BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS OF PRIVATE EVENTS IS POSSIBLE, PROGRESSIVE, AND NONDUALISTIC: A RESPONSE TO LAMAL

Peter Lamal’s response to our paper on anxiety (Friman, Hayes, & Wilson, 1998) is as much a critique of Skinner’s approach to private events (e.g., Skinner, 1984) as it is a critique of our paper. Skinner’s position constituted a rebuttal to the ubiquitous dualistic notion that behavior is but a mere manifestation of unseen cognitive and emotional processes that have vitalistic primacy. Skinner attempted to eliminate this dualism by defining all human activity as behavior, even when the activity is observable to the actor alone. In contrast, Lamal claims that private events have merely putative or hypothetical status as behavior and that only public events can be studied scientifically. But by excluding private events from definitions of behavior because they are so inherently different from public events, Lamal has merely adopted a different form of dualism. We side with Skinner’s more thoroughgoing nondualistic stance. Lamal relies heavily on Zuriff, who claimed that ‘‘no evidence is currently available to show that verbal responses enter into causal relationships with private events or that these private events are stimuli in the sense of conforming to the same laws as their