May 21, 2015

May 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Today’s writing is my fourth response to “Behaviorism and the Stages of Scientific Activity” by J. Moore (2010). By reading and studying this paper, it became clear to me that my theory of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), unlike most mentalistic theories, has passed through three different developmental stages. It is true for SVB that “verbal processes at the earlier stages establish a large degree of stimulus control over verbal processes at the later stages.” My “theoretical verbal behavior” is parsimonious and not controlled by any “mischievous factors.” I am not using metaphors to make my point and if I do, I only do so to demonstrate how distracting they are and should be avoided In spite of rejection, my insistence on vocal verbal behavior, on talking, as well as my resistance against and my problems with, writing, protected me from falling victim to mentalism, even before I knew anything about behaviorism. Listening to one self while one speaks dislodges any false notion of having a self.

The fact that neither the speaker nor the listener has a behavior-causing inner self, is the most revolutionary characteristic about SVB and is also the reason why I have experienced so much rejection from others. However, those few people who, due to their own behavior history, were ready to engage in the conversation that dissolves any sense of self, they reinforced me. When I discovered SVB, I called it “Language Which Creates Space” as I was involved with people who practiced meditation. I was an oddball in the company of esoteric people, who didn’t want to talk with me. As long as we were meditating, things were fine, but when meditation came to an end and we were drinking tea, someone would say something I experienced as disturbing as it seemed to destroy the meditation. The moment someone opened their mouth we were back to square one and our usual arguments and petty talk would come right back. People reluctantly talked about ‘being in their mind’ and were supposedly in the process of ‘getting out of their mind.’ They all agreed that talking itself made us ‘identify with our mind’ and weren’t into it. 

Since I was, because of the family in which I grew up in, into talking, I was frustrated when the meditation would go away because people were talking or because they didn’t want to talk. My notion of meditation was that there must be a way of talking, which creates and maintains it, but my attempts failed and I only got into arguments. People were getting tired of me and I was getting tired of them and I was thrown out. I got frustrated as meditation was absent in my conversations with others. Alone and rejected, I began to talk out loud with myself. Because I had been trained as a classical tenor singer, I was used to listening to myself, but this time I was listening to the sound of my voice while I was speaking. At that time this was a totally new experience for me.

To my surprise, when I listened to the sound of my voice while I talked with myself about my depressing situation, I felt peaceful and calm. My attention for the sound of my voice made me aware of what and how I was talking. I was saying to myself: this is how I want to talk! I felt relieved and reassured that I was able to talk like this with others. All I needed to do was to listen to my voice while I speak. However, this turned out to be extremely difficult, even almost impossible. Again and again, I lost my calm voice and was speaking with a voice which sounded upset, agitated, frustrated, fearful and negative. I wanted to speak with my happy voice, with a sound which made me feel at ease, meditative and focused, but I lost it again and again and again. Each time this happened, I went back to my attic and tried to listen to myself and each time, I found back again the sound which made me completely quiet. 

One friend, who was willing to listen to me, let me explain how I wanted to talk with him. He liked it and encouraged me to continue with it. Because of him I got a couple people together with whom we explored the process of listening while we speak. In SVB each speaker is listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. In SVB the speaker is his or her own listener, but other listeners can also hear if and when the speaker is listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. When the speaker is no longer listening to him or herself, while he or she speaks, he or she is producing Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the speaker separates him or herself from the other communicators, who are his or her environment, by assuming the existence of an inner self. 

Being disconnected or isolated from others is a negative emotion and causes us to speak with a sound which is experienced the listener as an aversive stimulus. Oneness with the environment, by contrast, based on feelings of safety, well-being and support, makes us produce an appetitive sound, with which everyone agrees. When the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks, others agree with 100% inter-observer reliability that he or she is listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. Others feel the relaxation of the speaker when he or she produces SVB, but others also feel the sense of stress, anxiety and fear, when the speaker again produces NVB.

SVB is vocal verbal behavior which is no longer controlled by the mentalistic belief in a behavior-managing self. SVB makes us and keeps us conscious. NVB, on the other hand, makes us and keeps us unconscious and causes us to repeat verbal patterns, such as our belief in the inner causation of behavior, repeated in an automatic manner. NVB takes the life out of us and makes us talk in a mechanical, predetermined manner. SVB stimulates awareness and enables us to pay attention to whatever we focus our attention on, but NVB demands, holds and drains our attention and makes us feel depleted.

Our voice is the independent variable and what we say is the dependent variable; a change in our voice changes the conversation. Skinner wrote “When I said “explanation”, I simply meant the causal account. An explanation is the demonstration of a functional relationship between behavior and manipulable or controllable variables.”  SVB and NVB is not only “a system of behavior in terms of which the facts of science can be clearly stated”, it is also a system that can be tested experimentally. The fact that we haven’t done that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t do it. "Third-stage theorizing" doesn’t depend on anyone’s confirmation. Like Skinner, I say “my reinforcers were the discovery of uniformities, the ordering of confusing data, the resolution of puzzlement.” Most certainly, my theory of SVB doesn’t “include elements that are not expressed in the same terms and cannot be confirmed with the same methods of observation and analysis as the facts they are said to address.”