A Self-Interpretive Behavior Analysis

A Self-Interpretive Behavior AnalysisPhilip N. Hineline Temple University

Although it rejects self-awareness as psychological bed-rock, behavior-analytic theory can be stated self-inclu-sively, keeping the theorist within view. Its principles ofdiscrimination and generalization have been elaboratedto include concepts and higher order conditionalities, in-cluding those of logic and of awareness. Its violating acultural bias that is called the "fundamental attributionerror" may be a primary source of controversies. Its otherdisagreements with mainstream psychologies hinge moreon contiguous versus remote causation than on mentalismversus antimentalism, which Skinner emphasized. Thenonmediational, Skinnerian theorist is a participation inthe world rather than an isolated self.

One cannot navigate the paths to becoming a psychologistwithout repeatedly encountering Descartes's cogito ergosum as implicit if not explicit bedrock for philosophicaland psychological positions. "I think, therefore I am" hasthe ring of sound reasoning. It offers the comfort of ananchor at the very center of things, of making oneself thebasis for a sure reality, of not depending on others toestablish what is and what is not. This Cartesian stancepermeates most psychological prose, fitting hand-in-glovewith the ways we commonly speak and think of ourselves.Within our culture, awareness and logical thought aretaken as basic to human functioning, accessible to directscrutiny, and hence relatively straightforward to under-stand. Companion to this is an intentional stance thatconstrues the self both as center of awareness and as agentof action. It also is commonly assumed that awarenessand agency are inextricably related, both placing thesource of action within the acting person.

Culturally Assumed Relations BetweenTheorist, Theory, and the WorldThe exact basis for a linkage between awareness andagency is seldom examined closely; indeed, it may be theintractable mind-body problem in thin disguise. But thegroundwork of these common assumptions has more se-rious problems. As Clifford Geertz (1975) illustrated withanthropological observations, these interpretive founda-tions do not rest on immutable human properties:

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique,more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, adynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and actionorganized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively againsta social and natural background is, however incorrigible it mayseem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of theworld's cultures, (p. 48)

If people of other cultures can readily think of themselvesso differently, as Geertz described, then our own culturallyconditioned way of doing so loses its special claim to elu-cidating the nature of human understanding.

Awareness, Isolation, and Agency in MainstreamPsychologies

To give our culture its due, one must acknowledge thatdeviations from the Cartesian stance have arisen andsometimes endured within the Western philosophical andpsychological mainstream. Some philosophers have iden-tified and challenged the implicit underpinnings of Des-cartes's dictum, as when Ryle (1949) noted the implau-sibility of a "mental phosphorescence" that would benecessary for direct self-scrutiny of the processes ofthinking. Wittgenstein (1953) questioned the possibilityof the truly private language that would be needed for aperson's complete autonomy in judging what is or is not.And in early psychologies, unconscious functioning hadplaces within the mainstream, as in the Freudian uncon-scious mind and in Helmholtz's unbewuster Schluss(Boring, 1950). Even cognitivist theorizing, which overthe years has given special primacy to conscious func-tioning (e.g., Ericsson & Simon, 1980; Norman, 1969),shows signs of accepting unconscious psychological pro-cess as normal, or even as the norm (Kihlstrom, 1987).Nevertheless, unconscious functioning usually is viewedas subservient to one's conscious functioning or else apotentially sinister challenge to one's rational being. Ineither case, it is seen as relatively mysterious and refrac-tory to analysis.

Other writings of contemporary psychology occa-sionally have challenged the prototypical notion of self,as recently in the pages of the American Psychologist,where Cushman (1991) offered a social-constructionistcritique of mainstream theorizing in developmental psy-chology. Cushman's thesis was that the mainstream viewmistakenly places "the Western configuration of self atthe core of a hypothesized universal experience of in-fancy" (p 206); thus, he questions the traditional as-sumption that selfhood necessarily entails distinctness andalienation from one's surrounding world. Such views re-main in the minority, however, for most contemporarypsychological theorizing—whether cognitivist, recon-structionist, or whatever—seems to retain core features

Preparation of this manuscript was supported by a summer researchfellowship awarded by Temple University.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to PhilipN. Hineline, Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia,PA 19122.

1274 November 1992 • American PsychologistCopyright 1992 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/92/$2.00

Vol. 47, No. II, 1274-1286

of the Cartesian stance. Cognitivists may invoke auto-matic processes of which the actor is not aware, but thoseprocesses are said to be modulated by "control processes"of an executive, aware "meta-knower," wherein a residualagency for action resides (e.g., see Kluwe, 1982). Theoristswho invoke contextualist arguments in questioning stan-dard psychological theory interpret both action and thecontext of action in terms of intentionality of the actor(e.g., see Rosnow & Georgoudi, 1986).

To the extent that these various theorists, as distinctfrom the subjects of their theorizing, are discernible ininterpretive discourse, they, too, come across as funda-mentally intentional. Occasionally the interpretee andinterpreter have been given similar status (e.g., Ross,1977), both portrayed in terms of intentionality, thus re-taining the basic Cartesian stance for both. When a basicrole of nonconscious functioning is acknowledged, thatpart of conventional theorizing falls outside any revelationor acknowledgment of the theorizing as in process.

Mediational Behavioristic Theory: More of the Same

Behaviorists, of course, have long been known for rejectingmentalistic theory, which implies a rejection of Cartesianconscious intentionality. But many behaviorists have beenless than consistent in this. They have hewn to a positiv-istic line of objectivity through truth-by-agreement—be-havioral in the sense of asserting that one can accept onlyovert behavior as data, but treating those data mainly asevidence for underlying process. These are mediationaltheorists, for they take psychological process as hidden,hypothetical, but operationally denned constructs that aresaid to mediate and thus provide agency for overt action.Mediational behaviorists have tended not to address theirtheorizing to the special roles or characteristics of languageor verbal functioning. Instead, when encountering the"talking therapies" or other saliently verbal interventions,they have adopted piecemeal from other interpretive tra-ditions. Cognitive behaviorism is an example of this; themediating processes are borrowed from nonbehavioraltraditions, construed as distinct from behavior, as pri-marily verbal and conscious, and thus a Cartesian stanceis restored to the interpretee. In addition, the languageof mediational theory tends to be framed around hy-pothesis formulation and testing, which seems to placeCartesian logic rather than behavioral process at the rootof mediational theorizing. In this respect a privilegedCartesian stance is retained for the interpreter, even whenit is not invoked for the interpretee.

