment of something abstract as if it is something concrete, is a product of NVB, the conversation in which the speaker and the listener are separated and cannot come together. By the way, the speaker and the listener, of course, don’t exist, only speaking and listening exist. In SVB speaking and listening occur at the same rate.

August 4, 2016

August 4, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my sixth response to “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). Day never said this, but the following sentence could easily be interpreted to mean that he was referring to the two universal response classes, Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). “It is as if in verbalizing our knowledge of things we always have to express an identification of one or another aspect of the permanent structure of nature.” 

We express one or the other. Confusingly, we often go back and forth between SVB and NVB. We couldn’t continue only with SVB, as mankind hasn’t yet recognized this distinction scientifically. Even though it is clear to those who learn about the SVB/NVB distinction this would be beneficial, it doesn’t and couldn’t happen, as there is, as of yet, nobody except me to make it happen. My students and mental health clients experience results that are proportionate to how often they have been exposed to and are now familiar with the SVB/NVB distinction.

At this time, they are the only ones who are benefitted by it. I feel fortunate with my job as a psychology instructor and therapist as this provides me with the best opportunity to effect the lives of as many people as possible. However, I can imagine a much broader reach than I currently have and I am always working towards achieving this. 

Increase of SVB and decrease of NVB or the decrease of SVB and the  increase of NVB is based on “identification of one or another aspect of the permanent structure of nature.” However, expressions as ‘he gave me his word’, ‘his words weighed heavy on her’, are ‘not set in stone.’ 

“The radical behaviorist is aware that we may attribute thing-ness to events largely because we are accustomed to speak of the world about us as composed of objects which are felt to possess an inherent constancy or stability.” Willard Day choses his words well as he writes that the radical behaviorist “is led to a position which is peculiarly anti-ontological” as “he is reluctant to take for granted that all useful knowledge must be conceptualized in terms of verbal patterns of thought derived simply from our experience with material objects.”  

It is important to recognize it is NOT the listeners, but the speakers who are the ones to “conceptualize.” However, SVB and NVB are two “verbal patterns of thought” which are “derived simply from our”, the listener’s,  “experience with material objects.” SVB and NVB are based on the listener’s experience of the sound of the speaker’s voice. 

By putting s him or herself in the shoes of the listener, the radical behaviorist becomes “anti-ontological” and “reluctant to take for granted that all useful knowledge must be derived simply from our experience with material objects,” As anyone who knows about the distinction between SVB and NVB will acknowledge, “useful knowledge” can only be “derived” from SVB as SVB is more useful than NVB. 

In NVB, “our experience with material objects” is such that the listener feels the speaker’s voice as coercive and demanding. It is fascinating to carefully read Day who wrote that “in particular” the radical behaviorist “objects to speaking of the events associated in a functional relationship as if they were things or objects having a more or less permanent identity as real elements in nature.” I want readers to think about that word speaking, as it seems to refer here to NVB.

The listener experiences and doesn’t like a speaker’s way of speaking, as he or she treated as if he or she was only a prop, an object for the speaker. In NVB, the speaker doesn’t care about the listener and treats him or her as a thing. In NVB the speaker is presumably more powerful than the listener and is allowed to dominate him or her.

It is the listener, who is more sensitive than the speaker, who “objects to speaking of the events associated in a functional relationship as if they were things or objects having a more or less permanent identity as real elements in nature.” In NVB, the speaker, who is the king, the boss, the slave-driver, the leader, the authority, lets the listener know that he or she is in control. In NVB the speaker dominates the listener. 

The listener’s objection to being dominated by the speaker is not only because the listener is treated as a means to the speaker’s end, but also because he or she knows that the speaker’s claim to a “more or less permanent identity” is only pretention. The falsehood perpetuated by NVB is that speakers and listeners are “real elements in nature.”

In SVB it is quite evident that each person is a speaker as well as a listener, also those who in NVB are doing all the speaking. The NVB speaker is often accused by the listener of NOT listening, but this doesn’t mean that the NVB speaker is incapable of listening. He or she is capable of listening, but only in circumstances which stimulate him or her to do that. As long as he or she is able to be in circumstances that stimulate him or her to be a NVB speaker, he or she will NOT listen. 

Day seems to imply this when he writes that the radical behaviorist “does not believe that the functional relations he describes constitute an identification of anything which might be called true laws of nature, in the sense that the systematic collection of such functional relations can ultimately be expected to fit together into a completed picture of an account of human interaction with the environment.”

NVB keeps the falsehood alive that there are “true laws of nature” which determine who does all the speaking and who presumably is only to do as he or she is told. Moreover, “human interaction with the environment” must be understood as interaction between one human being and another. We are each other’s environment; we affect each other and we are affected by each other. This bi-directional influence can be explored only during SVB due to turn-taking between the speaker and the listener. In NVB, there is no turn-taking. 

In uni-directional NVB the speaker speaks AT, not WITH the listener, but only in SVB we find “the systematic collection of such functional relations can ultimately be expected to fit together into a completed picture of an account of human interaction with the environment.”

August 3, 2016

August 3, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fifth response to “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). In his paper Day lays out the basic tenets of radical behaviorism before he explains how they relate to and can be reconciled with phenomenology. After “focal interest in the control of behavior” Day describes “the focal awareness that any scientist is himself a behaving organism.” He states that the scientist him or herself can and must be also his or her own object of study. 

