ABSTRACT

Positive behavior support (PBS) has been presented to the education and disability services sectors as a new science of behavior. The credo of liberal science imposes upon us two moral obligations: to allow everybody to err and criticize, even obnoxiously, and to submit everybody's beliefs, including our own, to public checking before claiming that they deserve to be accepted as knowledge. The chapter describes that PBS is a new applied science that is based on three important sources: applied behavior analysis, the normalization movement in human services, and person-centered values. Humans are blind not only with respect to what they are unable to detect, but also as a result of what they are particularly equipped to detect. Human detection of some aspects of the physical environment is so keen that it can mask reality.