August 19, 2016

August 19, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my twenty-first response to the paper “Radical Behaviorism in Reconciliation with Phenomenology” by Willard Day (1969). When the reader becomes informed about the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) he or she realizes that our common explanations of how we talk with each other are inadequate as long as “they do not involve tracing the observable antecedents of behavior as far as possible into the environment.” 

When the listener speaks in response to a speaker he or she has been affected by that speaker’s voice. This effect determines whether there is going to be SVB or NVB. Even though it is there, we usually don’t give much weight to the importance of this environmental effect. 

Instead of “tracing the observable antecedents of behavior as far as possible into the environment”, we adhere to psychological explanations which are incomplete as they “often do little more than specify some inner process as the cause of a particular aspect of behavior.” When we only talk about what is presumably hidden inside of us, we actually indicate that the circumstances to talk about it weren’t favorable. 

Aversive circumstances that will cause our NVB occur much more often than the appetitive circumstances that will set the stage for our SVB. We haven’t learned to pay attention to how we sound while we speak and as long as this doesn’t change, we are going to produce NVB. 

We can learn how to have more SVB, but the discrimination of SVB and NVB which is needed will only get started if someone, a speaker, points out to the listeners, how a “particular aspect of behavior,” our voice, is an environmental variable which affects how we talk with each other. In other words, we must listen, not look, outside of us, not inside of us. 

Whether one has SVB is not a matter of listening from within, but of listening from without. It helps to know that the speaker produces a sound which can be heard by others, but which is now heard by the speaker himself. Thus, we are not listening for anything inside of us, but for something that is outside of us, that is, the sound which has come out, the sound which has been expressed. Our ability to listen to ourselves while we speak, which makes SVB possible, is not an inner process, but a publicly observable and, therefore, verifiable process. 

The fact that we keep adhering to “explanatory inner processes” which don’t explain anything demands an explanation. The ubiquity of NVB and the low rates of SVB are related to our insistence on this nonsensical “ontological pattern of language.” Once we know about the SVB/NVB distinction our explanation of why we talk the way we do is complete. 

Once we explain what is happening inside of our skin, our covert private speech, in terms of how we are affected our by overt public speech,  by our interaction with other people, who constitute our environment, we have identified a “legitimate functional relationship.” 

The NVB speaker is forceful and insensitive and is eliciting negative emotions in the listener as NVB maintains the hierarchical difference between speaker and listener. Moreover, in NVB everybody knows their place. This is why Day states “In those cases where the private event is conspicuously related to the environment, then reference to the private event is likely to be considered irrelevant or unnecessary for purposes of manipulation and control.” The NVB speaker doesn’t take turns with the listener, who often isn’t even allowed to become a speaker and give feedback.  In other words, NVB is a one-way street. 

Aversive effects of hierarchical differences are absent in SVB. Only in SVB we can realize that “absurd situations” always give rise to NVB. If ”private events are said to control behavior even though they are not themselves directly observable even to a single observer,” most likely we are intimidated by “very complexly constructed verbal behavior.” 

In NVB we fixate on what we say, but we completely ignore, to our own detriment, how we are saying things. In SVB we talk in a simple way as we are not trying to impress or dominate each other with verbal acrobatics. The simplicity and elegance of SVB is parsimonious and scientific, but the bombastic complexity and forcefulness of NVB is always biased.