My Fourth Reponse to Fraley

Dear Reader,

This is my fourth response to the paper “On Verbal Behavior: The First of Four Parts” (2004) by Lawrence E. Fraley. I respond to this paper as Fraley writes about the implications for training of verbal behavior. Since I want readers to know about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), I would like them to recognize that Fraley, unknowingly, is referring to changes which only will come about if we are going to change the way in which we talk. Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is neither conducive to learning about verbal behavior nor is it helpful in teaching or in relationship. The following quote addresses the feedback, which is only happening if we engage in ongoing SVB, but which is absent in NVB. “The study of grammar would move from surveys of contexts and corresponding forms to surveys of contexts and corresponding effects on audience members—and to feedback loops through which audience reactions would in turn affect the speakers’ verbal behaviors. That is, within language training programs, in general, importance would tend to shift from form to function, a more powerful analytical approach to linguistics that is made possible by the emergence of the necessary basic science.” Although Fraley doesn’t write that we need a different way of talking, one could read into his writing that a different way of speaking is, of course, absolutely necessary.

Fraley addresses the importance of “scientific manuscripts coining new terms that they can then define with the necessary precision.” SVB and NVB are precisely such new terms, which are not only parsimonious and pragmatic, but also enjoyable. A couple of behaviorists, who haven’t talked with me, but who have written a comment on my writings, have referred to SVB and NVB as: two big bags of verbal behavior with fuzzy boundaries. Such a dismissive description is to be expected from those who don’t engage in a real conversation with me in which they would be able to find out there is nothing fuzzy about these two universal patterns of verbal behavior.

In spite of their great emphasis on scientific terminology, most behaviorists completely ignore the two most obvious ways of talking occurring in every society around the world. The reason that this continues – and it is going to continue to happen – is because behaviorists, (Fraley is no exception) view written scientific terminology to be more important than spoken communication. They all slavishly follow and try to imitate Skinner, who “found it necessary to coin several new terms when writing Verbal Behavior.” However, while “tinkering with Skinner’s analysis” and “extending it”, they never pay any attention to how Skinner, the speaker, sounds and to the, in my opinion, obvious fact that he mostly engages in SVB and, therefore, is experienced very differently by the listeners, who are mostly conditioned by NVB speakers. Most behaviorists lack the self-management skills which allow Skinner to talk as he does.

As the following example illustrates, the saying: it is not what you say, but how you say it, is lost on most behaviorists. “Let us consider a typical kind of example, pertinent to the analysis of a verbal episode, that often arises in the teaching context: From the behaviorological perspective, a speaker, in response to certain antecedent stimuli, exhibits a verbal utterance. A listener then responds in some way that provides consequences of that utterance. That consequation, which the speaker contacts as a result of the listener’s response, alters the controlling function between the speaker’s verbal behavior and the antecedent stimuli that originally evoked it—a change that tends to be revealed on future occasions of the speaker’s encounter with those stimuli. These events collectively exemplify the familiar operant conditioning process.” Due to their conditioning history with NVB, most behaviorists, like most of their students, are literally tone-deaf. Of course, “a verbal utterance” has a sound. The speaker’s sound determines whether the students want to listen to him or to her. Fraley, like so many of his colleagues, continues to erroneously believe that he is up against “superstitious students who were long committed to the assumption that bodies behaved in response to the will of implicit spirits called selves in secular contexts and souls in more spiritual contexts.” Regardless of their knowledge about behavior, behaviorists will not be effective as long as they teach with NVB.

It is not a matter of supplanting “such mysticism with concepts of scientific naturalism”, but whether one possesses the necessary skills to be able to model (like Skinner unknowingly does) the difference between NVB and SVB. Fraley (as so many other behaviorists), complains about the challenge he faces as a teacher, since he fails to acknowledge that he engages in NVB each time he feels “frustrated by the intransigence of those resident spirits, especially when they were cast in their religiously inspired soul personas.” Instead of fully recognizing that the student is as conditioned by NVB as the teacher, Fraley gets frustrated with his student’s responses. In effect, he unknowingly blames his students for having NVB, while he himself engages in it. Moreover, as he presumably is the knowledgeable teacher, he unknowingly sees himself as the SVB speaker.