Skinner's Alternative: Self-InclusiveBehavioral TheoryIn a key paper, "The Operational Analysis of Psycholog-ical Terms," B. F. Skinner (1945) identified the abovefamily of behavioristic positions as methodological be-haviorism, and he firmly distanced his position fromthem. Behavior-analytic theory, which developed in andfrom Skinner's work, is non-mediational in character, fo-cusing directly on the dynamic interplay between envi-ronment and behavior. In its theorizing, that interplay is

process, and the theory is a characterization of the effectivefeatures of the environment as revealed by their orderlyrelations with behavior (Hineline, 1984a, 1984b; Hineline& Wanchisen, 1989). The resulting prose often impliesor asserts that the causes of behavior are in the environ-ment. Readers accustomed to placing agency or processfor action mainly within the actor are likely to find thisprovocative, so it should be clarified that the issue heredoes not concern metaphysical assertions about wherecauses really are. Rather, it concerns the parts of the worlda theory deals with. It is axiomatic to this approach thatbehavior is understood in terms of its relations to presentand past environmental events. Axiomatic assumptionsare properly evaluated on the accomplishments of theirtheory as a whole, not on a basis of their initial, individual,intuitive congenialities.

Skinner identified his approach as a radical behav-iorism, not for its social implications or for its degree ofemphasis on environmental determinants but because,unlike methodological behaviorism, it includes activitieslike seeing and thinking within a behavioral account.Those activities are viewed as similar in kind to overtbehavior. Although sometimes free of immediate envi-ronmental constraints, they affect one's other behaviorno differently than one's overt action can affect one's otherbehavior—as when holding a nail with one hand enableshammering it with the other or rehearsing a set of alter-natives affects choices among them. Special considerationis involved in accounting for some aspects of language1

and for awareness of one's internal activities (Skinner,1969), but this need not place these activities at the priv-ileged core of a mind's I. Rather, it is to ask what is atissue when certain kinds of terms are invoked and whenone learns to describe private events, which are unavail-able to those who teach that describing (e.g., Skinner,1945, 1969).

Skinner also addressed the theorist's interpretive ac-tivity, and consistent with the rest, this part of the accountexplicitly declines to place agency within the person; in-stead, it describes persons as loci of time and place, whereunique combinations of variables come together in theoccurrence of behavior. Skinner was at ease with char-acterizing his own personhood in the same way, as illus-trated by "A Lecture on 'Having' a Poem" (Skinner,1972), which playfully finds similarity between the cre-ativity of his own authorship and the creativity ofmotherhood. The remainder of the present essay attempts

1 The Skinnerian account explicitly addresses the nature of linguisticand verbal functioning in a way that deemphasizes some of the issuesthat have been focal for specialists in that domain (Skinner, 1957). Thusinitially, Skinner's contribution was greeted with hostility (abetted byChomsky, 1959) and misunderstanding (detailed by MacCorquodale,1970), although recent developments (as described by Andresen, 1990)have been making the discipline of linguistics more compatible with theSkinnerian position. Additional recent developments have addressedSkinnerian theory to therapeutic interventions that are primarily verbal,addressing phenomena that have been of concern to more conventionalclinical theorists, but not borrowing foreign metaphors to encompassthem (e.g., see Kohlenberg & Tsai, 1991; Zettle & Hayes, 1982).

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to bring the terms of behavior analysis to bear on itselfin greater detail, keeping the interpreter within view whileexamining the nature of the interpretation. Social attri-bution theory will be acknowledged as providing clues tothe cultural deviance of behavior analysis, but the mainagenda is to show how a psychological theorist, as well asthe theory, can be understood without invoking theCartesian stance. The point of departure is a behaviorist'sanalogue of the Cartesian dictum.

First Principles

To discriminate is to behave differentlyin different situations,

andTo generalize is to behave similarly

in different situations.

These definitions are consistent with ordinary languageas well as sufficiently spare and precise for a conceptualbeginning. For example, discrimination properly encom-passes a connoisseur's praising and savoring some wineswhile criticizing and rejecting others, and generalizationapplies to the same connoisseur's describing both a whiteand a red wine as dry or particular varieties as suitableto accompany a meal featuring fish. Generalization alsoencompasses the weaver's using two spools of yarn inter-changeably, whereas discrimination denotes the reservingfor a different project a third, identically labeled spoolfrom a different dye lot. Thus, discrimination and gen-eralization are basic to effective participation in the world.But the same definition of discrimination also encom-passes socially destructive patterns: denying opportunitiesor services to people of one race or religion while accom-modating people of other groups. Analogously, general-ization can be illustrated by racial or ethnic stereotypes.These, like many psychological terms, apply both to be-havior that we view as adaptive or laudable and to be-havior that we despise.

The conceptual roles of discrimination and gener-alization and their relation to the interpreter are a primaryconcern here. Using them as expository first principlesdoes not require that they arise in only one pair of ways;indeed, behavior analysis identifies at least three processeswhereby a given discrimination might arise. For the pres-ent, consider a question that the discerning reader mayalready have asked:

What do you mean, "different situations"?

Raising this issue exposes the interpreter's behavior aswoven among the interpreted events: To speak of differentsituations is itself to behave differently with respect tothem, and the identification of different situations denotesdiscrimination on the part of the interpreter. Furthermore,speaking of the interpretee's behaving differently is an-other of the interpreter's discriminations. The interpret-er's identifying a discrimination on the part of the inter-pretee is a correspondence between those two of the in-terpreter's own discriminations: In asserting this

definition the interpreter is behaving differentially withrespect to instances of the interpretee's behavior, and re-latedly with respect to the circumstances surroundingthose instances.

In complementary fashion, the interpreter's identi-fying the interpretee's generalization is itself a combinedgeneralization and discrimination on the part of the in-terpreter. To say "behaving similarly" is to generalize be-tween instances of the interpretee's behavior; to say dif-ferent situations is to discriminate between the circum-stances surrounding those instances.

The normal state of affairs includes stable equilibriabetween one's discriminations and the events one en-counters, a state of affairs that is essential for ordinaryadaptive functioning in both inanimate and social envi-ronments. Thus, a human infant may learn some dis-criminations and generalizations without the participa-tion of other people, directly interacting with objects thechild will later describe as hurtful or pleasing, heavy orlight, solid or unstable, or ripe or green. Other discrim-inations and generalizations, especially the verbal ones,are learned through interaction with other persons, as innaming colors, objects, and relations. These evolvingrepertoires of normal development blend seamlessly withthe more specialized discriminative ones that we knowas scientific.

