The functional analysis of psychological terms: in defense of a research program.
Skinner’s 1945 recipe for turning ‘mind’ talk into environmental facts is still on the table—try it on your next mental word.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Critchfield (1996) revisits Skinner’s 1945 plan for turning mental words into testable environmental events.
The paper is a call to restart that program, not a new experiment.
What they found
The author argues the 1945 blueprint is still usable.
Mental terms like ‘mind’ or ‘memory’ can be defined by the outside conditions that evoke them.
How this fits with other research
Langthorne et al. (2007) already did it. They replaced the mental word ‘sensitivity’ with the measurable concept of motivating operations in FA interviews.
McDowell (2013) sharpens the same point. It shows that methodological behaviorism itself slips into mentalism, so radical behaviorism is the safer path.
Roche et al. (2003) seems to disagree. They invite cognitive theories into behavior analysis, but the clash is only on paper; their goal is bridge-building, not empirical term testing, so the two papers talk past each other.
Why it matters
You can start small. Take one mental word your team uses—say, ‘frustrated’—and write a one-sentence definition that points only to observable conditions and results. Test if observers agree. Each term you convert keeps your language, your graphs, and your interventions rooted in things you can see and change.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In 1945, B. F. Skinner outlined a proposal that psychological or mentalistic terms found in natural language might be analyzed empirically in terms of the variables, conditions, and contingencies of which they may be observed to be a function. Such an analysis would enable discriminations to be made between different classes of variables that enter into the control of the term. In this way, the analysis would clarify what is traditionally called the "meanings" of such terms as they occur as properties of verbal behavior. Despite his expressed confidence in the success of such a program, Skinner largely abandoned the functional analysis of psychological terms in favor of the development of a promising new field; the experimental analysis of behavior. The present paper argues that the original program is of great importance as well, and for the following reasons: (a) to make full, immediate, and (most importantly) effective contact with the range of issues and terms of central importance to the traditionally and culturally important concepts of "mind" and "mental life" (and thereby demonstrating the relevance of radical behaviorism to the full range of human and verbal behavior); and (b) to extend the methodology of the functional analysis of verbal behavior more generally. Such a research program would demonstrate, through an empirically-based scientific analysis, that the philosophical problems concerning "mental life" may be productively analyzed as problems of verbal behavior. Issues of methodology are discussed, and possible methodological strategies are proposed regarding the confirmation of behavior analytic interpretations of mentalistic terms.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 1996 · doi:10.1007/BF03392909