August 18, 2016

August 18, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my twentieth response to the paper “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). No value judgement is placed on the fact that a speaker either produces Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) or Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Whether a speaker speaks the truth or not is of no concern at all. Therefore truthfulness doesn’t play any role in discriminating SVB or NVB. 

What the radical behaviorist “wants to know is what makes him say the things that he does.” However, such a focus could never lead him to the distinction between SVB and NVB as it fixed our attention on what the speaker is saying and not to how he is saying it. Although it “leads him to a concern with the environmental events that have acted to teach him to talk”, that concern remains stuck with the words he is using. 

In spite of the fact that the radical behaviorist has “an interest in the possible events in the present and recent environment of the speaker that bear some similarity to the stimulation available to the verbal community in providing initial differential reinforcement”, this concern with content couldn’t bring him closer to the SVB/NVB distinction.  

It is of great importance to discriminate the environmental influences that make us say what we say. Radical behaviorists have analyzed this very successfully. Yet, “tracing the environmental chain of command over verbal behavior as far as possible” would “extend the range” of “effective action as a scientist” a million fold, if it also included why and when a speaker elicits positive or negative emotions in a listener. 

In SVB speakers express, evoke and maintain positive emotions in listeners, but in NVB they stimulate and maintain negative emotions. These lawful response classes are universal and mutually exclusive; as SVB increases, NVB decreases and as NVB increases, SVB decreases. During any given verbal episode (a lecture, conversation or a meeting), there is an accumulative effect of the instances of SVB or NVB. 

Speakers perceive or don’t perceive the stimuli in their environment, listeners, which either make them produce more instances of SVB or more instances of NVB. Although most speakers, over the course of their development, acquire enough control over their verbal behavior to be able to speak the language of their verbal community, regardless of the positive or the negative circumstances, the tone of their voice clearly indicates that they are not in control over how they sound. 

Naturally, what speakers say as well as how they say it is controlled by environmental variables. How we speak is not determined by some inner behavior-controlling agency, but by the environmental stimuli, that is, by those with whom we speak. Thus, the SVB/NVB distinction focuses on how we speak as it makes what we say of secondary importance. 

What the speaker says becomes more or less important to the listener because of how he says it. Interestingly, Day suggests “when a student begins to suspect that he senses some order of a particular kind in human functioning” he “must not fail to proceed directly to an explicit verbal description of what he has seen that appears to make him think he has found something.” Such an explicit description is however only possible in SVB, but cannot be articulated when we are involved in NVB. 

Academic focus on description of what has been seen obviates what has been heard. The ubiquity of NVB prevented the description of the SVB/NVB distinction, which first of all requires a careful analysis of the environmental control of the speaker by his own listening behavior. The speaker’s ability to hear himself, which is present in SVB, but absent in NVB, is about how he speaks, not about what he says.