Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior

II. The Nonverbal

II THENONVERBAL Words are instructions or directions for behavior, and they may be responded to either appropriately or inappropriately, but the appro­ priateness or inappropriateness depends upon the judgment of some­ one. The appropriateness and inappropriateness are no more immanent in the response than the meaning is immanent in the words which are responded to. But words are only one discriminable aspect of lan­ guage; verbal behavior is not linguistic behavior. This distinction is often neglected, and in philosophy it has always been neglected. What in the past few decades has been known as the "ordinary language" philosophy, or what have been known as the various linguisticphilosophies, are in fact nothing of the sort. Linguis­ tic behavior consists of other utterances as well as words. Indeed, when one speaks, one cannot do so without employing other vocal resources. Linguists have identified these other attributes as pitch, stress, and juncture and in English have, they maintain, identified four levels of each. The meaning of "pitch" is obvious. "Stress" is the attribute of the quantity of energy release, that is, volume. "Juncture" is a pause not between words, for in speaking there is nothing to correspond with the space between printed words, but a pause in the stream of utterance. The various punctuation marks in formal written language are attemptsto make visual equivalentsto juncture, attempts not entirely successful. For ordinary purposes these and other observable attributes of utter­ ance are subsumed by the term "tone," and there is a multitude of metaphorical terms for kinds of tone—growling, sweet, hasty, impres­ sive, and so on. The question is, What does tone have to do with the words which are uttered in a kind of tone? I shall begin with a trivial example, or an apparently trivial example, for analysis shows that what is going on here is by no means unimportant. 90 EXPLANATION ANDPOWER Two men who have been hitherto strangers to each other have struck up an acquaintance in a bar and have fallen into a sustained conversa­ tion. At one point Smith says to Jones, "Why, you son­of­a­bitch!" Smith's tone is one of jocularity. The relation between the words and the tone is an ironic one; that is, the tone and the words are inappro­ priate to each other. The words are denigrating, but the tone is jocular; it cancels the denigration. For Smith, friendship—that is, ascription of value to Jones, not denigration—is the appropriate way to interpret the words. The tone, then, is an instruction to respond inappropriately to the words. If Jones responded appropriately to the words, he might throw his beer in Smith's face, or hit him, or break off the conversation and turn on his heel. And it is perfectly possible that he might do anything of the sort, including stabbing Smith to the heart. Some people are very upset at denigration, especially from a comparative stranger. The protocol of the situation is that Jones ought to respond to the tone as cancelling out the denigration of the words, but he may or may not obey the protocol. He may judge it to be appropriate not to respond inappropriately to the words; he may judge it to be appropriate to ignore the jocularity of the tone. Or he may judge that it is inappro­ priate to respond to the tone, for rightly or wrongly he may believe that Smith really meant to be denigrating and that the jocular tone was hypocritical. The tone in which words are uttered, then, consists of instructions for responding to the words. Furthermore, as the above analysis of possibilities of response shows, there is no immanent connection be­ tween tone and words, nor, since the meaning of neither tone nor words is immanent, is there any necessary response that determines the relative importance of, in the case, a pair of instructions ironically related, one instruction asserting what the other denies. THE SIGN Another example will get us closer to what is going on here and how we should organize our analysis. Say that a subordinate has been called into the office of his superior and has been reproved for some failure or other. He reports on it to a fellow worker at his own hierarchical level. "His words were pleasant enough. He said that my slip wasn't very important, but that he felt he should call it to my attention. However, the tone of his voice showed that he was really very upset...