Facts, interpretations, and explanations: a review of Evelyn Fox Keller's Making sense of life.
Borrow biology’s pause between fact and story to keep your ABA explanations lean.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kennedy (2004) read a biology book and wrote a short review. The book shows how biologists turn raw facts into explanations. The paper asks: can ABA borrow that thinking process?
It is not a data paper. It is a think piece for clinicians who want cleaner reasoning.
What they found
Biologists pause before they jump from data to story. They ask: what is fact, what is guess, what is wishful thinking?
The review says ABA should do the same. Write down what you saw, then decide what it means.
How this fits with other research
Fantino (1981) already warned that ABA was spreading too fast and picking up psychology habits. Kennedy (2004) answers: slow down and copy biology’s checks instead.
Reed (1991) said the EAB-ABA split is like species drifting apart. Kennedy (2004) replies: we can still trade ideas if we stay careful.
Jiménez et al. (2022) later built a tidy map of developmental concepts. That map is the kind of clear thinking Kennedy (2004) wants.
Why it matters
Next time you graph a client’s tantrum data, stop before you write “attention-maintained.” List the cold facts first: 3 out of 5 tantrums followed teacher walk-aways. Then add the smallest story that fits. This one habit keeps treatment plans slim and honest.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Write two columns: left side lists only what you saw, right side lists your guess—keep them separate in your report.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The job of a researcher is to explain the phenomenon that he or she is seeking to understand. To do this requires the accumulation of facts. These facts are then interpreted to arrive at explanations. However, individual researchers often interpret facts in different ways and arrive at disparate explanations. In her book, Making Sense of Life, Evelyn Fox Keller (2002) outlines various approaches used by developmental biologists to understand the animate systems we call life. In this review, I note several parallels between biology and behavior analysis in how facts are discovered, what is an acceptable interpretation of data, and how explanations are arrived at.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 2004 · doi:10.1901/jaba.2004.37-539