Regarding the interpreter's discriminations, stableequilibria are essential to the combined relations that weidentify as orderly or coherent. If the interpretee discrim-inates among events where the interpreter generalizes, theinterpreter will identify that behaving differently as non-systematic variation—as noisy in informal scientific par-lance, or perhaps as strange or even bizarre in more or-dinary language. Consider, for example, a color-blind ex-perimenter attempting to assesses the wavelengthsensitivities of someone with trichromatic vision, withoutthe benefit of specialized apparatus. This experimentermight seem dense or foolish in denying the discrimina-tions that the experimental subject obviously is making.On the other hand, if the experimenter were the onlyperson with what we know as trichromatic vision, be-having differentially with respect to events that everyoneelse viewed as identical, that experimenter would be con-fined to the fringes of the scientific community (amongthe parapsychologists) or perhaps even of the communityat large (among the insane). If trichromats were insteada minority group within the population, our experimenterwould be a mere eccentric, insisting on distinctions thatdid not make sense to most people.

Concepts as Patterns of Activity

Concepts are discriminations between classes of events,with generalizations within classes of events.

In terms of behavior analysis, concepts also are differentialpatterns of behavior, and there is a sense in which mostdiscriminations and generalizations satisfy the above def-inition. That is, whereas we learn concepts explicitly fromothers when taught to name or to appropriately use balls,

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blocks, chairs, and tables, we also learn them throughdirect nonsocial interactions. Object constancies, for ex-ample, are concepts that entail the interpretee's behavingsimilarly with respect to the various patterns of stimu-lation that emanate from an object while his or her spatialrelations to it are changing, while behaving differentlywith respect to other, adjacent or surrounding objects.Thus, a person learns to react to a doorway as an un-changing rectangle, even though as visual array it is amyriad of trapezoids. Once again, the interpreter's be-havior illustrates the phenomenon under examination:discriminating between the interpretee's behavior patterns(e.g., as in discriminating the interpretee's walkingthrough doorways as distinct from walking elsewhere),while generalizing among some of the patterns (describingsimilarly, the interpretee's walking through the doorwayat any angle), while discriminating the doorway itself fromother objects (the interpreter, too, identifies a doorway asunchanging even though the relationships of both inter-preter and interpretee with respect to the doorway maybe in constant flux).

Scientific Concepts: Physical, Psychophysical, andBehavior Analytic

Scientific concepts also are construed as patterns of dis-crimination and generalization. Building a physics orchemistry from scratch entails initial issues of measure-ment—dimensions and the like—interrelated in a co-herent network of description. The earliest scientific psy-chology, sensory psychophysics, systematically related thediscriminations of peoples' direct interactions with stimuli(in the form of descriptions of elemental experience) tothe experimenter's generalizations and discriminationsthrough less direct interactions with the same stimuli(through the measurement procedures of physics), pro-ducing the psychophysical functions. Success in that en-terprise is recognized through smooth curves that identifydimensions of environment and behavior by portrayingorderly relations between them. There is recursivenessand reciprocity in this, as when the dimensional gener-alizations of intensity, wavelength, and spectral complex-ity have settled into equilibria with those of brightness,dominant hue, and saturation.

Whereas psychophysics concerns mainly the pres-ence, absence, and magnitude of stimuli along dimensionsthat constitute fairly simple gradients of generalizationon the part of the scientist, behavior analysis emphasizesadditional, more complex environmental dimensionsidentified through dynamic temporal and contingent re-lations with behavior. Again, through a recursive process,environmental events are defined through their effects onbehavior, just as behavior is characterized through its or-derly relations to the environmental events. These orderlyrelations are identified through experimental procedures,elaborated from simple to complex, with each new elab-oration validated through its demonstrated effectiveness.

The experimenter's role in this is to efficiently ar-range pertinent aspects of the world as they might affector be affected by behavior; the role of the interpreter is

to define and delineate those aspects as such. The strategyis like that of an early physicist studying inclined planesin the laboratory, isolating one potential set of variablesin a way that may enable and simplify the experimenterand interpreter's discriminations and generalizations.

Extrapolating to behavior outside the laboratory mayrequire understanding some strong interactions betweenvariables, but this does not require the operations to beviewed as addressing a detached entity of inclined plane-ness. Similarly, behavior-environment relations in thelaboratory are considered part of the same world as thatoutside the laboratory and are assumed to function inessentially the same way.

To be sure, sometimes there will be complex inter-actions between, as well as additive effects among, vari-ables. In research on human behavior, some of the pe-culiarly social contingencies of being in an experimentmay require special examination, but unless that exam-ination shows otherwise, these are to be understood inbehavioral terms that also address other forms of com-pliance and noncompliance. Also, some of the resultingequilibria involve classes of environmental events thatthe interpreter and the interpretee discriminate similarly,whereas others are characterized as cultural or biologicalpeculiarities, which is to say that they are characteristicof the interpretee's but not of the interpreter's behavior.As the concepts composed of sets of stimuli and thosecomposed of the interpretee's behavior evolve in relationto each other, many of the resulting equilibria are morecomplex than is suggested by the term dimension1

Bipolar Causal Talk About Behavior,Occasioned by Tripolar Situations

Just as various relations between events occasion ourspeaking of "larger than," "closer than," or "moving to-ward," other relations between events occasion ourspeaking in variants of "caused by." Most of the occasionsin which we speak of cause involve either contiguous orcontingent relations between events, and the causal talkhas a bipolar, directional character: cause-effect, inde-pendent variable-dependent variable, noun-verb, agent-action. The elaborated causal talk that we call interpre-tation or explanation is permeated by these bipolar lo-cutions, with a directional consistency maintainedthroughout a given discourse. A subset of the occasionsfor causal talk concerns behavior. Like that concerninginanimate relations, this causal talk is also bipolar, butits occasions are characteristically tripolar: They intrin-sically involve organism, environment, and behavior. Theresult is that in accounting for what people and othercreatures do, we tend to leave out one of the three poles,or potential foci. To do otherwise would be to omit thebipolar hallmark of interpretive or explanatory prose.

2 Schnaitter (1978) provided an example of this, detailing the specificdiscriminations and generalizations that are involved in the experi-menter-interpreter's verifying an instance of reinforcement.


Thus, virtually all psychological prose has either one orthe other of the two characteristic directionalities—thedirectionality of environment-behavior or that of person-behavior locutions.

Attribution Theory and Its Fundamental AttributionError

Normal adult speakers all engage in both types of locu-tions. However, within our culture, one or the other typeis maintained in particular types of circumstances. Theresulting culturally typical patterns have provided the ba-sis for attribution theory in social psychology. For ex-ample, Jones and Nisbett (1971) noted that there is astrong tendency for each of us to account for our ownbehavior in terms of its surrounding context, whereas wetend to account for the behavior of others by appealingto their dispositional characteristics such as moods, at-titudes, motivations, hopes, or expectations. The potencyof this effect was demonstrated by Storms (1973), whoshowed that persons who had just given environment-action interpretations of their own behavior would im-mediately shift to dispositional interpretations whenplaced in the role of observer, viewing a videotape of theirown, very same action.

