My Second Response to Fraley

Dear Reader,

This is my second response to the paper “On Verbal Behavior: The First of Four Parts” (2004) by Lawrence E. Fraley. I highly recommend that you read that paper, which I have posted with my previous writing. I am interested in the issue of “Verbal Communities” as I am in the process of creating a verbal community for Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Never before has such a verbal community existed. “A verbal community is a set of people who “talk” to each other—that is, who communicate among themselves through language, or more technically, whose linguistic behaviors are maintained by mutual reinforcement.” Fraley mentions the existence of subcommunities within each verbal community. Although this was never properly addressed, the SVB community has always existed within the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) community of every culture. Within “the English–speaking verbal community” we find mostly NVB speakers and only a few SVB speakers. The same is true for the French, the Chinese, etc. In pockets of each society SVB has always existed, but it was never clearly articulated that the SVB speaker attends to his or her own speech, that is, listens to his or her own sound, while he or she speaks.

Although SVB has been with us every-since we humans became verbal, we have not consciously, knowingly engaged in it. This unique possibility is only going to be achieved if we all knowingly participate in the creation and maintenance of the environment in which SVB reliably happens. Thus, just like any other ‘established language’, SVB “represents a relatively stable pattern of verbal behavior that is maintained by the special sets of contingencies that are in place within that given verbal community.” As our SVB is only reinforced by our SVB verbal community, we will no longer expect reinforcement from the NVB community. Those who want to have and are capable of having SVB, withdraw from the common NVB verbal community and in this way no longer participate in reinforcement of NVB.

To those who know SVB, people who engage in NVB are merely producing “vocal noises”, failed attempts at being verbal. Only if they listen to themselves while they speak, will they be able to shift from NVB to SVB and become verbal. This process is identical to a nonverbal child, who produces sounds, which are shaped by its verbal community to become language. “Through that process, the production of those noises becomes verbal behavior, and those sounds become words in their respective languages.” However, it is very important to recognize that by shifting from NVB to SVB, we are NOT learning different words in a different language, but, instead, we are learning to speak with a different sound in the language which we are already familiar with. By switching from NVB to SVB, we learn to talk, but we also learn to learn in an entirely new way.

NVB is the reason why even behaviorists like Fraley consider “private verbal behavior” to be “the most challenging aspect of verbal behavior.” In NVB you cannot say what you want to say as you, correctly or incorrectly, perceive yourself to be in a threatening environment. Involvement in NVB, of course, conditions very different neural behavior than involvement in SVB. Due to your involvement in NVB, you experience aversive stimuli inside your body. In NVB you cannot talk about these stimuli. Consequently, they seem to have a life of their own. All of this, however, is the result of the fact that you are NOT saying what you are perfectly capable of saying, but you are not allowed to say and which you don’t want to say, to prevent punitive consequences. Only in SVB can you feel and talk about the stimuli within your own skin and realize that what you considered to be your private speech is in fact the negative effect of your repeated involvement in NVB. Once you engage in ongoing SVB, you say what you want to say and then you find that there is no private speech. Only you have access to that part of the environment that is within your own skin and only you can talk about it.

Unfortunately, most of us are basically stuck with the stimuli which were conditioned due to our involvement in and exposure to NVB as we are the “only person in whom it occurs” and who “is privy to it”. You are so used to NVB that you have come to believe in the auditory illusion that is called private speech. Together with everyone else who engages in NVB, you imagine private verbal behavior occurring “in the form of private thoughts and visions, including those that we denote as comprehending, problem solving, and daydreaming.” Like Fraley, you believe that “for such privately occurring verbal behavior, the “speakers” serve as their own listeners.” The fact is, however, that privately, there IS no speaker, who produces a sound and there IS no listener, who hears a sound. Only when you talk do you produce a sound and is there something to listen to for a listener, but as I have earlier stated, NVB prevents you from talking and from listening. Actually, in NVB we are all only imagining, and, yes, we are all pretending that we are talking and pretending to be listening. Unless we engage in ongoing SVB, we are unable to recognize this.

When we engage in ongoing SVB, we realize that overt speech does NOT recede to a covert level, as is so often purported. Even Fraley writes that “Verbal behavior in the form of audible speaking involves a coordinated set of muscle–driven motor behaviors. Those vocalizations may be exhibited with decreasing intensity until so little sound is being produced that it cannot be heard.” Of course, our bodies are conditioned by overt speech, but to consider these effects as “private forms of verbal behavior” is nonsense.

It is astounding to me that even someone as informed as Fraley, apparently can’t resist the temptation to write metaphorically about the “more private forms of verbal behavior” which “are executed entirely by specialized parts of the nervous system—forms of verbal behavior that may involve only molecular scale movements of neural body parts. This class of neural activity occurs among nerve cells.” Fraley, in my opinion, really wants to talk about these private stimuli, that is, he, unknowingly, wants to engage in SVB, but, like everyone else, he is bound by the conditioning effects of NVB. He doesn’t know about SVB in which we can actually talk about these private stimuli. Naturally, we are NOT able to talk about our private stimuli as physiologists would, but we can talk about them as ONLY we could!!! Fraley, due to his NVB conditioning, puts a limit on himself and doesn’t allow himself or others to talk about these private stimuli in a more elaborate way, as would become possible with SVB. He concedes “Such events involve the release or transformation of so little energy that they remain undetectable by outside observers unless those observers are specially equipped to conduct sensitive probing for such slight and often well insulated physiological activity. Thus, a person’s subvocal statement, “It is going to rain soon,” manifesting as a private thought, goes generally undetected in any direct way by other people (although neural physiologists, using special instrumentation, may be able to detect and measure some properties of the involved neural activity). To the extent that it remains private, no opportunity is created for other members of the verbal community to supply consequences directly to that mini–scaled behavioral manifestation.” I have contacted Fraley, but he doesn’t want to talk with me about SVB and about these private stimuli.