“Science at heart is either the behavior of scientists and the artifacts of such activity and scientific behavior is in turn presumably controlled by much the same kind of variables as those which cover any other aspect of complex human behavior.” However, only if the behavioral scientist monitors his or her own responses will he or she be effective. 

Not every radical behaviorist is as aware of his own verbal behavior as Willard Day, who writes “The radical behaviorists faces the fact that the ultimate achievement of his scientific activities is for the most part either verbal behavior or a new set of acquired behaviors which hopefully enable him to control nature more effectively.” As long as the radical behaviorist doesn’t make verbal behavior his or her focal interest, he or she will be unable to decrease NVB and increase SVB, which will enable him or her to control nature more effectively. 

Although Skinner considered his book Verbal Behavior (1957) his most important publication, radical behaviorists for the most part have not capitalized on their own verbal behavior, as they continue to downplay the importance of their way of talking as a means of teaching and acquiring new behaviors to control nature more effectively. 

During Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) the speaker explores and often realizes that he or she is saying something he or she has never said before. During Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), on the other hand, the speaker mechanically repeats what he or already she has said many times before and isn’t aware of it. Thus, in only NVB we repeat “the psychological distinctions that are modeled after linguistic practices uncritically acquired simply in learning to speak the lay vocabulary.”

In SVB can we talk and think about what we talk about and how we talk about it. Only in SVB will we be “conscious of the fact that much psychological talk reflects stereotyped conceptions both of the nature of the knowing process and of the relation between our knowledge of things and the structure of whatever it is that is taken to be the object of psychological investigation.” I emphasize that Day refers to how we talk about things. As long as we have been able to continue with our NVB, we were unable to discuss and explore our way of talking. 

Since we didn’t engage in SVB a whole lot, we weren’t able to trace our verbal behavior to our current and to our previous environments. It is fascinating to read Day’s description of the radical behaviorist as he, of course, describes himself. Reinforced for the refined verbal ability that is necessary to control nature more effectively, Day, like Skinner, unknowingly has recognized and avoided NVB and implemented SVB. 

Day was “suspicious of primitive animism, which embodies nature with man-like powers, strengths and forces, as well as of facile determinism, which views the aim of research as isolating the fundamental elements of nature which are thought of as existing in in some kind of mechanical interrelationship.” He was not into such superficialities. 

As the behaviorist is often misunderstood and misrepresented “His resistance to such hidden epistemology leads at times to an obstinate refusal to think in terms of a particular common-sense theory of what it is to have knowledge about one or another subject matter.” Only NVB stimulates such “obstinate refusal” also known as counter-control. 

August 2, 2016

August 2, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fourth response to “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). “In using words as seen, perceived, observation, guess, hunch and insight, as in the preceding paragraph, the radical behaviorist does not feel that he is specifying with very much precision what many psychologist would call either behavioral or mental processes.” This would not be the case if they would insist on listening while they speak and engaged in SVB. 

I appreciate Day more than other behaviorists as he seems to be aware that ‘observation’ has something to do with the way in which we talk.  “He is simply talking as best as he can – actually, in this case he is not talking as carefully as he might – and he is responding to discriminable events which have not been very consistently differentiated by whatever factors govern the way in which we learn to talk as we do.” 

I consistently differentiate between our current way conversation and the “factors that govern the way in which we learn to talk as we do.” NVB doesn’t allow the investigation of the extent to which we talk as we do because of how we sound. Surely, “the verbal community which instills in us “the capacity to identify a stimulus” is not necessarily a scientific community. It has been my consistent auditory-observation that people who are uneducated in the sciences are more likely to differentiate between SVB and NVB than those who are. 

It is time that scientist realize that the scientific community has higher rates of NVB than the non-scientific community. In other words, people have remained ignorant about science for the very same reason they have remained ignorant about radical behaviorism. 

Although the unscientific community has higher rates of SVB than the scientific community, they both have much higher rates of NVB than SVB.  The reason is that coercive behavioral control is more widely practiced than behavioral control based on positive reinforcement. Such practice is, of course, maintained by the way in which we talk. 

By increasing our rates of SVB and by decreasing our rates of NVB, we move away from the ubiquity of aversive behavior control and we learn to practice positive behavioral control. As I have been able to bring these changes about in both myself and in others, am “confident in my statement of a functional relationship” between how we sound and how we talk. As a psychology instructor, in front of a class of thirty students, and as a therapist, treating individuals suffering with a variety of mental health problems, I manipulate, i.e. control, specific behaviors. I accomplish this by increasing SVB and decreasing NVB. My student’s and client’s success is based on the SVB/NVB distinction.

Day, who doesn’t know about the SVB/NVB distinction, states “the focal interest in control of behavior does not prejudice the case for the importance in human functioning of genetic or constitutional factors, nor does it lead to any such grandiose hypothesis as that all behavior is controlled by reinforcement.” As we become familiar with SVB, as we become capable of controlling our conversation outcomes, increase our learning and our improve relationships, less attention will be drawn to “genetic or constitutional factors.” 

Moreover, as our involvement in will SVB increase and our involvement in NVB will decrease, we will find that more behavior can be “controlled by reinforcement” than we have previously believed. The enormous gains which can be made by switching from NVB to SVB, by switching from aversive behavioral control to positive behavioral control, will one day be considered as the crown on Skinner’s work. I am confident that the exploration of the SVB/NVB distinction makes this shift possible.