February 18, 2016

February 18, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, p. 192) Skinner writes that “consciousness is a social product.” However, “The privacy which seems to confer intimacy upon self-knowledge makes it impossible for the verbal community to maintain precise contingencies.” What is missing from this analysis is that “precise contingencies” can only maintained by what I call Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), but ceases to exist once we engage again in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

We are only conscious of how we talk when we are not threatened. Since most conversation is based on aversive contingencies, we are mostly mechanical and unconscious about how we talk. It is hard to believe that this is the really case, but once the SVB/NVB distinction becomes clear, there is no way of denying it. Most conversations are stress, anxiety, distraction, fear, flight or anger-inducing as the speaker’s voice affects the listener with an aversive contingency.  

Maintenance of “precise contingencies” requires that we constantly stimulate each other to listen to ourselves while we speak. Thus, in SVB we communicate our shared sense of well-being. Our acquired self-knowledge involves the maintenance of this knowledge by how we talk.  “Introspective vocabularies are by nature inaccurate (p. 192)”, because what we are dealing with is private speech which is no longer understood as part of public speech. Consequently, NVB maintains the belief in the privacy of the inner autonomous man.

In SVB private speech is considered as caused by public speech and is therefore not seen as separate from it. Our vocabulary to describe the environment within our own skin improves to the extent to which environments stimulate us to express private speech again as public speech. Inaccuracy of our current vocabulary is due to the ubiquity of NVB in which we separate our private speech from public speech.