December 7, 2014

December 7, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This author heard someone on the radio say “he sounded good, he said what I wanted to hear.” What a verbalizer sounds like to a mediator is a function of the mediator’s behavioral history. However, only in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) does the verbalizer say what the mediator wants to hear, but in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) the mediator’s dislike of the verbalizer doesn’t get any attention. This doesn’t mean that in NVB the mediator likes to hear what the verbalizer is saying. In NVB, the mediator merely pretends to like what the verbalizer is saying. Thus, the aforementioned saying may be an example of NVB or it may also be an example of SVB. 

The statement seems to refer to how the nonverbal behavior, the sound of the voice of the verbalizer, is determined by the mediator, depending on what the verbalizer is verbally saying. Supposedly, the verbalizer sounds good only if he or she says verbally what the mediator wants to hear. People with a liberal or republican leaning only like to hear what they already agree on. However, nobody is really listening. The nonverbal behavior of paying attention to our sound is made impossible by our verbal fixation. We make it seem as if what we say, the verbal, is more important than how we say it, the nonverbal. This assumption is maintained by NVB. Only in SVB is what we say aligned with how we say it. Only in SVB is there congruence between our verbal and nonverbal expression.

Skinner (1957) considered functional unity as essential for describing units of discourse. He treated the units that emerge, both for the verbal community as well as for the individual, as idiosyncratic. He stated “…phrases, idioms, clauses, sentences… may have functional unity as a verbal operant…” which “is exclusively a unit of behavior in the individual speaker.” Verbal Behavior is a functional verbal account of the organism’s interaction with its nonverbal and its verbal environment. This required a new terminology and dismissal of grammatical issues, which couldn’t capture the workings of the operant process. The logic of traditional grammar is totally different from Skinner’s logic, in that the former is rooted in the primacy of internal, imaginary causation of behavior, while the latter teaches that behavior is a function of measurable, environmental variables. Many are still upset with Skinner for changing the language. However, this author proposes to take Skinner’s work even one step further. The proper discussion of operant conditioning processes cannot occur as long as communicators still engage in NVB, which essentially is the way of talking which disconnects the speaker from the listener, from his or her environment. We are only able to accurately talk about environment-behavior relations if our way of talking includes rather than excludes the environment.  Our agential way of talking in which we continue to believe that we cause our own behavior, is a way of talking which separates the speaker from the listener. SVB has a totally different kind of logic. As talking only makes sense if someone is listening, listening is more important than talking in SVB.