Ordinary language: The contributions of Gilbert Ryle and John Austin to the experimental analysis of behavior.

Cole (1994) digs into two old philosophy books. The author shows how Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin cleaned up messy everyday words.

The paper then links those tricks to Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Goal: teach BCBAs to spot when their own words blur meaning.

No data were collected. Instead, the paper gives step-by-step examples of ‘conceptual analysis.’

Example: saying a child is ‘aggressive’ hides the real actions (hits, bites). Swap the fuzzy label for plain verbs and your treatment plan gets clearer.

Normand et al. (2022) ran a survey and found parents rated jargon-filled vignettes the same as plain-language ones. This seems to clash with R’s call to scrub jargon. The gap is method: Normand tested acceptance, not understanding. Parents may accept without grasping.

Pilowsky et al. (1998) showed that folk-psych words (‘he’s mad because he wanted to’) block students from learning radical behaviorism. R’s tool kit gives instructors a way to untangle those folk terms before they harden as misconceptions.

Johansson (2025) uses AI to model how words gain meaning. Both papers chase the same prize—clear verbal events—but one uses philosophy, the other code.

Next time you write a report, pause on every mental-state word (‘frustrated,’ ‘manipulative’). Ask: what did the body do, in what context? Replace the label with observable verbs. Your treatment plan, supervision notes, and parent goals will match what you can actually see and count.