Kelley (1967) identified several variables that affectthe directionality of prose, variables such as distinctness(the strength of correlation between particular environ-mental events and the action), consistency over time (co-variance in presence and absence of particular environ-mental features and particular behavior), consistency overmodality (robustness of the environment-behavior rela-tion when there are variations in the environmentalevents), and consensus (agreement among different in-terpreters regarding the relation between a given envi-ronmental entity and behavior). Positive relations of thesefour types are said to result in environment-behavior lo-cutions. Ross (1977) elaborated on these, adding an ob-servation and a corresponding term that contributes anote of irony: the fundamental attribution error. That is,in vernacular interpretations of action there is a dispro-portionate tendency to appeal to dispositional character-istics of the actor and a corresponding tendency to deem-phasize the environmental circumstances of the action.The irony is that although attribution theorists seldomacknowledge it, this pattern is characteristic of attributiontheorizing itself. Jones and Nisbett (1971), when dis-cussing the actor-observer difference, refer to the differ-ences as biases on the part of the actor and biases on thepart of observer, even though all persons routinely engagein both roles and, hence, neither bias is a predictive char-acteristic of the person independent of context. Similarly,Kelley's cataloguing of environments in which one di-rectionality or the other will occur is construed disposi-tionally as an intuitive analysis-of-variance model, amodel of activity within the interpreter's head. Even Ross,when discussing the possible relevance of the fundamentalattribution error to the theorizing of professional psy-chologists, clearly failed to notice that the immediatelypreceding pages of his own prose were replete with dis-

positional, organism-behavior locutions that were occa-sioned by environment-behavior relations.

Origins ofSkinnerian Resistance to the AttributionError

Whereas attribution theorists have conformed to the cul-turally pervasive overemphasis on organism-based inter-pretations of action, behavior analysts have done just theopposite, adhering to a directionality of prose that placesthe causes of behavior in the environment. This, too, isunderstandable through the relationships identified byattribution theory. Skinnerian theory has developed inconjunction with a tradition of within-subject researchdesigns, whose extended observations and analyses of theindividual's behavior are accomplished while environ-mental conditions are systematically changed and re-peatedly evaluated. Analyzed according to the featuresidentified by Kelley's intuitive analysis-of-variance model,these circumstances offered by a Skinnerian experimentare ones in which it is culturally normal to give an en-vironment-based interpretation of behavior. A close ex-amination of Skinner's (1938) initial book reveals thedevelopment of characteristically Skinnerian prose inconjunction with an extensive series of experiments(Hineline, 1990). Also, it is scientifically conventional todevelop one's theory within a context of experimentationbefore extrapolating to the rest of the world. The subse-quent extrapolation of this particular prose style, however,often asserts environment-behavior locutions in situa-tions in which the cultural convention is that of dispo-sitional locutions. Furthermore, like most serious psy-chologies, behavior analysis offers its interpretations inthe grammatical second or third person, which is to say,from the viewpoint of observer. However, it retains thedirectionality that would be culturally normal only ifgiven from the standpoint of actor.

Directionality Without Awareness

These discriminations, which are constituted of direc-tionally differing prose in different types of situations,typically occur without our being aware of their occurringor of their nature. For example, consider the followingpair of statements: "I have discovered that Guinness isstronger than Budweiser" and "I have discovered that Iam more allergic to tulips than I am to goldenrod." Wetend not to notice differing directionalities in these state-ments. In the former case, an implied direction is frombeverage to behavior; in the other case, the implied di-rection is from allergic disposition to behavior. Yet thepotency of a beverage is my susceptibility to it, and myallergy to tulips is their potency to make me sneeze. Inboth cases there is a proximal environmental event, andthe underlying physiological mechanisms are knownabout equally well. Nevertheless, we speak of the beverageas the cause in one case and of a characteristic of theperson as the cause in the other. Kelley's analysis-of-vari-ance model identifies what is probably going on here:When everyone is affected similarly, environment-basedlocutions are normal; when people are affected idiosyn-


cratically, organism-based locutions are normal. Eventhough the events resulting in and constituting these ac-tions are equally internal or external, irrespective ofwhether everyone is affected similarly, that difference orsimilarity between people results in our speaking as if theactions originated in different kinds of places. In short,the occasioning of causal talk can be profoundly misdi-rective.

Costs of Culturally Deviant Directional Talk

If the cultural conventions of explanatory talk are evenapproximately as attribution theory suggests, it is notsurprising that many people have found Skinnerian in-terpretation to be unappealing or threatening. Eventhough behavior analysts have refused to blame individ-uals whose behavior is deemed in need of change, eventhough they have championed single-subject research de-signs within psychology, and even though behavior-ana-lytic interventions in education and therapy are tailoredto the individual, they describe their approach in a di-rectionality that is normally occasioned by everyone beingalike, and thus may seem to deny the individuality ofpersons. Furthermore, its deviance, per se, may contributeto the vehemence and gratuitous hostility of critics' re-actions. As members of a culture, we all discriminatedeviations from normal speech patterns, usually withoutbeing able to describe the operative dimensions of thosediscriminations. Few of us could say what is strange aboutschizophrenic speech; nevertheless, most of us reactstrongly when we encounter it. Indeed, the treatment ofpeople judged to be mentally ill attests to the tendencyof members of a verbal culture to react with alarm oreven hostility when encountering deviant speech patterns.In behavior-analytic terms, deviant speech patterns arefailures of stimulus control, and from the viewpoint ofthe community at large, behavior-analytic prose in manycontexts constitutes social deviance and has borne thecosts.

Thus, some critics have reacted to Skinnerian lan-guage of control by expressing alarmed belief that theSkinnerian behaviorist covets a role as white-coated pup-peteer in the shadows behind human events. This andother extreme reactions are understandable as intuitivereactions to deviance rather than as reasoned reactionsto substantive argument. Similarly, this analysis makesmore comprehensible the frequency with which behavioranalysis is distorted and caricatured in introductory text-books (Todd & Morris, 1983) as well as in writings formature scholars, such as those identified by Catania(1991) and Shimp (1989). It also suggests that even whenstated as non-provocatively as one can manage, avoidingtechnical terms and the language of control, this kind ofinterpretive prose will still deviate from culturally normalprose in subtle but very important ways.

If this characterization of directional prose and itsdeterminants identifies the problem, it may also enablea solution: The culturally based reactions might be neu-tralized by an account that keeps the behavior-analyticinterpreter in view while exposing readers to the extended

context in which the interpreter's prose developed. Thus,I turn to the origins of an interpreter's discriminations.

