Examining the Partially Completed Crossword Puzzle: The Nature and Status of Contextual Behavioral Science

This chapter describes contextual behavioral science (CBS), its nature, origins, status, and future. It deals in succession with its foundational assumptions and strategies, basic work in language and cognition, contextual approaches to clinical interventions and assessment, and extensions of CBS across settings and populations. The chapter explores the idea that CBS is a strategy of scientific development, that is based on a core set of philosophical assumptions, and that is nested within multidimensional, multilevel evolution science as a contextual view of life. The CBS approach is quite different than a bottom-up strategy, in which basic scientists alone are given all of the duties of constructing principles of high precision and scope that can be applied by practitioners to complex human behavior. Applied methods are now springing directly from relational frame theory (RFT) concepts more broadly, not just the middle-level terms of psychological flexibility, a process that seems likely to continue.