Is Psychology Really `the Study of Behavior'?

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the concept `behavior' within the context of the development of American psychology. After explicating the term's meaning within ordinary usage, we argue that `behavior' is a theoretical construct within behavior analysis, and that its privileged status in psychology outside behavior analysis is really just a residuum from the days of the hegemony of behaviorism. The claim `psychology is the study of behavior' falters within psychology more generally on the grounds that `behavior' is simply too confused and ambiguous a construct on which to found psychology. On the other hand, within behaviorism itself, it is still possible to vindicate the claim that psychology is the study of behavior, since `behavior' has a technical sense within behavior analysis. However, to establish that psychology is the study of behavior in this technical sense would require that behaviorism succeed in explaining all of the phenomena of interest to psychologists, since otherwise some psychological phenomena would be left outside this domain.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.