My Fourth Reponse to Fraley

Dear Reader,

This is my fourth response to the paper “On Verbal Behavior: The First of Four Parts” (2004) by Lawrence E. Fraley. I respond to this paper as Fraley writes about the implications for training of verbal behavior. Since I want readers to know about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), I would like them to recognize that Fraley, unknowingly, is referring to changes which only will come about if we are going to change the way in which we talk. Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is neither conducive to learning about verbal behavior nor is it helpful in teaching or in relationship. The following quote addresses the feedback, which is only happening if we engage in ongoing SVB, but which is absent in NVB. “The study of grammar would move from surveys of contexts and corresponding forms to surveys of contexts and corresponding effects on audience members—and to feedback loops through which audience reactions would in turn affect the speakers’ verbal behaviors. That is, within language training programs, in general, importance would tend to shift from form to function, a more powerful analytical approach to linguistics that is made possible by the emergence of the necessary basic science.” Although Fraley doesn’t write that we need a different way of talking, one could read into his writing that a different way of speaking is, of course, absolutely necessary.

Fraley addresses the importance of “scientific manuscripts coining new terms that they can then define with the necessary precision.” SVB and NVB are precisely such new terms, which are not only parsimonious and pragmatic, but also enjoyable. A couple of behaviorists, who haven’t talked with me, but who have written a comment on my writings, have referred to SVB and NVB as: two big bags of verbal behavior with fuzzy boundaries. Such a dismissive description is to be expected from those who don’t engage in a real conversation with me in which they would be able to find out there is nothing fuzzy about these two universal patterns of verbal behavior.

In spite of their great emphasis on scientific terminology, most behaviorists completely ignore the two most obvious ways of talking occurring in every society around the world. The reason that this continues – and it is going to continue to happen – is because behaviorists, (Fraley is no exception) view written scientific terminology to be more important than spoken communication. They all slavishly follow and try to imitate Skinner, who “found it necessary to coin several new terms when writing Verbal Behavior.” However, while “tinkering with Skinner’s analysis” and “extending it”, they never pay any attention to how Skinner, the speaker, sounds and to the, in my opinion, obvious fact that he mostly engages in SVB and, therefore, is experienced very differently by the listeners, who are mostly conditioned by NVB speakers. Most behaviorists lack the self-management skills which allow Skinner to talk as he does.

As the following example illustrates, the saying: it is not what you say, but how you say it, is lost on most behaviorists. “Let us consider a typical kind of example, pertinent to the analysis of a verbal episode, that often arises in the teaching context: From the behaviorological perspective, a speaker, in response to certain antecedent stimuli, exhibits a verbal utterance. A listener then responds in some way that provides consequences of that utterance. That consequation, which the speaker contacts as a result of the listener’s response, alters the controlling function between the speaker’s verbal behavior and the antecedent stimuli that originally evoked it—a change that tends to be revealed on future occasions of the speaker’s encounter with those stimuli. These events collectively exemplify the familiar operant conditioning process.” Due to their conditioning history with NVB, most behaviorists, like most of their students, are literally tone-deaf. Of course, “a verbal utterance” has a sound. The speaker’s sound determines whether the students want to listen to him or to her. Fraley, like so many of his colleagues, continues to erroneously believe that he is up against “superstitious students who were long committed to the assumption that bodies behaved in response to the will of implicit spirits called selves in secular contexts and souls in more spiritual contexts.” Regardless of their knowledge about behavior, behaviorists will not be effective as long as they teach with NVB.

It is not a matter of supplanting “such mysticism with concepts of scientific naturalism”, but whether one possesses the necessary skills to be able to model (like Skinner unknowingly does) the difference between NVB and SVB. Fraley (as so many other behaviorists), complains about the challenge he faces as a teacher, since he fails to acknowledge that he engages in NVB each time he feels “frustrated by the intransigence of those resident spirits, especially when they were cast in their religiously inspired soul personas.” Instead of fully recognizing that the student is as conditioned by NVB as the teacher, Fraley gets frustrated with his student’s responses. In effect, he unknowingly blames his students for having NVB, while he himself engages in it. Moreover, as he presumably is the knowledgeable teacher, he unknowingly sees himself as the SVB speaker.

