March 29, 2015

March 29, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Every day I am getting more ready to write. Much of my writing is a preparation. These are days I have lots of time. As I like to write more, my writing gets better. As I read behaviorist literature, my writing comes under control of behavioristic principles. However, I am still trying to make sense of the behaviorist tenet that “truth and meaning of verbal behavior lie not in their correspondence to the world but their effects” and that “effects of verbal behavior occur primarily in the behavior of other people” (Guerin, 1992) (italics added). I agree that “truth and meaning of verbal behavior” lie in “their effects, and the effects” in “the behavior of other people”, but I want' to say something about “truth and meaning of verbal behavior” in correspondence. 

Certainly, the truth and meaning of “give me your money or I’ll kill you” is the effect this sentence has on other people. “In this sense, such verbal behavior repertoires are maintained, and thus are “true” only to the extent that they get someone else to do something” (Guerin, 1992)(italics added). My question is, how do we get each other to do something and how we affect others? “This is my gun” is true only in the sense that saying it functions to change the behavior of someone else and strengthen a class of verbal responses” (Guerin, 1992). Although, to safe ourselves, we may pretend to have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), it is the verbal response class called Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and not SVB, which will be strengthened under such coercive conditions. 

The reason there is so much more NVB than SVB is because we are constantly threatened. In other words, more often than we acknowledge, there is correspondence between how the speaker sounds and how the listener responds. Stated differently, hostile environments maintain NVB non-verbally.