" By relaxing constraints..."

1984-5, Kansas University, Dept. of Human Development and Family Life; Lawrence, KS
 CUMULATIVE RECORDS FROM 7  HYPOTHETICAL EXPERIMENTS WITH AN IMAGINARY RAT

Introduction
'Most psychology consists of putting what everyone knows into language that nobody understands.'
(Who said this??)

'They are not hypotheses, in the sense of things to be proved or disproved, but convenient representations of things already known.' B.F.Skinner, 1938: THE BEHAVIOR OF ORGANISMS, p. 44


The criticism has been made that the data presented here are hypothetical, and therefore their value is questionable. It should be pointed out that they are not hypothetical in the sense that the independent variables described have never been observed. Nothing has been added to existing method or outcome in the operant conditioning laboratory - except space.  No assumption has been made about behavior of an organism - except that SDs [*] at a distance will generate movement towards them. This assumption is widespread in applied behavior analysis and implicit in operant theory. The only problem is that it has never been observed systematically in the operant lab and thus the power implicit in behavior analysis has been hidden from the common understanding as - as Sidman says (1984)
The data simply synthesize knowledge that already exists.

The following passage states my case:
'By relaxing the constraints upon our empirical analyses, step by step, we increase the size and the complexity of the analytical unit.  As the unit of analysis expands, new relations emerge  among  the  elements of the unit and between units, permitting the inclusion of ever more behavioral phenomena within the systematic framework.'
Murray Sidman, 1984: Functional Analysis of Verbal Classes (preliminary draft) "

___________________
[*] 'discriminative stimuli'
_____________________


Today I think the graphs show an organism as the central 'unit for analysis' in basic conditioning
experiments.  Back at work, in 1985, colleagues and I thought of clients - adults and children - as
our 'analytical units' whose problematic behaviors we were treating with rehabilitation objectives. 

Comments are welcome...

July 27, 2012