My Fifth Response to Fraley

Dear Reader,

This is my fifth response to “On Verbal Behavior: The First of Four Parts” (2004) by Lawrence E. Fraley. Understandably, following Skinner’s example, the vast majority of behaviorists (Fraley included) insist on what has by now been proven to be the totally futile attempt of replacing “the traditional terms that are adopted from common language” with precise scientific terminology. It has been an enormous waste of time and effort and continues to make behaviorism unpopular. Moreover, the real issue, the difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), never got any attention.

When a student hears a teacher engage in NVB, he or she will “at once” assume “the presence of an internal but often incorporeal mental agent that initiatively generated whatever vocal behavior was exhibited.” With NVB teaching, the verbally-fixated teacher (who is not listening to him or herself while he or she speaks and is not considerate about the poor listening student, who has to put in a lot of effort to be able to understand the teacher) confirms rather than dissolves the student’s belief in “that mystical perspective”, in which, presumably, “the speaker was more than the body that spoke; the speaker was the mysterious agent within who made decisions about what that body would say.” To put it bluntly, the student who hears the NVB teacher explain, against all conditioning, that there is no behavior-causing self, is bound to think the teacher is talking out of his or her ass!

Students of behaviorism, after they have listened to their lecturing NVB teacher, may eventually acknowledge that “the term listener was often interpreted as an internal agent that, in a more or less autonomous way, considered a speaker’s statement and initiatively decided upon an appropriate reaction.” However, unknowingly or knowingly, they still feel oppressed, and, they will try to counter-control their aversive teacher, who pontificates about “the natural science alternatives to” their “common superstitious indulgences.” Many of them will still adopt the preferred “new technical terms that would not as readily evoke such superstitious miscarries”, but the issue of NVB was never properly addressed. Consider this, dear reader, that behaviorists have never even addressed the forceful way of talking that prevents the dissemination of their science?

I know for sure that you will not be able to read what I have written anywhere else. I truly believe that this emphasis on changing the terminology has done more harm than good. Ernest Vargas may have married the daughter of B.F. Skinner, but, as far as I am concerned, he is just another stubborn behaviorist, who refuses to talk with me. His suggestion to adopt “in courses in verbal behavior at West Virginia University” the “terms verbalizer and mediator in place of speaker and listener,” is just another silly attempt at avoiding to speak more elaborately about the elephant in the room: NVB! It hasn’t been useful at all to change the words “speaker” and “listener” to “verbalizer” and “mediator!” For SVB, we must talk about the speaker as his or her own listener, rather than only talk about the listener who listens to the speaker who is not the listener him or herself.

Although Fraley realizes very well that changing the terminology is not sufficient, he doesn’t tell his readers what else is needed. What is needed is a focus on how we talk, not on what we say, but on how we say it. He writes “The verbalizer is simply the body that exhibits the verbal behavior that is under consideration, and the mediator is the body that behaves in response to the verbalizer’s statement and does so in ways that consequate the verbalizer’s statement. Importantly, by definition, neither of them is anything more. While a number of advantages are gained by adopting these terms, doing so seldom insures that the analytical thought of superstitious students will indefinitely retain the naturalistic perspective.” There is only the way in which students and teachers talk about these matters, but there really is no such thing as “the analytic thought of the superstitious students.”

Fraley knows very well that something is missing in the commonly accepted analysis. This is why he writes “Technical terms can help maintain a naturalistic focus on the subject matter, and that is why they are coined and employed. However, expectations that precisely defined technical terms will keep a student separated from the implications of that student’s own mystical basic assumptions imply a challenge that exceeds the capacity of mere terms.” He acknowledges that something more than terminology is needed to “keep a student separated from the implications of” his “own mystical basic assumptions,” but since he doesn’t know what it is, he can’t tell his reader what it is. I know what it is: SVB is needed to teach behaviorism.

Supposedly You Already Know SVB

Dear Reader,

Supposedly, you don’t have any Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), but, if that was true, why aren’t you talking with me and having Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)?? Most people who read this will not talk with me, as they refuse to recognize the truth of these written words while speaking with me. I can recognize the difference between SVB and NVB. Those, who like, me are also familiar with the SVB/NVB distinction, will immediately recognize anyone who claims to have SVB, but in fact engages in NVB. It is because we recognize the great difference between SVB and NVB that we can afford not to get involved anymore in NVB. I see no value in having a confrontational conversation (which would be NVB!) to point out someone’s NVB. In the past, I had many of such conversations, which never went anywhere and left me depleted. Even after learning about the difference between SVB and NVB, for a long time, due to my dreadful history of conditioning, I couldn’t resist the temptation of trying to let all NVB speakers know that, although they engage in NVB, they could also be SVB speakers and I got myself in trouble again and again and again…

Now, I can leave the NVB speakers alone, as I have found that writing about them is safer and more effective. By writing about people, who, as communicators, are each other’s environment and either allow each other to have SVB or force each other to have NVB, I am able to distance myself from the abusive NVB speaker. A certain selection process has begun to reveal itself: only by maintaining my distance from NVB and by engaging in SVB, could I get and remain clear about the difference between SVB and NVB.

