The Peck of the Pigeon: Free for All

There seem to be four discernible areas of conflict between behaviourism, especially the experimental analysis variety, and other scientific schools of behavioural studies. I would like to discuss these briefly before introducing some factual information that hopefully will illustrate how I conceive a free-for-all analysis of behaviour. It is inevitable that I shall need to set up straw men to deal with these initial generalities. The diversity of standpoints among individual representatives of the various traditions is great and has doubtlessly increased recently. An eclectic attitude, for which I shall be pleading, seems to be spreading. Gradations rather than divisions of opinion are the rule. Schools of thought are no longer as monolithic as they once were. Other branches of the natural sciences appear to have gone through a similar dissolution of factions as the volume of positive knowledge they could command increased. One of the areas of conflict has to do with the range of behaviours that the various schools study. I consider that for an ambitious general account of behaviour, the "experimental analysis" school of behaviourism studies a too restricted range of phenomena. We have been told that a botanising of behaviour is not needed but it would seem that this can no longer be taken for granted. What is, for example, the experimental behaviour analysis account of the sexual behaviour of the female rat or the singing behaviour of song birds? One should in principle be able to deduce from leverpressing rats and key-pecking pigeons, but can one? The account offered by hehavioural endocrinologists for the first case and by neuroethologists for the second is likely to be closer to the truth by any definition than one behaviourists could offer. It might be argued that the demand is unfair but