The Future of Psychotherapy and the Expanding Universe or Michael J. Mahoney

Human Change Processes (Mahoney, 1991) is an attempt to set experiential psychotherapy on a scientific basis. The first tow-thirds of the book, based on an extensive survey of diverse scientific and scholarly literatures, argues fairly convincingly for a conception of human beings in which attachment, subjectivity, emergent and unconscious mental processes-especially regarding the self-and emotionality are central to human development and psychotherapeutic change. The book's last part, a discussion of experiential psychotherapy, based largely on clinical experience and intuition, is vague on important points of psychotherapeutic procedure ad process and is less convincing. The disjunction between the scientific discussion of psychology and the non-scientific discussion of psychotherapy is the book's major flaw. Nevertheless, the book is important as an attempt to synthesize a psychotherapy that is at once humanistic and scientifically informed.     

The gifts of culture and of eloquence: An open letter to Michael J. Mahoney in reply to his article, "Scientific psychology and radical behaviorism"

In what seems to be a response to a paper by Skinner (1987), Mahoney (1989) provides evidence of unfamiliarity with and intellectual intolerance toward radical behaviorism by presenting a critique of it that includes a variety of improper and counterfactual attributions. For example, he argues that radical behaviorism is Cartesian rather than Baconian when the historical record shows the opposite, that it is fundamentally associationist when in fact it is selectionist, and that its philosophy of science is essentially that of operationalism and logical positivism when instead it moved on to other criteria decades ago. The details of Mahoney's history are sometimes flawed and sometimes unsubstantiated, as when he provides a distorted account of the origins of the Association for Behavior Analysis or when he makes undocumented claims about the banning of books. On examination, many of his arguments are couched in stylistic terms that share their rhetorical features with racial, ethnic, and religious stereotyping.     

Chicken,Eggs, and Speciation 1

Standard biological and philosophical treatments assume that dramatic genotypic or phenotypic change constitutes instantaneous speciation, and that barring such saltation, speciation is gradual evolutionary change in individual properties. Both propositions appear to be incongruent with standard theoretical perspectives on species themselves, since these perspectives are (a) non‐pheneticist, and (b) tend to disregard intermediate cases. After reviewing certain key elements of such perspectives, it is proposed that species‐membership is mediated by membership in a population. Species‐membership depends, therefore, not on intrinsic characteristics of an organism, but on relationship of an organism to others. A new definition of speciation is proposed in the spirit of this proposal. This definition implies that dramatic change is neither necessary nor sufficient for speciation. It also implies, surprisingly, that an organism can change species during its lifetime.