Behavior and Social Issues, Volume 7, No.2, Fall 1997 AN ACADEMIC HOME FOR A NATURAL SCIENCE

ABSTRACT: The definitive characteristics of a natural science of behavior are reviewed and contrasted with the characteristics of the traditional social sciences. Differences are traced to the different origins of those disciplines. While philosophical and scientific factors auger for the disciplinary independence of a natural science approach to the discipline, arguments against independence are fueled by economic and political contingencies. Efforts by natural scientists to change disciplines rooted in mysticism have been unsuccessful for reasons that could have been anticipated, and the resulting compromises to the integrity of natural science discipline are explored. Based on the fundamental incompatibility of the disciplines in question, natural scientists of behavior must choose between the integrity of their discipline and the seductions of the extensive resources currently controlled by their mystical counterparts. In a strictly natural science of behavior/environment relations there are no minds or psyches. A body is not inhabited by a mystical administrative spirit called "self' that chooses behaviors for the body to exhibit. Nor is the fallacy of "information" extrapolated to the extreme of information processing. Those are the notions of scholars operating in the absence of a natural science oftheir behavior-related subjec