No Island Entire of Itself: Reductionism and Behavior Analysis

Abstract

All of natural science, by definition, has the primary task of reducing Nature’s complexity—as given—to a limited set of concepts, principles, laws, and mechanisms that, more or less, captures that complexity. Behavior analysis, as a natural science, certainly exemplifies this task by, for example, reducing the complexities of behavior to the action of contingencies. But even within that framework, there remain many complexities. We will briefly discuss some of these “homogeneous” modes and issues of reduction in behavior analysis, but there are even greater challenges. Given that behavior analysis is essentially a member of the biological sciences, the issue arises of the relationships between behavior and other biological functions at all levels—especially behavior in relation to neural processes—an aspect of so-called “heterogeneous” reduction. This is one of the most difficult issues in biological science. The challenges are not simply empirical, but deeply conceptual. One conclusion seems inescapable: The science of behavior analysis cannot stand alone in the community of the biological sciences; behavior is too complex to be treated simply on its own terms. Behavior analysis can provide an agenda and the methods for proper exploration of certain behavior-neural relations, but neuroscience provides behavior analysis with challenges to account for, not to say predict, behaviors revealed through explorations in that field.

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