The spoken analysis of how we as human beings interact is a dangerous affair due to which many have lost their lives. Since we mainly engage in NVB and seldom in SVB, we are all conditioned by and expecting a punitive, threatening way of talking. Forceful behavior control, which always goes hand in hand with NVB, can be replaced by positive behavior control with SVB, but for that to happen, we have to become aware about how aversive control always elicits equally aversive counter-control. Stated differently, anytime we directly try to stop a speaker from having NVB, we ourselves engage in it and create more of it.

All NVB speakers are NVB speakers – and most likely will remain NVB speakers – not, as is often suggested, because they have decided to be NVB speakers, but because they are repeatedly in environments which aversively affect them. If NVB speakers would be able to spend enough time in aversive-free environments, they would naturally and effortlessly become SVB speakers. This behavioristic knowledge is absent in our culture and thus, we keep blaming each other for the aversive contingencies by which we all, to a very large extent, have been and continue to be affected. It is impossible to avoid the horrible consequences of NVB as long as we don’t even understand why we keep engaging in it in the first place. NVB reader, I will continue to write to you and to invite you to talk with me in 2019. When you talk with me, you will notice your NVB can be stopped, you can still engage in SVB.

My Sixth Response to Fraley

Dear Reader,

This is my sixth response to “On Verbal Behavior: The First of Four Parts” (2004) by Lawrence E. Fraley. When a teacher talks WITH, and, therefore, connects with, the students, the students experience and know very well that such a teacher is, of course, totally different from the teacher who talks AT them, who, therefore, disconnects from them. Students tell me some teachers are better than others, but they have never told me another teacher created Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) in their class-room like I do. I don’t write this to brag, but I want you to know my students tell me this every semester.

If students are given the opportunity to speak (as they are in my classes), they divulge their other teachers are sadly mainly engaging in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). They even ask me to teach their other teachers to have SVB with them. Furthermore, they tell me how surprised they are, as they effortlessly and joyfully learn more in my class than in any other class. Also, many of them express a sense of relief as well as disbelief about the fact that I don’t punish them. At the end of each semester, they are aware the wonderful learning environment we experience as group, is not magically created by me because I am such a great teacher, but by everyone’s participation in and understanding of SVB.

How different my experience with my students is from someone like Fraley. I appreciate the fact that he is honest about it, but I can tell from his writing that he isn’t successful in connecting with his students. He laments the “superstitious student”, who “already knows, with a certainty born of faith, that a verbalizer would have to be the same mental agent that a speaker is understood to be.” Rather than considering his own forceful way of talking (NVB), Fraley prefers to believe that his students can’t understand behaviorology because of their previous beliefs.

Please, read the following long quote very carefully and realize that the NVB speaker is always blaming the listener for not listening!!! “The instructor who insists that a verbalizer is only a body that exhibits verbal behavior is making that pitch to a student who knows, with comfortable certainty, more about it than that instructor is prepared to concede. As far as that student is concerned, that instructor is constrained by some narrowing rules of scientific logic from moving conceptually into a wonderful and awesome domain where that unfettered student is free to roam. While a natural scientist may view that student’s mystical thinking as forays into a fool’s paradise along paths of self-deception, the fundamentally superstitious student has a different view. Such students interpret their own frequent reversions to superstitious interpretations as their way of keeping a finger on the pulse of reality during their temporary detours into the sadly limited world of natural science, which they are undertaking to gain insights into the often appalling limitations with which natural scientists burden themselves in order to do their necessary if somewhat dehumanizing kind of work. While superstitiously indoctrinated students theoretically can be purged of their superstitious behavior, the necessary programs of reconditioning are typically so intense and so time consuming that the arrangements for them are more characteristic of protracted therapy than of academic instructional programs. As a matter of economy, science instruction, if it is to be effective and efficient within the constraints imposed by traditional instructional operations, must be directed to students who have been kept relatively free of superstitious indoctrination. However, the selection of superstition–free students for programs designed to produce effective scientists is difficult within a superstitious culture.”

