December 29, 2014

December 29, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Many people have described this writer as ‘spontaneous’. It became clear to him why he didn’t like to be described that way anymore. Although it is a positive description, it made him feel he was not taken serious. In his series “On Verbal Behavior” The Fourth of Four Parts” (2005) Lawrence E. Fraley writes “People do not spontaneously initiate any of their own behaviors, whether public or private. The putative capacity to do so is a fictitious cultural endowment. In nature, nothing happens spontaneously. Spontaneous is an adjective of ignorance. It indicates that its verbalizer is not, perhaps cannot, specify the independent variable (s) in the functional relation (s) through which the specified dependent variable is manifesting.” Although people have called him spontaneous, they saw something for which they had no good explanation. They thought that the author was causing his own behavior and they had absolutely no clue of what his lively behavior was a function. Their pre-scientific thinking couldn’t stimulate them to look for and find the environmental variables which caused this author’s well-being. The fact that he never caused his own behavior, that nobody causes his or her own behavior, is missed by everyone because hardly anyone is capable of teaching it.  

   

Since all things in the natural world happen because they can happen and not because some imaginary agent makes them happen, a functional analysis reveals that all behavioral responses are controlled by stimuli in the external or the internal environment. One of B.F. Skinner’s  great contributions was that the environment on both sides of the skin is one. Antecedent stimuli can therefore be endo- environmental, that is, on the inside of the skin and ecto-environmental, that is, outside the skin. 

Fraley (2005) hypothesizes about a “nonverbal consciousness” in which “any consequences of private neural responding would have to manifest naturally, without ever having been mediated by a verbal community.” Human beings are like other nonverbal animals, except they can also respond verbally. Due to pairing of nonverbal stimuli (i.e. visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, but also auditory) better verbal responses can be elicited. Although Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is not reinforced in most environments, it continues, because “no verbal community nor verbal practices would have been involved in the conditioning nor in the subsequent occurrence of that class of awareness or consciousness.” 

SVB, the interaction in which our voice elicits more efficient, effective and refined verbal response forms, which are in the realm of social cohesion, art, aesthetics and spirituality, makes us truly verbal. To think of someone as having a thought or a feeling, is a product of NVB, in which private thought, which “shares in defining the person”, is excluded from public speech. SVB, by contrast, in which public speech is reinforced by private speech, and in which positive self-talk was reinforced by SVB public speech, is always at first only acknowledged by the individual, by the speaker-as-own-listener and only later by remote mediators. 

Mediation by the same person, because it is immediate gets easily overlooked. The body of the person, who often experiences him or herself as the verbalizer and the mediator, is different from the body of the verbalizer, who only sometimes experiences him or herself as the mediator. The more the verbalizer experiences him or herself as the mediator, the more this will affect this verbalizer's subsequent verbal and nonverbal behavior and the subsequent verbal and nonverbal behavior of others. The refinement and acceleration, which happens in SVB is possible because of the alignment of a verbalizer's verbal and nonverbal behavior.