February 17, 2016

February 17, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, p. 192) Skinner writes “Without the help of a verbal community all behavior would be unconscious. Consciousness is a social product. It is not only not the special field of autonomous man, it is not within range of a solitary man.” If skinner would have addressed the role of our vocal verbal behavior in being conscious, his efforts to “de-homunculize” man would have been more successful. What is the verbal community’s role in producing a conscious speaker? The verbal community creates and maintains the contingency which stimulates the conscious communicator.  

Verbal communities condition conscious and unconscious speakers.  We overestimate the extent to which conscious communicators are produced as we ignore the importance of two universal ways of talking.  Conscious speakers engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), but unconscious speakers engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Without this distinction man didn’t and couldn’t “de-homunculize.” 

The SVB/NVB distinction is more likely to be found by “a solitary man”, who sits alone and who listens to himself while he speaks, than by someone who keeps talking with others. The contingency that stimulates us to listen to ourselves while we speak is most easily created and maintained while we are alone, but it seems almost impossible to be maintained while we talk together.  Thus, without our aloneness “de-homunculization” didn’t and couldn’t happen.  

Only when we listen to how we sound while we speak we notice that we say different things when our sound changes. Our sound is always in the here and now and listening to it can only occur in the here and now. We become conscious of our way of talking only as long as we keep paying attention to how we sound. Of course, we can do this together, but each speaker must listen to him or herself while he or she speaks, otherwise the contingency which makes the SVB possible will fall apart. When speakers don’t listen to their own voice while they speak, they inadvertently coerce others to listen to them.