My Third Response to Fraley

Dear Reader,

This is my third response to the paper “On Verbal Behavior: The First of Four Parts” (2004) by Lawrence E. Fraley. Almost everyone believes that they have thoughts, that they, as people say, talk privately inside their heads with themselves. This pervasive false belief, which always goes hand in hand with the unscientific, profoundly problematic, but, also utterly immature notion that we, as individuals, cause our own behavior, is maintained by our usual nasty way of talking which I call Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). It goes without saying (pun intended) that we are affected by our involvement in NVB. Whether we acknowledge it or not, it is our common way of talking which makes us unhappy. This doesn’t mean, however, that we have negative thoughts and feelings, as we and our so-called mental health professionals believe, but it means that we experience negative stimuli inside our body about which we seldom if ever talk directly. Only during Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), in which we can fully express ourselves, don’t we mistake these private events any longer as our thoughts or even as our feelings or as our private speech.

Obviously, SVB is a very different way of talking than NVB. As a matter of fact, SVB is so different that while you engage in it, you realize you have always known this was possible, but were never able to get to it. When you, at long last, engage in ongoing SVB, it is clear why your previous way of talking was literally driving you nuts. The only way to have SVB is to stop yourself from having NVB. To have only a moment of SVB is even more troubling than not to have it at all. As long as we can’t continue with SVB, our biggest problem is the very thing which is so incredibly beneficial to all of us: genuine communication.

Although we are, of course, conditioned by our verbal communities and although this certainly means that our bodies and brains have changed and our neural behavior has been and continues to be affected by our verbal environments, there is no such a thing as “private subvocal speech.” To talk about what goes on covertly, inside of our own skin, in the same way as what goes on overtly, is bound to be ineffective as inside of us there is no speaker and no listener. Moreover, our common assumption of this non-existent “private subvocal speech” takes our attention away and endlessly and unnecessarily distracts us from the only real speech, which is overt speech. Only by focusing on overt speech are we able to differentiate between SVB and NVB.

Fraley, who presumably would love the world to know about the science of human behavior, nevertheless still refers to what he describes as “private subvocal speech.” He uses the example (long quote) of someone who is having the (covert) thought “it’s going to rain soon.” “Two points are relevant: First, the elements of that private subvocal speech were originally conditioned under public circumstances. That is, when the thinker was being conditioned originally to respond in that particular linguistic way to stimuli that typically precede rain, the speech was audible to members of the verbal community. They could then consequate it appropriately and with precision thus conditioning the person to exhibit that verbal behavior in a form that is common to that verbal community. When manifestations of that form of speaking recede to the private subvocal level of mere thought, those thoughts, which are manifesting only as neural activity, reflect the common language of the verbal community. As often noted, people think linguistically only in a language that previously they have learned. Second, the current private thought may in turn share in evoking some publicly detectable behavior that can be consequated by the social community, such as reaching for an umbrella to be carried along on an outing. If that public gesture is then punished or reinforced by community members, those consequences affect not only the proximal publicly visible gesture but, to a lesser yet often significant extent, the preceding private verbal behavior that shared in evoking that public response. Much private verbal behavior is consequated indirectly in that way.” What was conditioned under public circumstances was NOT private subvocal speech, but specific physiological responses which, if we cannot talk about them, inevitably result in the illusion that overt speech continues inside of us.

Once the notion of “private verbal behavior” has been accepted, we are getting stuck with a whole bunch of falsehoods. There surely NEVER was a “thinker”, who “was being conditioned originally to respond in that particular linguistic way to stimuli that typically precede rain” when “the speech was audible to members of the verbal community.” It was only an overt speaker, who produces sound that can be heard by a listener, who was conditioned in that particular way. Certain neural behavior was conditioned, but neither was a thinker nor a thought involved in this process, but only overt speech. The overt responses which Fraley describes (taking out the umbrella), are produced without any thinker and without any thought. According to Fraley, public speech recedes to “the private subvocal level of mere thought, those thoughts, which are manifesting only as neural activity, reflect the common language of the verbal community.” If these so-called private subvocal thoughts only manifest as neural activity, what is wrong in just calling them that? Why can’t we talk about the stimuli we experience inside our body? It is only due to our involvement in NVB that we seem to be unable to talk about what goes on within our skin, but in SVB we talk about them beautifully.

Fraley is ABSOLUTELY wrong when he writes “people think linguistically only in a language that previously they have learned”, as people only SPEAK in the language they have learned! This is especially apparent when you work with people who have been diagnosed with so-called mental disorders. The psychotic schizophrenic may engage in what is described as word-salad, but he or she never speaks a word in a language that he or she wasn’t previously conditioned by. When the schizophrenic is said to be internally stimulated, you should listen to what he or she wants to say. Neither do you privately speak with yourself inside your head, nor is a schizophrenic hearing any voices, but both of us are certainly responding to stimuli in our body which are the result of the extent to which we were involved in SVB or NVB. No doubt, NVB, the speech which separates us from our environment and makes it seem as if there are two environments, the environment inside of our skin and outside of our skin, plays a major role psycho-pathology. It is only during SVB that we can talk about what is inside and outside our skin as one environment.