LAUDABLE GOALS, INTERESTING EXPERIMENTS, UNINTELLIGIBLE THEORIZING: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF RELATIONAL FRAME THEORY

Behavior and Philosophy, 2003 by Burgos, Jose E

ABSTRACT: An assessment of Relational Frame Theory (RFT) is benefited by a distinction among goals, experiments, and theorizing/philosophizing. The goals are laudable, but not new. The experiments are interesting, but they largely involve an expansion of the concept of relational responding from equivalence to nonequivalence relations, the obvious next step. The theorizing, where RFT's bona fide novelty supposedly lies, I found to be ambiguous, opaque, and contradictory. Inasmuch as unintelligibility allowed me to understand, I found RFT to be a hypothetico-deductive and essentialistic proposal that amounts to little more than applications of basic set-theoretic (class and membership) and logical concepts (negation, material implication, biconditional) to verbal behavior.

Key words: relational frame theory, hypothetico-deductivism, essentialism, set theory, logic

The book Relational Frame Theory (2001) is the result of a collective effort to synthesize the multiple aspects of a proposal that, until now, has been scattered throughout journal articles, book chapters, and conferences. The book consists of two parts. Part I is entitled "The basic account" and presents the basic concepts, justification, philosophy, and experimental research of relational frame theory (RFT). Part II is entitled "Extensions and applications" and presents some of what the authors refer to as "implications" (p. 155) of RFT for a wide variety of topics (viz., development, education, social processes, psychopathology, and even religion and spirituality).

An assessment of the book is aided by a distinction among goals, experiments, and theorizing. The general goal of understanding verbal behavior is laudable, but not new. The experiments are interesting, but they largely represent an extension of the kinds of methods used in behavior-analytic equivalence-relation research to nonequivalence relations, the next obvious step, which, of course, does not diminish its importance. The theorizing (i.e., the concepts, logic, and justification), where RFT's bona fide novelty supposedly lies, I found to be unintelligible. Such an unintelligibility prevented me from making an unequivocal determination of specific goals (beyond the sketchy cliche of "prediction and control"), how they were to be achieved, and the significance of the experimental results for the achievement of any goal. I will thus focus on Part I, and, within it, on the main concepts, logic, and justification. Therefore, the present review should be seen as a conceptual/logical/philosophical complement to reviews that focus on the more experimental aspect of the book.

Part I consists of eight chapters. In Chapter 1, the authors do three things. First, they summarize the Skinnerian (within which they place Willard Day's and Kurt Salzinger's) and interbehavioral approaches to language. Second, they identify the philosophy of RFT with "a type of pragmatism [they] have called functional contextualism" (p. 6).1 Third, they attempt to explain why none of the standard approaches has lead to "a vibrant research program" (p. 10). In particular, their explanation regarding the Skinnerian approach arises from the idea that Skinner's definition of verbal behavior is "not functional" (pp. 12-13) and "too broad" (pp. 13-15).

In Chapter 2, the authors present the basic concepts of RFT, a central one being "relational responding," which the authors regard as learned behavior. Specifically, it is conceptualized as an "overarching," "generalized," or "higher order" (p. 23) operant, where by "operant" they mean the standard Skinnerian notion of "a functionally-defined class of responses" (p. 23). Another feature of relational responding is that it is "arbitrarily applicable" (p. 25) and contextually controlled, where by "arbitrarily applicable" is meant "under the control of cues that can be modified on the basis of social whim" (p. 25). In this chapter the authors also present a classification of relational frames into "families" dubbed with terms such as "coordination," "opposition," and "comparison," among others.

In Chapter 3, the authors elaborate these basic concepts into the notions of multiple stimulus relations and transformation of stimulus functions. In Chapters 4 through 7 all of these notions are applied to analogies, metaphors, stones (through the notion of a relation of relations), thinking, problem solving, the self, and self-directed rules. Chapter 8 is what the authors call a "precis" of RFT, where they "summarize some of the key features of RFT and. . .address some of the common behavioral criticisms to this approach" (p. 141).

Before I make specific commentaries, I must mention two stylistic matters that dampened my enthusiasm from the beginning. First, in the Preface, one reads that "[a] new day has dawned" (p. xii), which supposedly refers to RFT. This phrase struck me as a rather tawdry self-praise that reminded me of the obnoxious parents who say "we've got the best kids in the world." There is such a thing as believing too much in a theory, no matter how provocative, interesting, or potentially fruitful. Believing too much in a theory is suspicious enough, regardless of the believers; never mind when the believers are the very authors of the theory.