May 17, 2015

May 17, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Although many people probably may think I that am crazy for making such a big deal out of it, the difference between writing and reading and speaking and listening are completely ignored and this has many negative consequences. This distinction ties in with learning, or rather, with the conditions which make learning possible. If behavior is to be our starting point, we must accept the fact that writing and reading are entirely different behaviors than speaking and listening. Speaking and listening are crucially important in the process of learning how to read and write, but writing and reading are of no help to us when it comes to speaking and listening. To the contrary, writing and reading keep taking our attention away from speaking and listening.

If we refocus again on speaking and listening, which is one of the main goals of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), we would discover that a different way of looking at the world instantaneously becomes possible because we are letting go of our infatuation with words, which presumably are the most important aspect of our verbal behavior. By becoming familiar with SVB, we effortlessly discern that our sound plays a crucial role in our vocal verbal behavior, that is, in our interactions with others. Whether or not we pay attention to our sound, while we speak, creates an entirely different way of talking. Only if we listen to ourselves while we speak can and will we achieve SVB, but if we are oblivious about the sound of our voice, while we talk, which is most of the time, we end up having Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the speaker aversively controls the behavior of the listener. 

When Catania (2013, p. 4) refers to the long-standing “debate between those who call themselves radical behaviorists and those who call themselves cognitivists or mentalists”, he adds “to a large extent it has been about how we talk.” I disagree with this point of view, which obfuscates the fact that these debates are not about people who are talking with each other, but are mainly about scholars who merely write and read papers. “The behaviorist”, who supposedly “argues that, "because behavior is all that is available to measure, the language of mental events can be misleading”, is referring to the language which is used and not to how something was actually said. 

It never was “a mentalistic account” which was “accepted as explanatory”, which supposedly discouraged “further inquiry”, but it was lack of vocal verbal behavior, that is, the lack of actual conversation between behaviorists and mentalists, which continued to perpetuate this unnecessary standoff. If more effort would go into how we actually talk with each other, we would have to pay attention to how we sound and then we would find something that would get us out of this stale mate. However, Catania states “For the behaviorist it isn’t enough to say that someone did something because of an idea, a feeling or a hunch” (italics added). Here is an example of someone who writes about what we say as if writing is more or less the same thing as saying it. No doubt Catania would be speaking like that if he would say something, but imagine how off-putting that is, that speaking is never quite enough and that the contingencies controlling speaking and listening behaviors can only be found if we “look further, to these past experiences or, in other words, to past behavior.”

Interestingly, Catania states “If we are successful, we may also have something useful to say about the origins of our ideas, feelings and hunches.” In other words, what we are feeling and experiencing in the moment is not important, but only our past behaviors, which causes what we are feeling, are “useful” because they originate them. From this it is also evident how “the behaviorist doesn’t dispute the existence of ideas, feelings and hunches, but rather criticizes them as causes of behavior.” Thus, in ordinary conversation, the behaviorist basically dismisses the possibility of having a conversation which is under stimulus control of the sound of our voice.  

   

When comparing apples and oranges or cognitivists and behaviorists, it is,   important to recognize that “this dispute stems as much from different ways of talking about behavior as from differences in research findings.” Indeed  “behaviorists and cognitivists are often interested in very different types of questions” and “behaviorists tend to deal with questions of function and cognitivists with questions of structure.”  However, this doesn’t answer the question about why they never talk with each other. The fact that they are interested in different questions could actually enhance their conversation, but this would only be the case if behaviorists and cognitivists learned about SVB. Currently, both are mainly involved in NVB and neither one even knows it as their different ways of ‘talking’ are in fact only different ways of writing.