Data in search of a principle: a review of relational frame theory: a post-Skinnerian account of human language and cognition.
Skinner’s account still works; RFT is an add-on, not a replacement.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Palmer read the 2001 RFT book and wrote a long review.
He asked: did the authors discover a new behavioral principle?
He decided the answer is no.
What they found
Palmer says relational framing is just old operant learning.
He says we do not need a new name or new theory.
Stick with Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, he says.
How this fits with other research
Hatton et al. (2004) answered Palmer in the same journal. They say relational operants are shaped by normal reinforcement histories. No new principle is claimed.
Osborne (2003) reviewed the same book one year earlier. He says RFT stays inside Skinner’s tradition. Palmer and Grayson read the same pages but reach opposite verdicts.
Schoneberger (2025) looks back and says the fight was pointless. Use Skinner’s definition when you track speaker–listener contingencies. Use RFT’s definition when you study how words relate to other words. Both tools fit in the same toolbox.
Why it matters
You do not have to pick a side. Keep teaching verbal behavior the Skinner way: mand, tact, echoic, intraverbal. When you see derived relations pop up in your data, grab RFT concepts to explain them. The field has moved from ‘either-or’ to ‘use both.’
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Responding to derived relations among stimuli and events is the subject of an accelerating research program that represents one of the major behavior analytic approaches to complex behavior. Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes,& Roche, 2001) offers a conceptual framework for this work and explores its implications for verbal behavior and a variety of other domains of complex human behavior. The authors dismiss Skinner’s interpretation of verbal behavior as unproductive and conceptually flawed and suggest a new definition and a new paradigm for the investigation of verbal phenomena. I found the empirical phenomena important but the conceptual discussion incomplete. A new principle of behavior is promised,but critical features of this principle are not offered. In the absence of an explicit principle,the theory itself is difficult to evaluate. Counter examples suggest a role for mediating behavior,perhaps covert, thus raising the question whether a new principle is needed at all. The performance of subjects in relational frame experiments may be a mosaic of elementary behavioral units, some of which are verbal. If so, verbal behavior underlies relational behavior; it is not defined by it. I defend Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior and argue that an account of relational behavior must be integrated with Skinner’s analysis; it will not replace it.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2004 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2004.81-189