Origin and Elaboration of Interpreters'DiscriminationsDetailed behavioral accounts of complex processes sel-dom appear in general forums. No doubt, editors of thoseforums tend to reject such accounts as arcane and spe-cialized. Furthermore, behavior analysts, including Skin-ner, have recognized the risks of being misunderstoodwhen presenting their unconventional viewpoint; forclarity, the general-forum presentations usually have beenconfined to its most basic terms and concepts. Howeverreasonable this approach may be, the restriction to simpleconcepts appears to have abetted a distortion of its own,for it makes behavior analysis seem simplistic. It is notsurprising that, acquainted with only a small handful ofbasic behavioral terms, the general reader might find itimplausible that the functioning of an intelligent adultperson could be adequately characterized in such terms.The present article is, of course, an attempt at such acharacterization—of the human activity of behaviorallyinterpreting human behavior. To accommodate the ob-vious complexity of that activity and especially to portraythe interpreter as aware and as capable of explicit logic,it seems important to include at least some of the elab-orated discriminations and generalizations that are in-volved. Preparatory to this, a couple of asides are in order.

First, it will be necessary to use the term functionalrelation with a pervasiveness that may strike the readeras jargon. There are two senses of this term: One is themathematical sense of y = f(x), for which the psycho-physical relationships provide simple examples. The sec-ond sense of functional relations is that of effective orbiologically adaptive, as enabling an individual's partic-ipation in the world. A given behavior-environment re-lation may be simultaneously functional in both senses,but usually one or the other is more salient, and it isuseful to understand them as distinct meanings arisingfrom two different traditions.

Second, there are several distinct types of discrimi-native functional relations, and although we describe andstudy them separately, one must recognize that it is com-mon for two or more to be simultaneously operative (aswhen telling a joke produces laughter and also preventsa confrontation). Also, episodes of differential behaviormay be indistinguishable in form and be functionally dis-tinct. For example, a child may learn the phrases "on theleft" and "on the right" separately as commands and asdescriptions; knowing one does not guarantee the other(Lamarre & Holland, 1985). Furthermore, a given dis-criminative repertoire may evolve in character, beginningas one kind of behavior-environment relation and thenbecoming another. For example, one initially follows di-rections when changing a printer ribbon; then with prac-tice one comes to interact directly with the machine, nolonger reading or rehearsing the instructions. Then sub-sequently one might generate new instructions for some-one else by directly describing one's well-developed tech-


nique. Many scholarly criticisms of Skinner's approachhave been rooted in failures to recognize these complex-ities (e.g., see Catania & Harnad, 1988), which any com-prehensive account of human action must address.

Successive Levels of Conditionality

Discrimination implies conditional relations; behavingin a particular way is conditional upon particular sur-rounding circumstances. Thus, in the classical days ofbehavior theory, discrimination was illustrated by Pavlov'sstudies of food presentation made conditional, not justupon the preceding presentation of another stimulus, butdifferentially so, as upon a circle rather than an ellipsehaving preceded the food. This kind of conditionality isindependent of the organism's behavior; food presenta-tions are dependent (a two-term relation) on which ofthe visual stimuli has just occurred, but those food pre-sentations are not affected by the behavior under consid-eration. Discrimination based on three-term conditionalrelations was illustrated by Skinner's early studies of arat's lever press or a pigeon's key peck producing foodonly in the presence of a light or tone. This is wheregeneral psychology textbooks typically leave the behav-ioral account of discrimination, perhaps with minor em-bellishments such as generalization gradients.

Layers of conditionality have been added within boththe Pavlovian and Skinnerian traditions of research.Modern Pavlovian theory has addressed the modulatingroles of stimuli that differentially accompany more basicrelations (e.g., Holland, 1983; Rescorla, 1986). This, too,is three-term conditionality; for example, in the presenceof a contextual stimulus, one two-term Pavlovian relationholds; in the absence of that stimulus, the opposite Pav-lovian relation holds. Fourth-order conditional relationshave been examined as operant discriminations identifiedas identity or oddity (e.g., Ferster, 1960). These are readilyillustrated and studied through matching-to-sample pro-cedures: The subject is presented with a designated samplestimulus and two or more alternative, comparison stimuli.In the matching procedure, selecting the one that matchesthe sample is reinforced. The levels of conditionality cor-respond to the number of discriminations that the ex-perimenter-interpreter must make: (a) same-differentdiscrimination among the various stimuli, (b) discrimi-nations of particular stimuli as accompanying or not ac-companying other ones, and (c) particular responses asoccurring or not occurring, and thus being reinforced ornot reinforced (d) in accordance with the relationshipidentified by (b). Selections occasioned by the relation ofoddity involve the same level of conditionality; selectingthe stimulus that is uniquely unlike the sample results inthe reinforcing consequence. A fifth order of condition-ality can be established if, say, selections according to thematching relation are reinforced in one context and thoseof the oddity relation are reinforced in a different context.This can be accomplished with pigeons (Nevin & Liebold,1966) as well as with people, so formal logic and verbalcompetence are not yet at issue. Sidman (1986) provideda systematic exposition of these as well as sixth- and sev-

enth-order conditionalities, along with discussion of theirimplications.

Novelty and Variability Among Discriminated Events

Discriminations based on open-ended sets of stimuli andon open-ended sets of response patterns also are readilyestablished in nonverbal species. For example, Herrnsteinand Loveland (1964) trained pigeons to respond differ-entially, depending on whether an accompanying picturecontained or did not contain one or more persons. Thepictures were landscape photographs from many regions,and no bird saw the same picture twice (see also Herrn-stein, Loveland, & Cable, 1976). There is no question ofthe validity of these birds' complex patterns of discrim-ination and generalization, but of course one can still askwhether those patterns are the same as in the situationsin which we speak of concept formation in humans. In-deed, von Fersen and Lea (1990) presented somewhatsimilar experiments and argued that even though theirbirds' discriminations and generalizations were estab-lished and maintained with respect to five independentenvironmental features, selective manipulations resultedin changes that the experimenters did not consider sup-portive of the term concept in the sense of ordinary humanusage. Unlike the general sketches of the present essay,their discussion provides a specific analysis of relationsbetween the interpreter's and the interpretee's discrimi-nations and generalizations. Careful experimentation isneeded to assess whether the discriminative categoriza-tions on the part of these birds differ in important waysfrom humans' analogous nonverbal as well as verbal cat-egorizations. As will be described later, some apparentlyfundamental differences between human and nonhumandiscriminative functioning have been identified, and theyappear to be correlated with, but not necessarily depen-dent on, verbal functioning.

