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Notes
In their response, Villatte et al. (in press) point out that the number of RFT-based publications has been growing, citing examples and a recent review article by O'Connor, Farrell, Munnelly, and McHugh (2017). A growing number of publications do not, however, constitute genuine conceptual development, nor reflect the health of RFT. Consider, for example, that approximately one third of the published empirical RFT articles cited by O’Connor et al. were co-authored by a single individual. To compound matters, approximately one third of the empirical articles were focused on ‘implicit cognition’ (i.e., most were papers on the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure, the IRAP). This relatively narrow focus and heavy dependence on a single researcher are in our view cause for concern, rather than celebration. Of course, we are not arguing that no progress has been made, simply that the progress seems relatively slow when the authorship and content of the papers are considered.
Indeed, the MDML appears to render the whole debate around middle-level versus technical terms redundant. Specifically, the precision of scientific terms is not dichotomous (i.e., middle-level versus technical), but is a matter of degree. For example, the first level of the MDML is mutually entailing, which is widely accepted as a technical term in RFT, but remains relatively imprecise until you specify a particular relation and only gains increasing precision as you specify the dimensions along which it can be measured. Precision is not, therefore, just a matter of debate or argument, but is defined, in part, through a particular experimental analysis.
References
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Funding
This book review was prepared with the funding from the FWO Type I Odysseus Programme at Gent University, Belgium, awarded to Dermot Barnes-Holmes.
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Barnes-Holmes, Y., Kavanagh, D., Barnes-Holmes, D. et al. Reflecting on RFT and the Reticulating Strategy: a Response to Villatte, Villatte, and Hayes. Psychol Rec 68, 119–121 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-018-0272-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-018-0272-5