Let me now unpack for you what Fraley, the person who supposedly knows how behavior really works, unknowingly, is referring to. Any instructor, who “insists that a verbalizer is only a body that exhibits verbal behavior” and thus, is repeatedly “making that pitch to a student”, is: 1) a verbally-fixated, 2) outward-oriented, and 3) struggling NVB speaker, who doesn’t recognize the simple fact that the sound of his voice has an aversive effect on the listener. Stated differently, Fraley describes a teacher who is struggling to keep the student’s attention. If Fraley directly tells his students (and I have no doubt he does) that their belief in an inner self, who presumably causes a person to speak, is “superstitious”, he is not doing a good job at shaping their behavior.

It is interesting, however, that Fraley admits that the student “knows, with comfortable certainty, more about it than that instructor is prepared to concede.” Fraley, the instructor, the verbalizer, should learn, during the interaction, from his student, the mediator. Such learning will only occur if he is able to receive feedback from his students about how they (probably with eyes glazing over) experience his lecture. This is a very common teacher/parent/couple problem: we want others to listen to us, but we are not listening to ourselves, that is, we engage in NVB.

What now follows is Fraley’s justification for sounding horrible and dominating his listener. “As far as that student is concerned, that instructor is constrained by some narrowing rules of scientific logic from moving conceptually into a wonderful and awesome domain where that unfettered student is free to roam.” (This is comparable to a parent, who would punish a child, but insist that it is for their own good.) “While a natural scientist may view that student’s mystical thinking as forays into a fool’s paradise along paths of self-deception, the fundamentally superstitious student has a different view.” Fraley doesn’t realize that his students, like he himself, already have endured much NVB in their behavioral history and that his teaching is just more NVB.

“Such students interpret their own frequent reversions to superstitious interpretations as their way of keeping a finger on the pulse of reality during their temporary detours into the sadly limited world of natural science, which they are undertaking to gain insights into the often appalling limitations with which natural scientists burden themselves in order to do their necessary if somewhat dehumanizing kind of work.” Due to NVB, Fraley speaks of “the sadly limited world of natural science.” To someone who knows how to engage in SVB, nothing is more exciting and liberating than “the world of natural science.” It is because of NVB that Fraley is basically burdening himself and is apparently only experiencing “appalling limitations.” It is only because Fraley isn’t capable of addressing the SVB/NVB distinction that he would even describe his work as “somewhat dehumanizing.”

I strongly disagree with his analysis, as I know with SVB many things become possible which are simply impossible with NVB. Also, I find it unpragmatic (and appalling) that Fraley and with him legions of behaviorists, when they can’t have their way with pushing behavioristic jargon on people, start using bombastic terms such as superstition, indoctrination and purging of behavior, while, supposedly, we are only talking about conditioning. “While superstitiously indoctrinated students theoretically can be purged of their superstitious behavior, the necessary programs of reconditioning are typically so intense and so time consuming that the arrangements for them are more characteristic of protracted therapy than of academic instructional programs.” SVB is not therapy, but a totally different way of talking!!!

Fraley now makes a ridiculous, elitist’ proposal as he is clearly suggesting behaviorology should perhaps only be for the ‘happy few.’ He writes “As a matter of economy, science instruction, if it is to be effective and efficient within the constraints imposed by traditional instructional operations, must be directed to students who have been kept relatively free of superstitious indoctrination.” There are no such students (!) as we are all, whether we know it or not, admit it or not or are aware of it or not, conditioned by NVB. Fraley seems to realize something is wrong with his statement…“However, the selection of superstition–free students for programs designed to produce effective scientists is difficult within a superstitious culture.”

Collaboration and SVB

Dear Reader,

Although we are all somewhat familiar with the terms collaboration and cooperation and often use these words interchangeably, they actually mean two very different things. Collaboration can be defined as the coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem, while cooperation is accomplished by the division of labor among participants as an activity where each person is responsible for solving a portion of the problem. Most people, based on their past experience, will say that it is hard to collaborate and in the same breath they will tell you that cooperation doesn’t involve compromise or consensus-building. Presumably, collaboration is about giving up control to others and, supposedly, this requires your vulnerability. I am here to tell you that such a wrong view is based on your involvement in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). People only say collaboration is hard when they realize it requires a different way of talking than the one which they are used to.

