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The study of behavior differs fundamentally from the study of the psyche and logically cannot share the same discipline. However, while disciplines might be defined through technical exercises, they function through exercises of political power. The evolution of a discipline, though based on field and laboratory data interpreted within a specific paradigm and justified publicity by its utility to solve personal and social problems, follows a course of development in the political arenas of the academies and the professions. We happen to have a discipline, roughly connoted by the label "behavior analysis," without an academic home (the present ones haphazardly tolerate our activities), without a professional organization (the present one lobbies only "for behavior analysis"), and without a true professional name (the present one implies an approach not a discipline). No scientific community lasts long without a supporting professional infrastructure. In explicitly asserting ourselves as a discipline, we confront a number of difficult issues such as continuing to work in departments antithetical to behaviorism and a number of problems such as what we call ourselves to identify our professional and scientific concerns. (For example, we need a term descriptive of our science in its broad sense. That term is not psychology. Too many people persist in maintaining its commitment to cognitivism. On whatever term we agree, "behavior" should constitute its stem, for our efforts focus there, not in the putative underlying psyche or its current cognitive update.) The focus of our concerns and the solutions of our problems rest on one issue: Will our discipline prosper most as a branch ofpsychology or as an independent discipline? Slowly, but surely, our actions demonstrate that the latter is the preferred option, but these actions, though fortuitous, occur almost by accident. By specifically programming to achieve an independent professional status we increase the probability of doing so.

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A NUMBER OF STATEMENTS PRESCRIBE BEHAVIOR: apothegms, maxims, proverbs, instructions, and so on. These differing guides to conduct present varieties of the dictionary definition of "rules." The term "rules" thus defines a category of language usage. Such a term, and its derivative, "rule-governed," does not address a controlling relation in the analysis of verbal behavior. The prevailing confounding of a category of language with a category of verbal behavior appears related to a lack of understanding as to what distinguishes verbal behavior from other behavior. Verbal behavior is a behavior-behavior relation in which events are contacted through the mediation of another organism's behavior specifically shaped for such mediation by a verbal community. It contrasts with behavior that contacts events directly, and shaped directly by the features of those events. Thus we may distinguish between two large classes of behavior by whether it is behavior controlled by events, or behavior controlled verbally. However, the functional controls operative with both classes of behavior do not differ.

What other people do gives rise to endless gossip, usually accompanied by reactions of curiosity and moral judgment. We want to know why people act as they do. Concurrently, we want further or fewer occurrences of those actions and thus we comment on the degree of their propriety. Mostly the action alone, its topography, suffices for us to call it right or wrong. But sometimes we wait until we find out why the person (or group) behaved in that manner. Whether or not this mitigates our disapproval or mutes our approval, attempting to relate action to cause puts us in the position of scientist rather than moralist. Take for example the following actions: Contemporary hunter-collectors ... possess. .. many mechanical techniques for inducing abortion. .. such as tying tight bands around the stomach, vigorous massages, subjection to extremes of cold and heat, blows to the abdomen, and hopping up and down on a plank placed across a woman's belly 'until blood spurts out of the vagina." (p. 15) Infanticide runs a complex gamut from outright murder to mere neglect. Infants may be strangled, drowned, bashed against a rock, or exposed to the elements. More 'Harris, M. (1977). Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures. New York: Random House. xii + 239 pp., including index. (Reprinted 1978 as First Vintage Books edition.) Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from Cannibals and Kings (1977 ed.). The description of Harris's thesis often quotes his argument or paraphrases it closely, but this presentation is more unequivocal than his; phrases such as "tends to," "could have," "almost always" have been dropped for the sake of exposition. Reprints may be obtained from Ernest A