February 8, 2015

February 8, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is the final response to “Listening is Behaving Verbally” (2008) by H.D. Schlinger. It is unclear at this moment if anyone will ever appreciate or validate this writing, but this writer remains hopeful, because he has acquired the vocal verbal behavior of which this writing is a function. This skill didn’t come easy, but he is certain that he has it and he enjoys using it. This writer has given up organizing groups, because it was always a problem to attract participants. However, in the psychology classes he teaches, he works with two groups for the duration of an entire semester. 

The dream, from which he just woke up, had two parts. In the first part he was at his house where people had gathered to participate in a group. He was delighted to see such a large group. Never before had so many people showed up. Before the group could get started, however, a leaking toilet had to be fixed and after that was done the group began. In the meantime, tea had been shared and everyone was calmly waiting to get started. When this writer finally came in everyone was ready.  

        

In the second part of this peaceful and peculiar dream, this writer was watching how a painting was painted by an old painter, who was seated at the harbor. The painting depicted the sea as seen from the harbor. He could see the buildings along the cay with its freight-boats and yachts. One ship was on its way leaving the harbor. The painter explained that the horizon was far away, but also very near and while looking at the reality and then again at the picture, this writer began to have a sense that leaving and arriving was the same.  

  

When this writer was a child, his father justified hitting him on his head and ears by saying “Those who choose not to listen, will have to feel.” If this writer did something that irritated his father, he would say in a threatening way “Do you want me to give you buzzing ears?” or “My hands are itching to give you a good beating.” He had no idea that his voice as a speaker continuously negatively affected his son as a listener. 

Another one of his often repeated statements was, paradoxically “No matter what it is, we can always talk about it.” At times, they talked, but, as his father was always putting himself above him, this led to arguments and a sense of rejection and frustration for this writer. 

Now that his father is very old, this writer doesn’t have any contact with him anymore. His knowledge about behaviorism and behaviorology has made him loose interest in anyone who is ignorant about the science of human behavior. Yet,  even most of those who know about behaviorism are unable to engage in the conversation in which he can demonstrate Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Since only what is written matters to them, he began to write about it. 

By commenting on their papers he can make his findings clear. He is not interested in proving them wrong. Most of the time, they are quite right, but since their analysis doesn’t involve SVB and NVB, something essential is always missing. He knows something that they don’t know, but his unequal relationship to them is that they will make it seem as if they know something which he doesn’t know. 

Although it is true there is still a lot to learn about behaviorism for this writer, the often repeated principle “If it can happen, it will happen, but if it doesn’t happen, it can’t happen” helps this writer to accept when SVB can’t happen or when only NVB can happen. He is no longer interested in behaviorologists or anyone, who, like his father, coerces him, because he enjoys expressing, exploring and verifying his SVB/NVB distinction. 

The point of Schlinger’s “brief speculative analysis is that appealing to the ongoing discriminated verbal behavior of the listener represents a parsimonious approach to explaining how verbal stimuli condition the behavior of the listener without resorting to analysis at other levels.” 


This writer, however, insists on an analyses at other levels. SVB and NVB are different response classes of the listener, when he or she becomes a speaker. The turn-taking that is involved in listeners becoming speakers and in speakers becoming listeners, characterizes the difference between SVB and NVB, which are operant behaviors and respondent behaviors that are caused by the nonverbal components of verbal stimuli. Words when spoken are sounds, which condition the behavior of the listener. 

Schlinger, who states “a rule is any verbal stimulus, irrespective of who utters it” leaves unanalyzed the fact that SVB and NVB function “to condition the behavior of the listener." In the absence of the SVB/NVB  distinction “the ubiquity of verbal stimuli that condition a listener’s behavior” cannot be well-organized. Moreover, “the different approaches to rule-governed behavior by behavior analysts” make the concept virtually meaningless. As rule-governed behavior is characterized by our verbal fixation, it will not allow us to acknowledge the two ways of talking, which even every uneducated communicator is ready to admit. 

Although the behavior of speakers “is conditioned by listeners who are specially trained to respond to such behavior”, it is only under certain circumstances “that listeners also become speakers.” Such occurrences are much more rare than is often assumed. In NVB listeners never really  become speakers, as NVB speakers are prevented from listening to themselves. In NVB speakers force listeners to listen to them.  NVB speakers don’ t listen to themselves, although others are listening to them.

The fact that much listening is behaving nonverbally, reflexively, prevents  people from understanding what is being said.  “Many basic linguistic processes” are not at all as “common to both speaker and listener” as we might be inclined to believe. This writer agrees with Hayes and Hayes, who wrote that speakers and listeners only share a history of training with “arbitrarily applicable relations sustained by social conventions” (1989, p. 182). Only in SVB are there “linguistic features common to both speaker and listener.” Only in SVB “the communality is that both individuals engage in verbal behavior.” Only in SVB is the public speech of the speaker identical to the private speech of the listener. In NVB, in which the public speech of the speaker is never identical to the private speech of the listener, in which this commonality is missing, as the speaker remains the speaker and the listener is not allowed to become the speaker, there is no verbal behavior in the strict Skinnerian sense. Rather than behavior that is mediated by others, it is behavior that is forced upon others. To ignore this important difference is to ignore the SVB/NVB distinction. 

According to Schlinger, only when listeners are “also speaking (mostly echoically and intraverbally) they are said to listen (or paying attention or understanding).” This is an exact description of SVB. The NVB speaker has a different effect on the private speech of the listener than the SVB speaker. There is a big difference in the listening, paying attention to and understanding that is a function of feeling threatened and intimidated and of being positively reinforced. The NVB listener was drilled to follow orders and obey the NVB speaker, but the SVB listener was trained to respond to and reciprocate the SVB speaker. These are two opposing conditioning processes. Although there is variability, most of us have only received a very small amount of SVB, but a lot of NVB conditioning.