Collaboration is not hard once we know how to have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), which, rather than making us vulnerable, unites us and makes us stronger. As we learn to have ongoing SVB and as we collaborate productively and happily, we find to our big surprise that the need to compromise or build consensus doesn’t even arise. Moreover, as we learn to practice effective self-management, we gain control over behavior, our speaking and listening, where previously we believed we didn’t have any control, due to which we were more prone to remain busy with trying to control others instead of ourselves.

As we were all conditioned by NVB, we mistake being open with conforming, giving in or falling on our own sword. However, when we engage in SVB, we don’t draw our sword, let alone fall on it and we don’t fight either, so there is no question about backing down. It is due to NVB we keep trying to ‘defend against’ the very possibility of collaboration by dismissively describing it as a messy process, as our collaboration would certainly prove that our forceful NVB is very primitive and unsophisticated and certainly not as orderly as it claims to be. In SVB, we enhance each other’s self-control, as we stimulate each other to listen to ourselves while we speak. The issue of coercively dominating others only arises during NVB. Nobody is giving up any control during SVB, only in NVB do we give up control.

Another myth that is perpetuated by our blunt NVB is that we will only be able to collaborate if we have some sort of enlightened leadership. We are presumably in need of the some visionary, some great thinker, someone with great ideas. All of this is a product of NVB, which prevents collaboration by selling people (hook, line and sinker) on the falsehood that novelty is always difficult. Supposedly, we are not open enough to the mumbo-jumbo and to the snake-oil pitches of the so-called professional speakers, the ones who presumably do the talking for others, the ones who supposedly are ahead of their time. In the name of innovation and improvement of the human condition, we should all jump on the band-wagon of their new ideas and be okay with the constant tension and divisiveness, which is the reliable outcome of their NVB. SVB exposes these sooth-saying preachers of discomfort and peril. There is no need for anyone in SVB to respect each other as we are already respecting each other. As the SVB/NVB distinction is a behavioristic construct, everyone who comes to know SVB embraces the fact that each of us has a unique behavioral history of conditioning.

Those with NVB endlessly talk about the need to trust, to be diverse and to collaborate. However, in SVB we are doing all these things. SVB, which is a scientific construct, is not made possible by the much over-rated different belief systems that people bring to the table. We leave our biases at the door in the room in which we engage in SVB! Furthermore, as we engage in SVB, we mutually reinforce each other, that is, we comfortably find that what we have in common matters more to us than our different values. Stated differently, SVB is about genuine cultural integration and collaboration. This new way of talking is needed to do justice to the fact that we are all different.

SVB doesn’t stress us accept different points of view. The question about respecting each other only arises due to NVB. In SVB, in which we all positively reinforce each other, we respect each other as we experience what it is like to be truly respected and validated. SVB is a behavioral cusp. Our participation in SVB is immediately reinforcing and future outcomes are predicted to be even more reinforcing as SVB increases our access to reinforcers. As everyone is reinforced, everyone not only collaborates, but is also responsible and accountable. We don’t need to work on getting better at collaboration as this is the natural outcome of our involvement in SVB. Our collaboration results from how we talk.

Learned Helplessnes?

Dear Reader,

I want everyone to know that there is no such a thing as a “teachable moment.” Those who speak about teaching in that way, don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Humans don’t learn in one moment. This is not how behavior works. Also, there is nobody inside of you, there is no inner self, who is either willing or unwilling to learn. You don’t learn because you “suddenly get it”, because you “have a high IQ” or because you are “so intelligent”. This one special experience which supposedly “changed your life forever”, all your “profound insights” and all your laughable, mystical “haha-moments”, simply demonstrate you don’t know anything about human behavior.

Let me make this very clear: YOU, whoever you believe yourself to be, don’t learn anything, ever! The only thing which really happens is that your body has been changed over time by certain conditioning processes. Particular responses were reinforced and these behaviors are then selected and are more likely to occur in the future. Once again, you don’t ever cause your own behavior. When you find yourself having a certain behavior very often, just acknowledge that your behavior was reinforced in the past and, most likely, is being reinforced right now in your current environment. Behavioral change will only occur if you change your environment.

