November 8, 2015

November 8, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Students, 

This is my fifth response to “Effectiveness as Truth Criterion in Behavior Analysis” by Tourinho and Neno (2003). I am writing these words as I am thinking about what many others have also been thinking about. My thinking, however, is a function of what I call Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), whereas the thinking or the private speech of other thinkers switches back and forth, like our daily conversations, between SVB and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Moreover, other thinkers such as the authors of this paper, Skinner and James, although they surely have much more SVB than those who are not into pragmatism and behaviorism, are still unknowingly mostly determined by the ubiquity of NVB. As a consequence, their efforts go mainly into writing about talking rather than in talking about talking. 

Although I am writing about talking, my attention mainly goes to talking about talking. James describes pragmatism as “the method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable.” In doing so, he refers to SVB. In the following statement James brings out his private speech into public speech. However, he mainly uses his writing to imagine what it would be like to speak about what he is thinking. Like Skinner, he was unknowingly describing SVB. “Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak, any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally.” (James, 1907/1996a, p. 34) 

Also the authors of this paper do a nice job of providing a description of SVB. “Truth, accordingly, is not an attribute of beliefs that represent reality in its formal or essential aspects, but a way to refer to whichever beliefs function productively to organize human experience.” It is one thing to read about this, but quite another to talk about it. For a long time the conviction has been that we will eventually talk about “the truth”, if we would study the writings of scientific and philosophic authors. However, this belief has proved to be false. The more we write and read about any scientific truth, the less we talk about it. This brought us to the situation where we are in today in which written words are more important than spoken words. 

Talking about “beliefs” that “function productively to organize human experience” requires SVB and will not be possible if we can't discriminate between SVB and NVB. How can we talk about this if we dysregulate each other? How can we talk about this if we don’t realize that our NVB prevents us from talking about this? Besides, the real work only begins once we have ongoing SVB. NVB imposes its dominance hierarchy as it creates and exploits chaos, but SVB evokes intelligent and refined interaction as we are able to talk about, enjoy and explore the oneness of our natural world. 

“Thus, theories become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest” (James, 1907/1996a, p. 32). In NVB we are stuck on theory, but in SVB we are open to any theory that explains reality.  Our conversation will make us aware there are many matters which we can only talk about when we have SVB. Our scientific disciplines are only useful to us to the extent that we can talk about them and therefore implement them. “Investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them may from some point of view be useful” (James, 1907/1996a, p. 33).

SVB makes theories generated by NVB obsolete. Read carefully the following statement written by William James more than hundred years ago. We still need to learn to talk about what he wrote about. I love James. “To “agree” in the widest sense with reality, can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed. Better either intellectually or practically!. . .Any idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn’t entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality’s whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will hold true of that reality.” 

In SVB we agree, but in NVB, although we don’t realize it, we disagree. Indeed, in SVB we “agree in the widest sense with reality”, whereas in NVB we “entangle our progress in frustrations.” What was true about human interaction back then is still true today. “True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.” (James, 1907/1996a, p. 103) Our SVB will establish this long longed-for “consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.” 

My writing is not, like these authors, a function of a longing for a better way of communicating. To the contrary, it is a function of my ongoing experience and my ever-increasing knowledge about SVB. “James argues that a belief is not true; it becomes true; that is to say, it is made true as it is confronted with the demands following the interaction of men with reality: “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its very-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation ” (James, 1907/ 1996a, p. 97).” The process James unknowingly was writing about is SVB.