Behavior: The Central Concept in Natural Science

Abstract

This chapter examines the concept of behavior and explains why it is the central concept in modern science. The term largely emerged with the work of John Watson, but has proceeded to spread throughout the scientific community, such that physics is often characterized as the science of how the universe behaves across scales. This chapter argues that natural science can be framed by the concept of behavior in terms of its metaphysical structure (i.e., the concepts and categories that frame natural scientific models consist of entities, fields, and change), epistemology (i.e., natural science is an exterior empirical stance that observes and measures behavioral change in the world), and ontology (i.e., natural science develops structural maps of entities and their patterns of behavior across stratified dimensions of complexification). This analysis answers why (a) the term behavior spread throughout the scientific world; (b) behaviors become the scientific aspect of mental processes that are accessible via the lens of science, and (c) behavior in general is not the proper category for psychology but demonstrates that psychologists are interested in a particular kind of behavior, namely mental behaviors.