The study of behavior differs fundamentally from the study of the psyche and logically cannot share the same discipline. However, while disciplines might be defined through technical exercises, they function through exercises of political power. The evolution of a discipline, though based on field and laboratory data interpreted within a specific paradigm and justified publicity by its utility to solve personal and social problems, follows a course of development in the political arenas of the academies and the professions. We happen to have a discipline, roughly connoted by the label "behavior analysis," without an academic home (the present ones haphazardly tolerate our activities), without a professional organization (the present one lobbies only "for behavior analysis"), and without a true professional name (the present one implies an approach not a discipline). No scientific community lasts long without a supporting professional infrastructure. In explicitly asserting ourselves as a discipline, we confront a number of difficult issues such as continuing to work in departments antithetical to behaviorism and a number of problems such as what we call ourselves to identify our professional and scientific concerns. (For example, we need a term descriptive of our science in its broad sense. That term is not psychology. Too many people persist in maintaining its commitment to cognitivism. On whatever term we agree, "behavior" should constitute its stem, for our efforts focus there, not in the putative underlying psyche or its current cognitive update.) The focus of our concerns and the solutions of our problems rest on one issue: Will our discipline prosper most as a branch ofpsychology or as an independent discipline? Slowly, but surely, our actions demonstrate that the latter is the preferred option, but these actions, though fortuitous, occur almost by accident. By specifically programming to achieve an independent professional status we increase the probability of doing so.
Organized scientific disciplines generate verbal behavior about science, but although organized in behalf of science, they are essentially social and political rather than scientific operations. Professor Staats (1986) misconstrues the fundamental nature of organizational disciplines in criticizing Fraley and Vargas (1986) for wanting to solve ". . . through organization ... what is really a scientific problem, that is, a problem of advancing behaviorism methodologically, conceptually, and empirically to meet the challenge" (p. 236). Organized disciplines, including organized psychology, are networks of political, economic, and social contingencies controlling the professional lives of member practitioners. Jonathan Turner (1985) took authors of books about sociology as a discipline to task:... for ignoring the fact that academic scholarship is also a political process .... Such processes need not be conspicuously implemented or particularly Machiavellian, but to ignore them is to miss much of what makes science a sociologically interesting phenomenon. (p.
This paper reviews the status of applied behavioral science as it exists in the various behavioral fields and considers the role of the Association for Behavior Analysis in serving those fields. The confounding effects of the traditions of psychology are discussed. Relevant issues are exemplified in the fields of law, communications, psychology, and education, but broader generalization is implied.
Foundation principles supporting a behaviorological thanatology are reviewed, including concepts of life, person, death, value, right, ethic, and body/person distinctions. These natural science foundations are contrasted with traditional foundations, and their respective implications are speculatively explored.
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