Novelty and Variability in Behavior Patterns

In the foregoing examples, the interpreter's discrimina-tions were focused on classes of stimuli, with differingforms of response being of minimal interest—just as aprofessor giving an examination focuses on the relationsbetween questions and the student's multiple-choice se-lections, rather than on the topographical details ofmarking boxes on the answer sheet. However, the topo-graphical dimensions of discriminative behavior also canbe of primary interest, especially when they, too, compriseopen-ended sets with selected functional properties. Forexample, Neuringer (1986) has demonstrated that un-predictability, per se, is a reinforceable property of humanbehavior. Trained in on-line interaction with a computer,his subjects learned to produce irregular sequences ofresponses that were indistinguishable from sequences thatwould be produced by random generators. There was or-der at the boundaries, whereby a given sequence was pre-dictably constituted of whatever characters the procedurespecified, but variability within the boundaries was asunpredictable as the author's statistical inferences couldverify.


Other open-ended response classes arise throughgeneralized imitation—a child learns to do what anotherchild does, whereas not imitating what a third child does.This generalized property of reinforced imitative behaviorhas long been known on the basis of experimental studies(e.g., Baer & Sherman, 1964; Gewirtz & Stingle, 1968).Its similarity to other conditional discriminations hasbeen detailed by Gewirtz (1971), and its role in the pro-duction of novel utterances has been spelled out in detail(e.g., Baer & Deguchi, 1985). Novel behavior, includingthe effective behavior we call creative, can be understoodas arising in these processes, coupled with the selectiveeffects of reinforcement acting on classes of responsesrather than on rigid stimulus-response connections ofthe sort posited by pre-Skinnerian behaviorisms. Noveltyarises partly out of the distributional, probabilistic char-acter of those classes. Thus, variability within order isaccommodated within the most fundamental of behavior-analytic concepts as well as by the more elaborated ones(Hineline & Wanchisen, 1989).

Possible Origins of Symbolic Relations

Interrelated classes of arbitrarily denned stimuli can beestablished by means of the matching-to-sample proce-dure noted earlier. That is, if in some learning trials, "A"is the occasion for "a" to be chosen and in other trials,"a" is the occasion for the Greek letter "alpha" to bechosen, these stimuli compose a potentially interrelatedset. One can subsequently reverse the roles of sample andcomparison stimuli to discover whether particular stimulihave become interchangeable and whether relations ofsymmetry or transitivity occur between them withouthaving been explicitly trained. Thus, in the above ex-ample, one would assess symmetry by examining whether,without further training, "a" as sample would result ina choice of "A" among the alternative comparison stimuli.To test for symmetrical transitivity, one would use "alpha"as sample, and examine whether "A" was selected fromamong alternative comparison stimuli. The demonstratedrelation of reflexivity (demonstrated in conventionalmatching-to-sample), along with the relations of sym-metry and transitivity (demonstrated as above, usingstimuli that bear no physical resemblance to each other)comprise the situations in which behavior analysts speakof equivalence relations (Sidman, 1986). The stimuli thatare interchangeable in these ways are called equivalenceclasses. It is relations such as these that appear to havedelineated some fundamental differences between humanand nonhuman behavior (Sidman et al., 1982). The un-trained extended (thus, "emergent") relations appear tobe correlated with verbal functioning (Devany, Hayes, &Nelson, 1986).

Independent functional sets of stimuli, establishedby the procedures sketched above or through direct ma-nipulations of classes of stimuli (Vaughan, 1985), can belinked by training a relation between a single member ofone set and a single member of the other. The matching-to-sample procedure can then verify whether additional,untrained relations occur between the two sets (Sidman,

Kirk, & Wilson-Morris, 1985). In addition, equivalenceclasses can be integrated with more traditional stimulusroles denned by behavior theory by establishing a behav-ioral function for one member and then assessing whetherthat function is operative for the other members as well(e.g., Hayes, Kohlenberg, & Hayes, 1991). Although thesefunctional relations appear to be closely correlated withverbal repertoires, the data also indicate that they are notbased on naming (L. J. Hayes, Thompson, & Hayes, 1989;Sidman et al., 1985). Hence, these relations may be atthe very basis of what it is to function symbolically,whereby one arbitrary event can take the place of another.Equivalence relations also are another basis whereby newdiscriminations are formed: We act differentially with re-spect to one stimulus as a result of our differential ex-perience with respect to another stimulus that is notphysically similar but that is a member of the same func-tional class.

Instruction Following and Explicit Logic in Rule-Governed Behavior

Finally, and building on the processes just described,many discriminative patterns arise through verbal in-struction, which Cerutti (1989) has described in terms ofbehavioral principles that involve combining and per-mutating discriminative repertoires. Initially, simple rep-ertoires are established while occasioned by distinctivestimuli, through one or more of the aforementioned pro-cesses. These constitute potential "instructed repertoires,"whether or not the stimuli are of linguistic form. Subse-quently, when various of those stimuli occur in combi-nation, a blending of the related repertoires will occur.In some cases, the component repertoires will continueto be evident; in other cases, reorganization will occur,obscuring the initial components. The instructed behavior(i.e., behavior resulting from the presentation of a com-bination of stimuli, each of which occasions a previouslyacquired pattern of behavior) then encounters its ownconsequences, which will further shape and maintain it.(See also S. C. Hayes, 1989; Skinner, 1957, 1966; Zettle& Hayes, 1982).

Sometimes these processes occur at a gross and ob-vious level, as when children play games such as "Captain,May I?" and "Simon says." At other times, the discrim-inations of instructed behavior involve subtle relationsthat are the occasions for particular grammatical forms.Identifying these in a child's developing speech requiresfinely tuned discriminations on the part of the observer,and systematic procedures are needed to validate thoseobservations. Thus, Moerk (1983, 1990) has identifiedbehavioral processes as pervasively involved in themother-child interactions that lead to the child's gram-matical speech, using extensive data sets whose initialexaminers had failed to find much evidence for such pro-cesses (Brown, 1973). These matches and mismatchesbetween the interpreter's and the interpretee's patterns ofdiscrimination, illustrate the equilibria discussed earlier,when I asked, "What do you mean, 'different situations'?"


From this viewpoint, behaving logically is not thesame as organized adaptive behavior. The former is re-served for the explicit stating, manipulating, and followingrules, such as those of algebra and formal logic. Theserepertoires require explicit teaching, and the difficulty oflogic and mathematics courses affirms that they are notmaintained by the implicit teaching of the verbal com-munity at large. That is, contrary to the suggestions ofordinary language, logic is not fundamental to ordinaryhuman behavior. In addition, statements of logic, bothformal and casual, must be distinguished from acting inrelation to such statements. This difference is respectedin the distinction between pure and applied mathematics.Analogously, the vernacular aphorism, "Do as I say, notas I do," as well as close examination of human decisions(e.g., Herrnstein, 1990; Kahnemann & Tversky, 1973)indicates independence between logical statements andaction in relation to such statements. In behavior analysis,that difference is marked by a distinction between rule-governed and contingency-shaped behavior. Hence, theremay be a consensus in placing logical behavior in a special,somewhat circumscribed category. All this notwithstand-ing, I hasten to add that logical, rule-governed behaviorhas a place within behavior-analytic theorizing. For ex-ample, I engaged in explicit logic when enumerating thevarious levels of conditionality earlier in the present sec-tion. Inductive logic involves the relations of awareness,so it will be considered next.

