Context of the Development of Functional Contextualism: A Contextualistic Approach

Abstract

The purpose of the present article is to portray the context of the development of functional contextualism (Biglan, 1993; Hayes, 1993) by describing relevant history of behavior analysis in the United States and Japan from the 1980s to the 2010s. The present article comprises 4 parts: (a) introducing the root-metaphor method (Pepper, 1942), (b) describing trends in behavior analysis from 1980 to 1993, (c) describing trends in behavior analysis after 1993, and (d) presenting some relationships between functional contextualism, radical behaviorism, and other contextualisms in current behavior analysis. The present review suggests that the context of the development of functional contextualism was (a) problems of elementalism and over-explanation in the 3-term contingency paradigm, (b) interactions between radical behaviorism and interbehaviorism, (c) a split into separate communities of basic behavior analysis and applied behavior analysis, and (d) a weakness of the analytical units of behavior analysis in family and community settings and processes.