The Verbal Community and the Societal Construction of Consciousness

Abstract

Skinner’s concept of the “verbal community� is developed as a link between the private experiences of individuals, on the one hand, and societal structures, practices and conventions, on the other. The verbal community enables the individual to have a discriminated consciousness of private experience, but since the verbal community is itself a historically constructed entity, then our most personal inner experience is also socio-historically defined. The nature of these relationships between society, the verbal community and the individual are explored from the standpoint of a transformational model of individual-society relationships, using Gramsci’s concept of ideological hegemony to articulate the ways that consent to domination is created and reproduced in the lived experience of society’s members.