Experimental Analysis and Theory in the Science of Behavior

No behavior analyst can disagree with Catania’s contention that mathematical treatment should not supplant an experimental analysis of behavior, and that these two analyses should supplement each other. Catania provided very interesting examples of mathematical treatment that seem to supplant an experimental analysis. He did not claim that these examples are representative of mathematical analysis in behavior analytic work at the time, although he certainly viewed such instances as an important reason for concern. Quantitative analysis necessarily implies loss of information. One example is the election of response rate as the basic datum in the experimental analysis of behavior, which was done at the expense of information about, among other things, response topography. It didn’t matter whether a rat pressed a bar with his right or left paw, or with his nose or mouth, provided that the bar moved enough to activate a switch. The behavioral unit so constructed was an abstraction that did not correspond to any particular response but could encompass the whole class of responses that had functional unity. Construction of such an abstract unit was already implied in Skinner’s generic conception of stimulus and response (Skinner, 1935). This generic conception enabled an experimental analysis that is based on quantitative analysis, since the primary datum is rate. Quantification implies abstraction and loss of information. When the information lost is irrelevant, the analysis gains in power and generality. Neglecting particular topographies was actually necessary for the derivation of laws relating behavioral strength (estimated by response rate) to environmental operations. In this case, quantification was a necessary step toward an experimental analysis. Mathematical transformations are much more complex in Catania’s examples and, as he shows, the information lost seems to be relevant. Another question I may raise, reading Catania’s paper after so many years, is how the research questions that were so exciting back then seem remote and not so relevant now. I did my doctoral dissertation on behavioral contrast. This doesn’t seem such an interesting issue nowadays. Perhaps behavioral contrast no longer attracts interest because the experimental questions have been satisfactorily answered. There is another possibility, however, that doesn’t exclude the first. Henry Roediger, in an article to celebrate the centenary of the birthday of B. F. Skinner (Roediger, 2004), asked “What happened to behaviorism? ” and suggested a few possible answers, not meant to exclude one another. One possible answer is that nothing happened to behaviorism, it continues to be a productive approach, with important journals and conventions that attract thousands of people. Another possibility is that behaviorism actually won the intellectual debate, since virtually all of contemporary psychological research, including cognitive psychology, has behavior as its dependent variable. However, he also raised the possibility that behaviorism may have lost its appeal because “behavioristic analyses were becoming too microscopic in the 1970s. ” Correspondence should be addressed to juliocderose@ yahoo.com. br Experimental Analysis and Theory in the