Long, D. M., & Sanford, B. T. (2015). Pragmatism and Psychological Flexibility in the Research Context. The Wiley Handbook of Contextual Behavioral Science, 81-99.
This chapter discusses how and why principles of psychological flexibility and behavior analysis can be extended into knowledge development itself so as to create a behavioral science more adequate to the challenges of the human condition. It provides an account of some cultural features of the contextual behavioral science (CBS) community that seem important to its functioning as a research tradition, and it links these features to some examples of researcher behavior. The chapter also discusses the understandings of realism and pragmatism, which provide general views of progress that arguably have divergent implications for methodological thinking and standards by which theories are evaluated. The particular form of pragmatism underpinning CBS, known as functional contextualism, has as its goal the prediction and influence of behavioral interactions with principles characterized by conceptual precision, scope, and depth.