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

Behavior and Philosophy, 2003 by Burgos, Jose E

What the authors call "conceptual error" (p. 13) and "key flaw" (p. 15), then, I call "conceptual flexibility," and what they call "the definitional problem" (p. 13), I call "the definitional expansion." By pretending to restrict functional definitions to single organisms, the authors show a conceptual rigidity that shuts the door to functional analyses of social behavior. To be sure, Skinner's change, as is, does lead to behaviorally bizarre results. However, on the one hand, bizarre results are a natural outcome of conceptual change (think of the bizarre results that have arisen from conceptual change in relativistic, quantum, and superstring theory). Bizarre results have not stopped scientists from embracing conceptual change, and 1 don't see why behavior analysts have to be the exception. The authors may well be right in that leading to bizarre results is a major reason why Verbal Behavior "did not lead to a progressive research program" (p. 11). If they are (a big "if"), far from justifying the absence of a "vibrant research program" (p. 10) based on Verbal Behavior, what that reason does is to expose a major mistake underlying that absence: Emphasizing bizarre results of conceptual change over the potential scientific progress it may allow.

On the other hand, take a mand episode where person A utters "Please, pass the salt" while looking at person B, and B immediately passes the salt to A. Under Skinner's definition, A's utterance qualifies as verbal behavior, not because of its topography or the fact that A is human, but because its consequence is socially mediated by B. Would the authors consider this result as bizarre? If not, then why is viewing the rat's barpressing as verbal behavior bizarre? Clearly, not because of the mediation per se (there's nothing bizarre about it) but because of the fact that rats are nonhumans and/or barpressing is not topographically linguistic. When it comes to assessing definitions of verbal behavior, then, the nature of the species and/or the responses seem to be quite important for the authors.

Moreover, under a relational-frame notion of verbal behavior, A's utterance does not qualify as verbal behavior if it does not "participate" (whatever that means) in a relational frame, which is equally bizarre. If bizarreness amounts to pretheoretic counterintuitiveness, rejecting an utterance such as "Please, pass the salt" is as bizarre as regarding the rat's barpressing as a case of verbal behavior. One bizarreness is thus replaced by another, so the issue becomes what bizarreness is the least bizarre, which is largely undecidable. But then again, I don't believe bizarreness is that bad. I thus agree that viewing barpressing (like not viewing an utterance such as "Please, pass the salt") as verbal behavior is bizarre, but I really don't care.

Just in case the reader (like the authors) cares, however, let me show that bizarreness can be substantially reduced in the case of Skinner's definition. The fact that the experimenter's behavior of mediating reinforcement of the rat's barpressing has been socially conditioned does not imply that the mediation is "social" (unless one is engaged in a search for the "essence" of social relations; more on essences later). The issue, then, is not that Skinner's definition of verbal behavior was too broad, but that his use of the term "social" was too broad. If we restrict "social" to certain interactions among members of the same species, as it is usually done in behavioral ecology and sociobiology (e.g., predator-prey relations are not typically regarded as social), the bizarre result does not obtain, at least in the kind of situation analyzed by the authors. No relation between an experimenter and a rat (or members of any other two species) thus qualifies as "social," so no behavior in the latter qualifies (technically) as verbal, no matter how much it is mediated by a socially-conditioned experimenter.