"Behaviorology” names the science of contingency relations between actions and other events. No label can, of course, capture the complexity of a science. It attaches its roots in two seminal works by B.F. Skinner: The Behavior of Organisms (1938), and Verbal Behavior (1957). In the first, Skinner established the analysis of behavior in its own right, defined the basic unit of analysis—the operant, and provided the experimental foundation for the science. In the second, based on the processes discovered and elucidated in his experimental analysis of contingency relations, Skinner interpreted the behavioral interaction known as “language”.

The origins of behaviorology, though, lie further back in biology: First, in the biological tradition provided by Jacques Loeb with its emphasis on the study of the organism as a whole and on an epistemology based on experimental control and demonstration. Second, in the evolutionary framework provided by Charles Darwin with its analysis of life forms and functions in their natural setting and on changes in these forms and functions driven by the consequences of selection.

A behaviorological analysis thus addresses the reciprocal interaction of the organism's actions with an immediate internal and external milieu. It explains the dynamic properties of this interaction as the effects over time of selective contingencies. It discovers and clarifies those properties experimentally and theoretically, and verifies them in a practical way by engineering their effects in everyday settings.

The term "behaviorology" emphasizes the exclusion of a reified agency as responsible for behavior. It affirms that natural and cultural selection processes functionally relate to maintenance and change in the properties of behavior. The name "behaviorology" designates a distinct subject matter and denotes a natural science discipline within the behavioral sciences. Behaviorology as a science operates within Skinner’s Theory of Contingency Selection.

For the complete works of Charles Darwin,

online go to: http://darwin-online.org.uk