COMMONSENSE AND CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

Abstract

Staddon's paper contributes to an ongoing dialogue concerning the proper interpretive focus of the type of work published in this jour- nal, a dialogue that spans at least the past four editorships (see Branch, 1992; Hineline, 1984; Nevin, 1980).Although decisions regarding publication of manuscripts hinge primarily on methodological matters, such as demonstration of experimental control in individual subjects and reliability of results through replications, there is also an implicit interpretive framework, referred to in the present context as ''environment-based theory," that much of the work in this domain shares.Environment- based interpretations are distinctive not only in their emphasis on environmental determi- nants of behavior but also in their departure from conventional locutions of psychological explanation.Moreover, many of the crucial features of environment-based theory are sub- tle and difficult to parse in everyday terms.Thus, debates like the present one, which pro- vide an occasion for an explicit statement of some of these key features, are exciting and important.Although I disagree with several of the ways in which environment-based theory is characterized by Staddon, his comments are nevertheless useful in forcing a reexamination of some of the assumptions upon which it rests, assumptions that too often are either unac- knowledged or are defined only negatively, for instance, as standing in opposition to "men- talistic," "cognitive," or other variants of or- ganism-based theory.According to Staddon, environment-based theory is atheoretical, guided by a kind of crude induction, and ahistorical, with variables act- ing in a vacuum.I will attempt to show that this characterization is applicable neither to current environment-based theory nor to its historical antecedents.But Staddon's paper is more than just a critique of particular features

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