An Interbehavioral Analysis of the Participation of Private Events in Verbal Behavior

Abstract

The analysis of private events has traditionally been framed within Skinner’s radical behaviorism, which offers a behavioral approach to human subjectivity by treating private phenomena as covert behaviors subject to the same contingencies as public behaviors. While this perspective represents a significant advancement over dualistic theories of mind, both its strengths and limitations become apparent when examining its conceptualization of private experiences. Parallel to this behavior analytic tradition, interbehaviorism presents an alternative framework for addressing subjectivity through its non-causal, field-based logic of psychological events. This conceptual paper proposes an interbehavioral perspective on private events to clarify persistent limitations in representationalist theoretical treatment. The discussion proceeds through five systematic sections: First, we examine Skinner’s and Wittgenstein’s critiques of 20th century representationalist theories and their collective influence on functionalist approaches to language. This historical analysis reveals how both thinkers challenged mentalistic explanations while establishing behavior-based alternatives. Second, we analyze the radical behaviorist treatment of private events, highlighting its successes in naturalizing private events while identifying unresolved tensions in its causal framing of covert-verbal behavior. Third, we reconsider the role of observation in accessing behavioral history, arguing that interbehaviorism’s focus on fields of participating factors provides a more nuanced account than radical behaviorism’s reliance on inference. Fourth, we present J. R. Kantor’s interbehavioral approach to history as a constitutive factor within psychological events, emphasizing how field logic avoids the mechanistic pitfalls of traditional behavioral accounts. Finally, we suggest some implications of this field-based model for developing behavioral assessments, particularly in clinical and linguistic domains where representationalist assumptions often persist. We argue that the interbehavioral framework achieves three critical advantages: (1) its field logic eliminates the need for causal mediation between public and private events, (2) its focus on event fields provides a more parsimonious account of behavioral continuity than radical behaviorism’s reliance on hypothetical constructs, and (3) its non-representational approach aligns with contemporary developments in embodied cognition while maintaining strict naturalism. The paper demonstrates how this perspective can inform the creation of assessment protocols that track psychological events without reifying internal states—particularly through its treatment of linguistic behaviors as field properties rather than private representations. By bridging theoretical and empirical domains, this analysis aims to stimulate three developments: (1) the focus on investigative strategies that operationalize field relationships based on cumulative observations rather than inferred mental processes, (2) systemically coherent clinical assessments that avoid representationist assumptions about private experiences, and (3) empirical designs that treat psychological events as integrated fields rather than sequences of causes and effects. We conclude that interbehaviorism offers a productive path forward for behavior science, preserving radical behaviorism’s naturalistic commitments while providing a coherent framework for studying subjectivity. This shift promises to advance both theoretical clarity and practical applications across behavioral research and intervention settings.