Psychological behaviorism, as indicated, addresses various areas and topics in psychology, offering theories, methods, and findings. But these various developments are parts of a unified construction, related by a set of consistent principles that constitutes an overarching theory of behavior, centrally human behavior. As a unified theory PB contends with the character of psychology. That character is one of fragmentation. Psychology is divided into autonomous fields and research endeavors whose independence defines that character. Psychology is indeed a collection of independent studies, as Sigmund Koch recognized in a 1981 American Psychologist article, not an integrated science in the way that physics, chemistry, or biology is. That is the reason for the contention. Psychology, as a collection of independent studies, is not prepared to deal with unified, overarching theory (see Staats, 1999), that is, to evaluate it for what it might mean to the science, to compare it to other such theories, to compare its part theories to competitive special area theories, to consider how psychology is to become integrated and the role of the overarching theory in that task.

That experience of the disjunction between psychology’s character and an overarching unified theory advanced PB’s knowledge of psychology as a science, a beginning interest of PB. Thus, psychological behaviorism early in its development began formulating a philosophy of science focusing on the problems of psychology with respect to disunity (see Staats, 1968, 1970). Ultimately this led to study of the philosophy, history, and sociology of science for the clues with respect to the importance of unification in a science—the result was a philosophy of science called unified positivism. Very briefly, this philosophy of science states that all sciences begin with disunified knowledge. Gained by various people, with diverse concepts and theories, studying phenomena that appear absolutely different, using different methods, the elements of knowledge acquired have to be unrelatable at the beginning. The PB thesis is that all sciences, physical science too, begin in disunity. After all the manifold phenomena of the world appear to be different on the surface even when they operate according to the same principles. Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 The Structures of Scientific Revolutions" provides an excellent historical description. “[During the first half of the eighteenth century] there were almost as many views about the nature of electricity as there were important electrical experimenters. . . . [A]ll were componentsof real scientific theories drawn from experiment and observation. . . . [However, there was general divisiveness, leading to unguided fact gathering, and this] produces a morass (Kuhn, 1962, pp. 13-15).
We can also find accounts that describe the effort that was required in science to find common underlying principles for phenomena that appeared for a long time to be very different And there is ample understanding that the more general--more comprehensive with respect to the range of phenomena treated--a theory the more valuable. Science also values parsimony. Although this is not well defined, and the problem of redundancy is not well treated, we can see that accounting for phenomena with fewer terms is more valuable than a more complex account. But the fact is that the philosophy, history, and sociology of science have not dealt well with the importance of unification in science, or the features related to unification, like parsimony. Especially, the study of science has not dealt well or systematically with differences in science with respect to unity.
The reason for that is that the study of science has focused on the nature of the unified sciences, like physics, chemistry, and biology. But those sciences went through their transition from fragmentation of study to unified study long before there were philosophers of science to research what was involved. For this reason the philosophy of science has offered little by way of characterizing what disunified sciences are, the differences in knowledge and operation they display from unified sciences, or what the unified sciences need to do to progress to the unified state. Many psychologists and some philosophers of science have recognized symptoms of psychology’s disunity, but as though the symptom was an inevitability of the subject matter of psychology, without providing the philosophy of science needed for understanding what unified and disunified sciences are or how to advance from the former to the latter. The works of psychological behaviorism and unified positivism provide that foundation (see Staats, 1968, 1970, 1975, 1981, 1983, 1991, 1996, and 1999). A number of psychologists have picked up that foundation and have begun to consider psychology’s problem of being a disunified science. As yet, however, there has been little in the way of beginning the many works that need to be undertaken to advance psychology to the unified state. When that gets underway it will change profoundly and widely what psychology is as a science. That is one of the avenues of advancement that PB and its philosophy open.

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