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From: Greg Snyder
Date: 04 Oct 2006
Time: 11:33:47 -0500
Remote Name: 130.74.194.57
Hi Vasu. In your post, I saw 1 question, and 1 personal commentary described as a “question”. I will only respond to your actual question, as I don’t have the time or desire to debate the merits of personal opinion. First off—a theory’s job is to account for reality. Its job is to provide a framework in which everything we perceive about a phenomenon is interpreted. In short—a theory provides us a frame of context in which we view the world. Nearly every (if not all) theory relative to the etiology of stuttering presupposed that stuttering is a SPEECH disorder. As such, each theory goes to great lengths to develop the pathology relative only to the speech mechanism. This is not supported by the data. So at this point—one is forced to either salvage an errant theory by modifying it, or dump the theory altogether. At this point, all the prevailing views on stuttering presupposed that stuttering was solely a speech disorder; subsequently, they are designed as such. People stutter because they have speech-related anxiety. (Do you think people could have sign-related anxiety, penmanship-related anxiety, or trumpet anxiety? To the best of my knowledge, there are no such cases documented on record. So if one was to salvage that perspective, such traumas would have to be invented—effective immediately. And this is undoubtedly possible in the eyes of some, as the psychological stuttering perspective is largely pseudoscientific in nature anyway. As such, the psychological stuttering perspective cannot be tested, it cannot be refuted, and it can always explain the data *after the fact* … ipso facto, it is a pseudoscience. No sense even wasting our time trying to debate it.) People stutter because they learned to speak using speech-motor incoordinations. (Do you think that people have penmanship incoordinations? Signing incoordinations? Trumpet-playing incoordiations?) At some point, one must weigh the sanity of trying to salvage an idea that was honed for an expressive modality of 1 by attempting to ad hoc revise it to apply to many… rather than suggesting that we were off-base from the very start. But as in my previous response to another—all of this is academic, as people will believe what they want to believe—the data be damned. In stuttering, there may be more dogma than science in many a “researcher” and clinician.