Discriminations That Constitute Awareness

Roughly characterized, most of the discriminations thatconstitute awareness are composed of repertoires of de-scription.3 Awareness of our surrounding world ariseswhen we learn to name colors and objects. One couldlearn to discriminate the property of red without learningto name it, as when learning to eat only ripened fruitthrough the direct consequences of eating. Awareness ofcolors comes through interaction with the verbal com-munity, as when a child is taught to name colors. Aware-ness of one's own actions and of the details of those actionscomes through the same processes that make one awareof objects in the surrounding environment. Then throughgeneralization, equivalence relations, and recombinationsof these previously established relations, new repertoirescan emerge, whereby relationships are described withoutanyone else's immediate participation. Often this will en-tail a shift from behavior that constitutes direct sensitivityto relations between events—whereby one can discrim-inate them without describing them—to the behavior ofdescribing them. This transition closely resembles whatis traditionally called inductive reasoning. Unlike mostaccounts of inductive reasoning, however, this accountdoes not posit any leap from the particular to the general,for it is asserted that one can, prior to being able to de-scribe them, already be sensitive to aggregates of and re-lations between particulars. Rather, it is a shift from non-verbal to verbal discrimination; to the extent that de-scriptions are the prime constituents of awareness, thisshift is also a shift to awareness.

People can react verbally to other aspects of theirown verbal behavior, and one mode of such action canbe a self-reflective awareness of description. However, onealso can be unaware of some aspects of one's verbal be-havior, including aspects of one's behavior of describing.This is especially relevant to preferences among expla-nations of behavior, which may include interpretive di-rectionality, as discussed earlier in relation to attributiontheory. Surely, interpretive talk has additional featuresthat we are unaware of but that nevertheless affect ourpreferences among theories.

Discrimination and the Language of Knowing

Much of the foregoing discussion concerns relations thatare addressed in ordinary language, in terms of an indi-vidual's knowledge. The behavior-analytic account evadessuch terms, deviating once again from entrenched culturalpatterns. Given the evident costs of deviance that havebeen noted earlier, must behavior analysis be so contrary?Indeed, behavior analysts often have asked whether andin what circumstances it is important to maintain thepurity of our language (e.g., Branch, 1977; Deitz, 1986;Hineline, 1980, 1984a; Marr, 1983; Shimp, 1976). Theusual conclusion has been that although we should avoidunnecessary jargon, most of the special characteristicsare essential to our approach. How this is so can be il-lustrated in relation to the initial major distinctions thatwere drawn in the present article, concerning discrimi-nation and generalization, by examining what happensif the same relations are discussed in more conventionalterms.

There are several senses in which to discriminate isto know. To consistently choose this instead of that is toknow which; to act only at the proper time is to knowwhen; to act differentially with respect to the probabilityof an event is to know whether; to act effectively is toknow how. Although each of these implies effective func-tioning, none of them requires the functioning to be ver-bal, aware, or explicitly logical. On the other hand, toknow that an alternative is correct or to know that it isthe proper time implies an ability to describe the relevantrelationships, and in the behavior-analytic account, thosedescriptive repertoires constitute awareness. To know thatone knows or to know how one knows, implies additionalverbal repertoires. Most of us know how to ride bicyclesand know that we know how to ride bicycles, withoutknowing how we know how to ride bicycles. Similarly,one may know when to awaken in time to catch the earlyplane without having known that one will know when toawaken—setting the alarm clock and subsequently awak-ening just before the set time. One can even know howto do something without knowing that one knows how(Hineline, 1983). It is important that one sometimes does

3 Technically, most of these are repertoires of tacts. Some additionalrelevant relations are called autoclitic; these are tangential here, exceptas noting that a behavior analyst's account can be more thorough thanthe present sketch.


know that or even how one knows how, and these locutionsshould be retained for those situations.

Thus, in principle, a behavior-analytic account couldbe stated in the language of knowing, provided that thesevarious distinctions were carefully maintained. As a mat-ter of practice this is unfeasible, however, for confusionssurely would arise as generalizations between ordinaryand special interpretive language. The knowing that lo-cution is larded throughout ordinary discourse, a little-noticed part of the pervasive Cartesian stance that wasnoted at the beginning of this article. Through that usage,members of our culture are taught to generalize amongthe various discriminative relations (knowing which,knowing whether, knowing when, etc.) as assumed to re-quire the consciousness of knowing that. To the behavioranalyst this constitutes failure to recognize the indepen-dence of various modes of discriminating; it constitutesan attendant failure to recognize the need for special ev-idence before the locutions implying awareness are in-voked, and it implies an obliviousness to the role of de-scriptive repertoires in one's other discriminations. Inshort, if these ordinary language terms were adopted, theresulting generalizations would trash some key distinc-tions that have been drawn and validated through carefulanalyses of behavior. The coherence of Skinnerian theorywould be lost, for complex processes would be invokedprematurely to account for the simpler relations that areneeded in a behavioral account of those more complexprocesses.

The Interpreter as Locus in a VerbalCommunity

Memes, Personhood, and Process Over Time

In the foregoing sections I have tried to assemble sufficientbackground to credibly accommodate the complexity ofan interpreter in process. That background also enablessome subtle and challenging implications of a thoroughlySkinnerian view to be highlighted: For a behavior analyst,discriminating and generalizing is behaving differen-tially—no more, no less. Discrimination is not some pro-cess that lies in a privileged knower residing behind be-havior; instead, some of the differential behavior is covertactivity that is part of one's behavior. Verbal conceptsresemble what Dawkins (1976) called memes. These areverb-like entities that replicate as equilibria in humanactivity. When we speak of attributes such as length orroundness, our generalizations are not only in equilibriawith a verbal community, but also with physical regular-ities of the nonverbal world—although in saying physicalregularities I concede too much to the interpreter's dis-criminations. Furthermore, the equilibria need not con-form to simple physical properties. For example, childrenas well as the adults of our community speak of chairsin particular circumstances, and that consistency exem-plifies a set of equilibria; yet, few if any of us could providea satisfactory general definition based on formal or phys-ical characteristics of chairs. Our generalizing and dis-criminating can form relational concepts such as "larger"

or "within reach;" they can involve classes of behavior,as in "running" or "standing," as occasioned by eithertwo- or four-footed organisms. The equilibria also can bebased on classes of extended patterns of interaction:Speaking of betrayal is occasioned by a transition in thepattern of interaction between two or more people, be-ginning with a stable pattern of reciprocity from whichone or a subgroup unilaterally departs, to the disadvantageof the others.

