Over the course of several years, I exchanged letters with B. F. Skinner about behaviorology. Although Skinner spent much of his professional career attempting to reform psychology–to persuade psychologists to study behavior rather than mind or cognition–in his last two years–he became increasingly disenchanted with the prospect, relating at one point (1993) that he was wrong to say that the study of behavior was the concern of psychology. He remained undecided about this historically crucial question, however, ending his final paper (on August 17, 1990, the day before his death) with the statement, “whether behavior analysis will be called psychology is a matter for the future to decide” (p. 1210). The letters he wrote to me express some of his doubts about this Sisyphean effort to reform psychology as a science of behavior. Here are the letters, unedited.

Graduate studies in behavior analysis in the eighties and nineties were different in many ways from the studies that are accessible today. The landscape has changed in many important ways and this has been caused partly due to variables like increased demand for behavior analysts in the work market, changes in technology that allow distance education and training, and the growth of behavior analysis internationally. Although the changes made possible by these variables have been positive, questions have arisen about some negative sides. This article takes a look at how the field has changed in the last dozen years and asks questions about the changing education of behavior analysts. The short and long term possible consequences of these changes are evaluated. The formation of a gap between passed and new generations of behavior analysts is recognized and discussed.

The ‘self’ is a highly popular concept in modern psychology, but is ill-defined in operational terms. The term ‘self’ is not a technical term in traditional behaviour analysis and for many decades, no attempt was made to define this concept. Skinner provided an early behavioural definition as ‘responding to one’s own responding’. More recently, relational frame theorists have argued that a fully adequate definition needs to incorporate arbitrarily applicable relational responding, which is seen within RFT as the core skill underlying verbal behaviour. This paper sets forth the RFT conception of self, from its roots as verbal responding (i.e., relationally framing) to one’s own responding, through its development in terms of deictic relations, to its elaboration as three forms of self-responding referred to as self-as-content, self-as-process and self-as-context. Subsequently, it will compare the RFT approach to self with those taken by a number of alternative psychological accounts.

Dr. Edward Taub has developed an effective therapy for stroke victims called Constraint-Induced Movement therapy. The foundation of this therapy is based entirely on behavior analysis principles, and intervention is a matter of applying contingencies of reinforcement for improving the movement of limbs impaired by different types of central nervous system damage. The result is a very efficacious therapy that produces large and clinically significant gains in performance that have been replicated numerous times across patients, clinics, and countries. Dr. Taub answers questions regarding the development of this therapy, which started with animal models, and offers insight into implementing behavior-analysis based treatments in medical settings.

Behaviorists have often insisted that mental or cognitive explanations are not explanations of behavior at all, and that “true” explanations lie in the historical contingencies of reinforcement and of survival of the species. Such insistence has occasioned continuing and vivid attacks from more traditionally oriented psychologists and professionals in other behavioral sciences who, from their own perspective, have insisted that behavioral explanations are not explanations at all, because they say nothing about the internal workings of organisms. Conflicting perspectives have been described as based upon different conceptual frameworks or paradigms. An alternative approach may be to recognize that there are different types of explanations – corresponding to different types of Why questions with which we are familiar in colloquial speech. Such a distinction between different types of Why questions and, accordingly, different types of explanations, lead to a recognition of different research areas as separate fields of inquiry. I will argue that the main problem from a behavior-analytic perspective lies, not so much in accepting mentalistic explanations as explanations on their own but, in the confusion of different types of explanations as if they were answers to the same kind of Why question.