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From: Greg Snyder
Date: 09 Oct 2006
Time: 09:56:00 -0500
Remote Name: 130.74.194.57
Hi Vasu. You raise a lot of valid questions, and I’ll try to address them as well as I can within the limitations of this medium. Firs off, you wrote in regards to WJ: [Nevertheless, I would claim that his intention was to stick to the scientific method although he faltered in the application of it.] This may or may not be true; I will never know his personal intentions and motivations. But I will suggest that he fell into a trap by not strictly adhering to the scientific method. In short, his gross errors were twofold. First, he was trying to apply deductive thought in science; and this simply doesn’t work very well. The end result is essentially a house of cards. He created his central tenet, and then went forth trying to “prove” said tenet. This really goofs up experimenter bias, and doesn’t really keep us honest in the process. Secondly, he attempted to use corroborative evidence to “prove” his central tenet, rather than direct measures of his stated hypothesis. This is also a scientific no-no, and one which is (or at least should be) taught in any graduate level science class. Further, if one looks at perhaps his only real attempt to “prove” his belief (i.e., the Monster Study), it was horribly designed. Data gathered from that study would really be hard to interpret due to problems with internal validity. It does honestly befuddle me why such scientists didn’t measure psychological attributes before stuttering surfaced, so that one could use a simple statistical regression to predict stuttering--rather than trying to use corroborative evidence to “prove” your deductive belief post-hoc. … … … … … You also wrote relative to Sheehan: [Similarly, Sheehan posited his approach-avoidance and role-conflict theory for stuttering.] You know, I do carry a soft-spot for Sheehan, as he (in my estimation) was the most “scientific” of the largely pseudoscientific psychological stuttering theorists. If you follow Sheehan’s thought, and actually step into his logic--it really does make sense. However, Sheehan fell into some of the same traps that WJ did. For example, he wrote: [In psychological and speech laboratories we've uncovered evidence that stuttering is a conflict, a special kind of conflict between going forward and holding back - an "approach-avoidance" conflict. You want to speak but are torn by a competing urge to hold back because of fear.] This is a deductive hypothesis that cannot be tested. It is based on corroborative evidence (i.e., the phenomenon that when people try to stutter less, they often stutter more). Sheehan had very cleverly discovered a terrific phenomenon, which held a lot of clinical promise. But just because we’ve discovered a phenomenon, that does not give us the right to solely interpret in a fashion that we want to believe. Sheehan was using corroborative evidence to support a central hypothesis (or theory) that was not directly testable. Further, I could provide other explanations accounting for the phenomenon that have just as much (or more) validity as Sheehan’s. Opinions are like _____; we’ve all gone one, and they all tend to stink. (Salmelin’s 1998 article, if I recall correctly, documented changes in neural processing relative to when a stutterer “tried” to stutter less or more. So by allowing the stuttered brain to work the way it wants to--i.e., stop trying to stutter less and just accept the stuttering as it comes--this may allow for more efficient neural processing of speech.) So in short--One can discover and use the positive effects of a phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean that your explanation of it holds any true merit. A perfect example of this is Freud; he made a lot of astute observations, but his explanations were a little screwy. … … … … … Ok—this is to be continued. I’ve got to get to work! But yes, there may be an emerging perspective on stuttering that seems to handle the stuttering phenomenon pretty well, including its existence in other expressive modalities. I’ll have to attack this in the future…