Behavior Analysis: Theoretical Issues and Epistemological Perspec-tives

This article is an overview of theoretical research about a contemporary area in psychology, known under the name of “behavior analysis”. This area is at the root of some applications in several sectors of social life (education, health, work, etc.), which currently have a large audience. Yet, the theoretical side of this approach has been thoroughly questioned for many years. Indeed, researchers in the field have agreed to describe a difficulty to deal with some human activities, such as language. In this framework and because of the enduring character of that difficulty, this work proposes to consider this observation expanding the scope of the analysis. The question asked here is to know whether the persisting lack of consensus regarding language in behavior analysis can be related to the axioms conditioning conceptualizations in this area. In this view, this work first reminds the main epistemological considerations which gave birth to this mindset, then synthesizes qualitatively the associated theoretical evolutions before proposing, in a third and last stage, an epistemological point of view in light of the Kuhn’s thesis (1962) about the evolution of sciences and of the Popper’s notion of falsifiability (1934). This article concludes with a perspective about the relevance of a-ontological and pragmatic evolution of research.