Laudable Goals, Interesting Experiments, Unintelligible Theorizing: a Critical Review of Relational Frame Theory

An assessment of Relational Frame Theory (RFT) is benefited by a distinction among goals, experiments, and theorizing/philosophizing. The goals are laudable, but not new. The experiments are interesting, but they largely involve an expansion of the concept of relational responding from equivalence to nonequivalence relations, the obvious next step. The theorizing, where RFT’s bona fide novelty supposedly lies, I found to be ambiguous, opaque, and contradictory. Inasmuch as unintelligibility allowed me to understand, I found RFT to be a hypothetico-deductive and essentialistic proposal that amounts to little more than applications of basic set-theoretic (class and membership) and logical concepts (negation, material implication, biconditional) to verbal behavior.