The Exodus of Behavior Analysis: Is “Splendid Isolation” the Way to Go?

Abstract

Psychology as a discipline is theoretically fractionated and has neither a generally agreed upon set of defining principles that determine its subject matter nor a common methodology that guides research. In the absence of a unified framework, psychology is therefore best viewed as a group of subdisciplines that can be distinguished by a conceptual approach (biological, behavioral, cognitive, humanistic, or psychodynamic) and content area (e.g., developmental psychology, learning, memory and cognition, or abnormal psychology). Each subdiscipline has its particular view of what counts as subject matter, what questions should be asked about this subject, and how one should go about finding answers to these questions (Lee, 1988). Despite this lack of agreement, I consider it reasonable to say that academic psychologists, regardless of their theoretical persuasion, adhere to an empirical epistemology and are committed to the principles and practices of science, albeit they are not all committed to the same kind of science. I assume Lawrence Fraley would disagree with me on this latter point because he chooses to characterize psychologists who subscribe to a traditional (meaning nonbehavioral) perspective as members of a "scientized" rather than scientific community. According to Fraley's viewpoint, these misguided individuals are spending their days studying the "interface between the metaphysical and physical worlds thought to reside in the mind of man," while behavior analysts in the meantime either are caught up in a futile struggle of "making over psychology," or are busy with practicing true science with the goal of developing a strictly natural science of behavior-environment relations that will gain them admission to the "coalition of natural sciences." Aside from its unnecessarily sarcastic tone, Fraley's juxtaposition of traditional psychology as a "pseudo science" and behavior analysis as a "truly scientific" discipline reveals either a misunderstanding or a deliberate rejection of the currently widely accepted conception of "science." According to this conception, behavior analysis differs from much of contemporary psychology in that its philosophical foundation, radical behaviorism, promotes an inductive rather than hypotheticodeductive scientific method, with the person standing in a dependent-variable relation