Radical behaviourism and scientific frameworks: from mechanistic to relational accounts

A substantial portion of B. F. Skinner's scholarship was devoted to developing methods and terms for a scientific study of behavior. Three concepts central to scientific accounts--cause, explanation, and theory--are examined to illustrate the distinction between mechanistic and relational frameworks and radical behaviorism's relationship to those frameworks. Informed by a scientific tradition that explicitly rejects mechanistic interpretations, radical behaviorism provides a distinctive stance in contemporary psychology. The present analysis suggests that radical behaviorism makes closer contact with the "new world view" advocated by physicists and philosophers of science than does much of contemporary psychology