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

Behavior and Philosophy, 2003 by Burgos, Jose E

I cannot but read this quote as asserting that social whim defines arbitrarily applicable relational frames, that it is a kind of social relation, and that it plays a mediating role. Putting it all together inevitably leads to the conclusion that the RFT definition of verbal behavior relies on the notion of social mediation as much as Skinner's. To be sure, the kind of mediation provided by social whim in (arbitrarily applicable) relational frames is different from the one provided by the contingency mediator in Skinner's definition. What is socially mediated in (arbitrarily applicable) relational frames is the antecedent stimulation. But social mediation seems to be at "the core" of both definitions of verbal behavior.

Immediately after the last quote, however, one reads that "[t]he history of the audience does not define the functional unit of language in RFT" (pp. 150-151). If "relational framing is inherently a form of social behavior" and "the training history of the social mediator is particularly important for that reason" I don't see how the history of the audience (or the social history of the experimenter) does not define the functional unit of relational framing. It would seem that by "inherently" and "particularly important" the authors do not mean "defining." But what do they mean then? Moreover, what do they mean by "defining" and "define"? I shall address this issue later. For the moment, let me comment on other notions that seem to be at the core of the notion of a relational frame.

Emergence and Context

The authors specify in Chapters 2 through 5 other notions that (apparently) characterize relational frames. Key terms here are "emergent," "derived," "transformed," and "contextually controlled." It is unclear whether the first three are synonyms. If they are, using three different terms to talk about the same concept can only make the discourse more confusing. If they are not, I have no idea exactly how they differ. In any case, I suppose the authors adopt the standard sense of "emergence" found in behavior-analytic equivalence-relation experimental research, where it refers to "not explicitly trained" or "without further training." A central notion of that research thus is also central to RFT, so the latter will inherit any problem with the notion.

One problem is that many (topographically) nonverbal behavioral phenomena in nonhumans qualify as emergent in the above sense, so emergent responding is far more general. For example, nonverbal Pavlovian generalization in nonhumans qualifies as responding to stimuli that have not been explicitly trained, so it is emergent responding precisely in the above sense. Moreover, it qualifies as relational responding, for one can view subjects as responding comparatively, and hence, according to what the authors call the "relational-frame family of comparison," which:

is involved whenever one event is responded to in terms of a quantitative or qualitative relation along a specified dimension with another event. Many specific subtypes of comparison exist (e.g., bigger-smaller, faster-slower, better-worse), (p. 36)