Convergences with behavior analysis: Recommendations from the rhetoric of inquiry

This analysis speculates on reasons why behavior analysis has not had the professional impact it desires, and suggests that increased contact with non-behavior-analytic research traditions and increased research in the area of verbal behavior may reverse the profession's fortunes. Behaviorists have accured a number of advantages from constituting themselves as a separate school in psychology. Nonetheless, school status can lead to isolation from other research traditions and can restrict communicative encounters with outside scholars to efforts to attack their research programs and defend one's own. Efforts to counteract these tendencies should help bring behavior analysis into the mainstream of contemporary social science research. In addition, if behavior analysts reconsider some of their assumptions about verbal and nonverbal behaviors and some of their methodological assumptions about how verbal behavior is to be studied, and if they place verbal behavior research on center stage, they may make substantive contributions to the contemporary multidisciplinary study of language.