Where is the person in all this? The interpreter'sdiscrimination is his or her participation in the world,with a locus in the participation. The person, too, is inthe participation, rather than the other way around. Cansuch a diffusely characterized interpreter be kept in view?Awareness of one's own action is not denied, but whenawareness occurs it is "adverbial" in character, a discrim-inative property of behavior itself, rather than an agencybehind the behavior. Once again, it may not be a stanceon mentalism that divides the Skinnerian from other psy-chologies. There may be another physical dimension, be-sides the directionality of prose, that contributes heat tothe Skinnerian controversies. Like directionality, this di-mension, too, is right before our eyes. It concerns one'sinterpretive stance regarding temporal distance betweencauses and effects.

Requiring Contiguous Causation Requires MediationalTheories

Ever since Hume it has been recognized that even in casessuch as colliding billiard balls, contiguous relations haveno ontologically special role in causation. Nevertheless,for most psychological theorists, contiguity is a stronglypreferred if not required basis for causal assertions. It iscommon to view sequences of events separated by frac-tions of seconds as constituting processes that contain nogaps that need to be filled. More widely separated events,however, tend to be seen as needing a connecting mediumto account for predictive relations between them; thatmediating role appears to be a primary raison d'etre ofinferred psychological process. For most people it is moreconvincing to infer a hypothetical causal entity as presentat the instant of its effect than to appeal to a remote eventwhose kind can be directly apprehended and assessed.Dawkins (1986) and Gould (1991) have also noted a hu-man obliviousness to process on time scales incommen-surate with immediate experience, when discussing issuesin the biological or geological domain.

In contrast, from its very beginnings the behavior-analytic account has accommodated causation over gapsin time. In the days of reflexology, Skinner (1931) definedthe simplest unit of analysis as a correlation between twoclasses of directly observable events—a class of stimuliand a class of responses—whereas most theorists con-strued reflexes as concrete but mostly unobserved bundlesof connected elements. To this day, the Skinnerian con-ception of the reflex is a diffuse and abstract but directlyobservable relation: One can observe the members of therelated classes, but not all members are present at once.Meanwhile, it remains more conventional to view the


reflex as concrete mechanism even while only inferred.Skinner asserted that with its extension to nonreflexivebehavior, his approach became distinctive for taking ratesof occurrence as primary dimensions of both behavioraland environmental events. By implication, rates of oc-currence are considered valid as constituents of psycho-logical process, even though you can look right throughthe gaps between events in their ongoing rate ofoccurrence.

The difference between mediational and nonmedia-tional theories is brought into sharp relief by consideringtime discriminations as addressed by each. For both, theevidence for temporal discrimination is differential be-havior with respect to time. For the behavior analyst, thediscrimination is the differential patterns of behaving,necessarily distributed over time, and in that sense ab-stract even if directly observable. In contrast, a media-tional theorist infers a continuous underlying structureor process that extends through the gap in time, presum-ably changing at the instant when the relevant behavioroccurs and thus providing a plausible immediate causefor that behavior. To account for a person setting an alarmclock and then awakening just before it is due to go off,the mediational theorist might envision an assembly ofreverberating neurons whose activity exceeds somethreshold at the time when the person awakens. But isthe differential activity of that set of neurons any lessmysterious or more wonderful than the differential activ-ity of the person with respect to time? Prior to the iden-tification of a real physical substrate that shows such dif-ferential activity, any explanatory appeal to it actuallyincreases the mystery, rather than decreasing it, and yetseems to claim having done the opposite. Behavior anal-ysis accepts a genuine, empirically based physiology ofbehavior as a complementary kind of account, but it alsoasserts that the differential activity of the person as a wholeis worthy of our interest in its own right, valid as an on-going unitary process on its own scale even though it isdescribed in terms of events distributed over time withapparent gaps between.

Elusively Extended Self

Similar relations of operant behavior can be operative atmultiple scales; a simple arm movement can be a unitaryoperant, but so, too, can a 30-minute trip to work. Eachcan be analyzed into smaller units, spliced into largerones, or taken at its unitary probability and rate of oc-currence. Similarly, physical science abounds with ex-amples of processes that occur simultaneously and sim-ilarly on multiple scales of time and space; even tightlydeterministic ones can show great variety, as in the mul-tiply scaled fractal relationships of Mandelbrot sets(Gleick, 1987). The variability, within ordered limits, ofselected response sequences such as those demonstratedby Neuringer (1986), which were described earlier, aresuggestive of the nonlinear recursive systems that inspiredchaos theory. Even more broadly, the selective processesin which we participate occur simultaneously on the on-

togenic, the phylogenic, and cultural levels (Skinner,1981).

To abandon the autonomous Cartesian I as oneselfmay seem threatening, given the ways we have been taughtto think of ourselves. However, once we get accustomedto it, viewing oneself as a multiply scaled, loosely boundedlocus wherein events participate in the world, can be fas-cinating, even fulfilling. Who we are is mainly what wedo; there is a real sense in which we live on through theeffects of our work. If one generates poems or cogent pas-sages of prose that are repeated by others, one participatesin the forming of memes that may outlive any recogniz-ably unique combination of ones genes. Both the implicitmetaphysics of behavior analysis and the self-concept thatit implies bear close relationship to the metaphysics andself-concepts asserted within Eastern mysticism (Capra,1977; Watts, 1966).

Taking ourselves less seriously, when we dance orplay music together, we engage in synchronized reciproc-ities of motion. As Skinner pointed out, the skin is arather arbitrary as well as permeable boundary. As achemical entity, one routinely exchanges molecules withpassersby; we notice it when sniffing the pipe smoke thathas been exhaled by someone across the room, seldomstopping to think that we also are constantly exchangingother kinds of molecules with the other, less odorous per-sons in the room. Furthermore, this diffuse conceptionof self is at one with other scientific conceptions of reality.For example, when physicists have attempted to establishthe mass and location of the tiniest, most compact bitsof solid matter, it tends to behave like process instead ofsolid stuff or exhibit only tendencies to exist. Similarly,the locus of the interpreter—whether oneself or other—is the locus of process and remains difficult to pin down.This is illustrated by the following two conceptions,4 bothof which allow for emphasis on environment-based in-terpretations, although having somewhat different impli-cations:

Behavior is the interactionbetween organism and environment.

andThe organism is a locus

where behavior and environment interact.

41 am endebted to Fernando Capovilla for providing the first ofthese as an alternative to the second.

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