The Link between Selection of Verbal Behavior during our Lifetime and Natural Selection

To identify what constitutes epistemologically and ontologically sound units of analysis, I investigate verbal behavior in conversations through a selectionist lens. How may Darwinian selection aid our understanding of the selection of behavior during ontogeny? Speech is a natural event that comes down to sounds that affect the behavior of conspecifics. The talk explores how Baum’s multi-scale ontology may be applied to verbal behavior. This implies treating larger verbal episodes as wholes, induced by a context and correlating with consequences. Thus, the talk, first, debates theoretical reasons to place verbal behavior in an evolutionary framework by viewing it as shaped by its consequences, through a person’s lifetime and through interactions with the environment across many generations of natural selection. Second, the talk exemplifies experimental procedures treating verbal behavior as allocation of time. Having conducted experiments designed in a multi-scale ontological behavioristic framework, which is viewing behavioral units as functional wholes with parts that also are verbal activities, I discuss conceptual merits and methodological challenges connected to applying multi-scale selection of behavior to experimental work.