I teach you to have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) instead of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). You have very little SVB, but a lot of NVB, as you are almost constantly in aversive environments in which only NVB is reinforced. You need to be with other people and in different circumstances to be able to have SVB. Although you still believe you have to decide or choose your own behavior, although you have been conditioned to view yourself as a bad learner or a lousy student, there absolutely is no you inside of you, who does your behavior. There is only your body which was and which is conditioned and therefore changed by environmental stimuli, by certain circumstances, by what Skinner describes as contingencies of reinforcement. Obviously, if you have been in certain circumstances very often, if you stay in these same dreadful circumstances, change of your behavior will not occur. To change your behavior, you must change of your environment. It takes experimentation to figure things out.

Stop being busy with “learning things the hard way.” Coercive or forceful behavior control is rampant everywhere as people generally don’t know how to practice positive behavior control. If you find that most of your behavior is based on trying to avoid aversive consequences (as you are trying very hard to be polite, conscious, kind, open, genuine and positive), know that you are living in threatening circumstances in which you will never be able to have SVB. “Learning things the hard way” means you are not learning anything at all. It is just another horrible saying to justify Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). And, here is another punitive saying for you: “If you don’t want to listen, you will have to feel the consequences.” Of course, you don’t want to listen to abusive NVB speakers, who will always shame you into believing that you are creating the negative respondent behaviors which they elicit. I repeat again: you don’t cause your own behavior!!! It is totally natural to you move away from aversive stimuli. “Avoidance learning” is the process by which an individual learns a behavior or response to avoid a stressful or unpleasant situation. The behavior is to avoid, or to remove oneself from, the situation. If you didn’t do that you wouldn’t be able to survive. However, repertoire that is based on avoiding negative consequences can never make you happy. As most of your behavior is coercively controlled by what behaviorists call negative reinforcement, you only have little repertoire that is controlled by positive reinforcement. By acknowledging the environment in which you can have ongoing SVB, an increase of repertoire that is controlled by positive reinforcement will naturally occur and you will feel very confident.

My Seventh Response to Fraley

Dear Reader,

This is my seventh response to “On Verbal Behavior: The First of Four Parts” (2004) by Lawrence E. Fraley. Here is what I believe is true for any subject that is being taught in schools, colleges and universities: if the teacher is able to establish Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) in the class and is therefore teaching his or her subject with passion and compassion, the student is going to be interested and capable of learning. It is obvious to me that this is generally NOT the case. Most teachers engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), that is, they merely demand the student’s attention and they act like celebrities.

When it comes to teaching behavioral science, it is NOT, as thirteen-in-a-dozen teachers like Fraley seem to suggest, a matter of whether students are “receptive to science.” Fraley is the typical example of a very knowledgeable, but cookie-cutter, inflexible, verbally-fixated and topic-obsessed teacher, who is obviously not very creative in experimenting with new ways of teaching, which would lead to better results. The more I read Fraley, the more a picture of him emerges of someone who writes elaborately in an attempt to deal with his frustration about teaching. Fraley is not alone in this matter as most of what is written, is in fact written as it cannot be said. Stated differently, most of what is written reflects our involvement in NVB, in which no one can say what they want to say.

Fraley writes “The introduction of new technical terms can sometimes prove effective”, but he doesn’t realize it is primarily the newness and the freshness of his own speech that brings this about and not so much what he says. Naturally, what he says is better understood when he says something in a way which is both appealing to himself as well as to his students. Interestingly, in the example, he says something he didn’t come up with himself. It is only when he refers to what someone else (Vargas) has said that he is, unknowingly, temporarily, out of his own (NVB) rigid pattern of speaking. “For instance, the term verbalizer in place of speaker better incorporates the non–vocal yet public forms of verbal behavior, such as the manipulative behaviors of a person who is exhibiting sign language. The term mediator in place of listener better suggests the important functional role played by that party in the conditioning of a verbal operant. That is, mediator stresses that party’s contingent provision of the behavior–changing consequences of the verbalizer’s verbal behavior. Insofar as the consequences of the verbalizer’s verbal behavior are mediated by the mediator, those terms closely fit the functional reality of a verbal episode. Nevertheless, the terms speaker and listener continue to appear frequently in the scientific literature of verbal behavior, and readers should remain prepared to interpret them interchangeably with verbalizer and mediator in most contexts.” What Fraley doesn’t understand and what even Skinner is not aware of, is that SVB is absolutely required to explain and understand that only “Insofar as the consequences of the verbalizer’s verbal behavior are mediated by the mediator, those terms closely fit the functional reality of a verbal episode.” In other words, Fraley and Skinner actually would like to engage in SVB, but, due to their NVB conditioning, neither one gets there.