ABSTRACT
Operant psychology has become separated from the rest of psychology. The journal Behaviorism, which appeared in 1972, concentrates on radical behaviorism, the philosophy of psychology associated with operant research. Radical behaviorism offers an ongoing reformulation of the subject matter, task, and method of psychology. Individualism permits cognitivism, which assumes that the phenomena of interest to academic psychology consist of a conceptual nervous system inside the organism. Individualism permits biological reductionism, the belief that psychological phenomena are reducible to physiological, and specifically neurological, processes. Reductionism is a biological version of cognitivism. In turn, both cognitivism and reductionism are consistent with the mechanistic thinking that locates causes in the immediate antecedents of behavior. Cognitivism locates these causes in the conceptual nervous system, and reductionism locates them in the biological organism. This set of related assumptions about the nature of psychological phenomena is at the heart of the behaviorism that persists in the mainstream of academic psychology.
