It has been said that sciences discover only slowly what they are really about. While that aphorism has usually been addressed to the relatively mature, traditional sciences, it aptly characterizes the preoccupation of psychology with inferred events assumed to underlie what people and other organisms do instead of with that behavior in its own right.

The subtleties implicit in such a focus on behavior are often overlooked. It is easy to see that behavior analysis differs from other psychological viewpoints, but the difference is difficult to pin down. Several widely repeated characterizations of its distinctive features are simply inaccurate, such as caricaturing behavior analysis as a stimulus-response or black-box psychology that denies a role to physiology, or confusing it with other behaviorisms that ignore phenomena such as thinking, perceiving and self-awareness. More constructive critiques have characterized behavior analysis as selectionist rather than essentialist (Palmer & Donahoe, 1992), as contextualist rather than mechanist or organicist (Hayes, Hayes & Reese, 1988), as nonmediational rather than mediational (Hineline & Wanchisen, 1989), and as functionalist rather than structuralist (Catania, 1973).

None of these entirely captures the distinctive flavor of behavior analysis, but science is behavior too, so behavior analysis must inevitably apply its own methods to itself. It may be unique in the extent to which it does so. In at least that sense, behavior analysis cannot help but embark on the odyssey of discovering what it is really about. The reviews included in this part emphasize that journey in progress.

Hilgard’s review of Skinner’s The Behavior of Organismsprovides a glimpse of behavior analysis from a viewpoint contemporary with its emergence as a distinct system. Hilgard recognized the innovative importance of Skinner's distinction between operant and respondent behavior as a departure from classic stimulus-response formulas, and understood that the status of hypotheses in Skinner's "descriptive positivism" differed from that in other approaches. Nevertheless, Hilgard did not see Skinner's approach as fundamentally distinct from other psychological systems; he saw it as compatible with the approaches of Guthrie, Hull, Lewin and Tolman, noting with a hint of pique that Skinner took other psychological systems less seriously than he took physiology.

Hilgard had been tracking Skinner's published essays over the preceding years and thus was sensitive to how Skinner developed the new system within the course of the book, which incorporated those essays as some of its chapters. Hineline's review tracks the evolution of Skinner's writing within the book, analyzing it in terms of the prose characteristics suggested by attribution theory in contemporary social psychology. Attribution theory, while developed to address ordinary language rather than theoretical discourse, made salient a distinction between two ways of accounting for an individual's action, that of appealing to properties of the individual, and that of appealing to properties of the environment within which the individual acts. The shifts in Skinner's prose style illustrate a distinction between organism-based and environment-based interpretive language that may contribute to how we understand the controversies behavior analysis has inspired and its separation from the other pyschological approaches. Donahoe &amo; Palmer further illustrate the nature of behavior analytic theory by examining the concept of inhibition as subsequently adopted or rejected by various behavior analysts. They show how at least some phenomena that had been interpreted in terms of inhibition do not require mediational intervening processes for their explanation.

Winokur reviews Skinner’s Contingencies of Reinforcement,a theoretical analysis notable for dealing with psychological phenomena that are often regarded as beyond the purview of a behavioral approach. The book does not ask what a phenomenon such as "seeing that we see" is, but instead examines what is at issue in the use of such experiential expressions. Winokur's essay not only clarifies Skinner's meanings of "theory" but also summarizes several innovative Skinnerian themes: for example, the private but not privileged status of events within the skin, the nature of rules as verbal antecedents, and the complex interactions between ontogenic and phylogenic contingencies. Winokur's observations range from the relation between J. S. Mill's "mental chemistry" and the elder Mill's "mental mechanics" to sometimes overlooked similarities in Skinner's accounts of perceptual phenomena and verbal phenomena.

Schnaitter prefaces his general characterization of Skinner’s About Behaviorismwith an adroit illustration of how the interpreter is included within interpretation. He then outlines three major themes along with their implications, thereby illustrating what is special about behavior analysis: emphasis on function rather than structure, as exemplified by the phylogenic and ontogenic origins of behavior; concern with level of analysis, demonstrated by the advantages of behavior analyses as an alternative to "the reductive language of physiology or the seductive language of mentalism"; and application of these to the interpretation of private events.

Shimp’s review shifts our focus from developments originating in Skinner's work to a target that is avowedly antagonistic to behavior analysis. Addressing Gardner's The Mind's New Science, Shimp proposes that cognitive science and radical behaviorism differ more because scientific communities and research programs are compartmentalized than because their philosophical differences run deep. To build his case, Shimp ignores much of Gardner's chest-thumping celebration of current fashion in psychology, concentrating instead on characteristics of behavior analysis that he finds especially susceptible to misunderstanding. Finding strengths as well as shortcomings in both approaches, he notes striking similarities between contemporary behavior analytic and cognitivist research.

In this section's concluding essay, Czubaroff presents a rhetorician's view of some of the controversies in which behavior analysis has been involved. Unlike Shimp, she argues that they entail fundamental issues transcending particular approaches rather than particular empirical or interpretive questions (cf. Hayes et al. on Pepper in Part IX). She notes that such controversies have been addressed by major philosophers of science and have long been viewed as natural aspects of progress in other fields. The rhetorician's perspective is especially useful for examining arguments between proponents of different paradigms, because when contending debaters disagree about what counts as explanation and what sorts of data are important they must rely upon argumentation and informal reasoning in supporting their claims.