April 25, 2015

April 25, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writing is my response to “Human Behavior as Language: Some Thoughts on Wittgenstein” by Emilio Ribes Inesta (2006). I am, like Ribes, against the “general conception of language” and I absolutely agree that “Human behavior cannot be understood if we separate language and social practice.” I appreciate the quotes by Wittgenstein and Malcolm. The former wrote about “language games” and the latter conceived of a philosophy in which there are no more knots to untie. Since “language without social practice and social practice without language are senseless”, I insist that we should be talking about these matters. I mean this very literally: we must have a different kind of vocal verbal behavior to be able to realize what these authors attempted to ‘talk about’ in their writings. My argument is that “we separate language and social practice” every time we value our written words as more important than our vocal verbal behavior. 

We talk the way we do, because we have learned to give higher value to what is written than what is said. Although we keep buying into this myth, any child can see the emperor is not wearing any clothes, that is, any nonverbal human being can hear the verbal emperor sounds awful. Surely, we don’t pay attention to how we sound while we speak so that we can get away with our big lie, that we are the narrators, the originators of our own lives, that we choose our own words and that we are individually responsible for what we, for better or for worse, claim to be our thoughts, feelings and actions. It is because we keep telling each other that we have an inner self which causes all our actions that we believe we are individually responsible for what we say and how we say it. The verbal lie called the ‘self’ seems to be the truth, because people everywhere keep repeating it.

Although Ribes correctly states “from this perspective, language, as an essential component of social practice, contextualizes every human psychological phenomenon” (Ribes, 2006), he doesn’t mention the more poignant fact that our sound is needed to contextualize what we say about our experiences. Certainly, “the logic of language is grounded in social practice”; French or Chinese sounds which are only produced and mediated by members of those verbal communities. “The fictitious universal logic of a rational or formal syntax or grammar” is based on our agential, that is, on our academic, scientific infatuation with words. Thus, what we say takes our attention away from how we say it. We imagine we sound the same when we speak English, but the fact is that we are not. Unknowingly, we remove ourselves from reality, from ourselves and each other, by how we sound. 

Dissociation from reality produced by the vocal verbal behavior of the speaker is called Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). He or she controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency. We are punished by NVB as we get imprisoned by words, which disconnect us from the reality. The way out of our verbal prison is by listening to ourselves while we speak. Our voice is needed to makes sense of what we say. We are able to have vocal verbal behavior in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an appetitive stimulus. This is called Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). SVB has different consequences than the vocal verbal behavior in which the speaker’s voice is an aversive stimulus. Neither Wittgenstein nor Ribes get any closer than stating “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” 

Nothing imaginary happens when a speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. Only the speaker, who expresses what he or she thinks, feels or experiences vocally, can listen to his or her sound and is able to come out of the ancient prison of words. When we hear ourselves, while we speak, we are sure that our own “form of life” is either negative or positive. If we still doubt which is which, our voice sounds aversive to us.

Ribes writes that “language is not only what people write and speak, but also the means by which this is done.” The means by which people write are different from the means by which people speak. We cannot compare a pen or a keyboard with the feedback that is produced by the sound of our voice. “The sounds spoken” are different from “the signs written or read.” In the latter, we at best imagine a sound. We imagine the sound we are most familiar with. We are most familiar with NVB. The sound we keep imagining doesn’t represent our well-being. Our well-being doesn’t need to be imagined; it is “self”-evident. When speakers produce SVB, they consider this way of talking with others as causing their thoughts, feelings and experiences and the expression of these. NVB is perpetuated as it maintains our bias. SVB is a natural phenomenon, but it will only become apparent while we talk.