Relational Frame Theory A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language
Human language and our use of it to communicate or to understand the world requires deriving relations among events: for example, if A=B and A=C, then B=C. Relational frame theory argues that such performances are at the heart of any meaningful psychology
- PDF / 3,602,377 Bytes
- 285 Pages / 468 x 720 pts Page_size
- 34 Downloads / 149 Views
RELATIONAL FRAME THEORY A POST-SKINNERIAN ACCOUNT OF HUMAN LANGUAGE AND COGNITION
Edited by
Steven C. Hayes University of Nevada, Reno Reno, Nevada
and
Dermot Barnes-Holmes Bryan Roche National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS NEW YORK, BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW
eBook ISBN: Print ISBN:
0-306-47638-X 0-306-46600-7
©2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow Print ©2001 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers New York All rights reserved No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Kluwer Online at: and Kluwer's eBookstore at:
http://kluweronline.com http://ebooks.kluweronline.com
To the memory of B. F. Skinner and J. R. Kantor They forged the way toward a naturalistic approach to human language and cognition
A PERSONAL PROLOGUE Steven C. Hayes University of Nevada, Reno
I have been asked by my coauthors to write a personal prologue to this volume. I am a bit embarrassed to do so, because it seems entirely too self-conscious, but I have agreed because it gives me a chance both to acknowledge a number of debts and to help reduce the harmful and false perception that RFT is a foreign intrusion into behavioral psychology. I would like first to acknowledge the debt RFT owes to Willard Day. I heard Willard speak in 1972 or 1973 as a beginning graduate student. His call to understand language as it is actually used became a lifelong commitment. In some ways this commitment was not just to the field but was a personal one to Willard himself, who was one of the most charismatic, intelligent, and complex human beings I ever met. Later, when Willard happily convinced me to join him at the University of Nevada, we were able to spend a few years together before a heart attack suddenly took away this great man. Ironically, Willard himself was extremely uncomfortable with RFT, but he was trying to understand it to the end because he appreciated its purpose. For me, RFT was a way to rise up to Willard’s challenge, and if any good comes from it, Willard is partly responsible. He gave me the mission. I have been asked where RFT came from. The answer may be disappointingly simple to some: it is a direct application of behavior analysis, as I understood it. I had been encouraged by philosophically oriented people like Jon Krapfl and Hayne Reese (and Willard Day, Scott Wood, my student colleague Bill Myerson, and many others) to think of behavior in the most open and functional way possible. I did not know the word “contextualistic” then, but the wonderful explosion of contextualistic behavior analysis at West Virginia University in the early 1970’s made a mark on me that would last a lifetime. They gave me a form of behavior analysis that could breathe free and that had no limits to its
vii
viii
RELATIONAL FRAME THEORY
aspirations. Given that training, it was absolutely nor
Data Loading...
