ABSTRACT
If “Physics is experience arranged in economical order” as Ernst Mach suggested a century ago, then by comparison Psychology could be characterized as experience in profligate disarray. We find ourselves in the waning years of the 20th century unable to even agree on the fundamental subject matter of the discipline. The internecine quarreling becomes even more strident when the domain of discourse shifts from the behavior of laboratory animals to the actions of Homo sapiens in its natural habitat. The issues that puzzle even the most optimistic observer are basically these: (a) What are the natural units of a virtually continuous, uninterrupted stream of a person’s activities, one blending smoothly into the next, with no obvious beginning or endpoints?; (b) Even if it were possible to identify units of analysis, how could one begin to understand their integration to form the elegantly articulated kinetic structures we call human behavior? Some have asserted there are no natural units for analysis of human behavior (Loevinger, 1957), while others have imposed units on the flux of human behavior a priori based on assumptions about the presumed underlying mental apparatus (Chomsky, 1965, 1968).
