ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the contrary argument, which explains how the psychological nouns and the verbs of consciousness designate broad classes of conduct. It discusses few consequences of the traditional assumption that mentalistic terms designate psychological properties of the organism. A contingency-oriented psychology does have a place for the psychological nouns and for the verbs of consciousness. The verbs of consciousness seem different from the psychological nouns, with respect to the possibility of translating them into action language. Uncritical acceptance of the psychological nouns as the starting point for a scientific inquiry has had several intellectual consequences. Fascination with the psychological nouns has let psychologists overlook the primacy of contingency-shaped and contingency-governed behavior. The concept of a person as the interpenetration of organism and contingencies implicitly accepts a level of integration beyond the psychological. Psychocentrism is the belief that social science is reducible to psychology. Psychocentrism is a form of reductionism, subject to criticism on the same grounds as biological reductionism.
