| Psychological behaviorism
has created a methodology of theory construction for grand,
unified, overarching theories. There has not been such a methodology.
The behaviorists approach was to establish an animal learning
theory in great detail, on the assumption that this theory would
then explain all of human behavior. This approach proved unsuccessful,
since it involved rejecting most psychology concepts, principles,
and findings because they could not be analyzed in terms of
animal learning principles. PB, in contrast, has showed that
the basic animal learning principles need to be advanced through
the study of human learning and the establishment of human learning
principles and concepts. The next level of development involves
advancing the human learning principles and concepts to the
study of the learning of important repertoires in childhood.
That level then provides the basis for constructing a theory
of personality, and that development opens the various fields
of psychology to analysis within PB.
Methodologically, a problem of grand theory has simply been
the huge number of concepts, principles, and findings that
exist in psychology. How can one theorist address them all,
in the detail called for? It is not possible. The traditional
answer to the problem is to construct a theory on the basis
of specialized study, extend it to the minority of phenomena
the theory can address, and to reject as irrelevant or erroneous
all of the rest of psychology. That strategy can never unified
the many phenomena of psychology.
The PB answer to the problem is framework theory. The trick
is to construct a theory capable of addressing most phenomena,
but to show this by example. Not all of the phenomena of child
development are addressed in PB, but a number are addressed
so the theory’s potential is shown. That is true of
all the areas treated. It is also the case that not all phenomena
are addressed with the same detail. A theory of reading (see
Staats, 1975) is presented and various empirical studies have
shown the value of the theory. PB’s theory of cognitive
(language) behavior therapy, on the other hand, while including
basic studies, was not extended empirically at the clinical
level. The framework theory recognizes its necessary incompleteness
by attempts systematically to deal with the samples it covers.
The incompleteness of PB in the many phenomena it addresses
is both a weakness, or incompleteness, and a strength. The
strength lies in its heuristic value, in its call for further
theoretical, empirical, and methodological work, and in its
potentiality for development.
PB, in its complexity, is a theory of theories. There are
theories, of different levels of completion, of such phenomena,
topics, and fields such as emotion, animal learning, human
learning, language, language learning, language function,
personality, attitudes, reading, interests, values, autism,
developmental reading disorder, psychotherapy, personality
testing, intelligence, the nature-nurture issue, social interaction
principles. All those and many more such theories are joined
together by the overarching theory, making PB a “theory
of theories,” and a grand unified theory, the first
of its kind.
Continue to Unified and Disunified Science:
An Important Dimension
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