In this brief rebuttal to Ilardi and Feldman's response to my commentary on their view of the future of a clinical psychology awash in mentalistic and biological terminology, I wish to respond to two interrelated issues brought up by the authors: the role of causality in psychological inquiry, and the domain of observable environment-behavior relations. Ilardi and Feldman (2001) appear to believe that by using technological advances to investigate biological variables (e.g., neuroimaging and neurocomputational modeling) the behavior of the organism as a whole should become subsumed under a biological model of functioning. What Ilardi and Feldman appear to confuse is the fact that various hypotheses, assertions, and theories can superficially "explain" or "account" for a set of phenomenon without the scientific criterion that empirically verifiable functional determinants or causation must be demonstrated experimentally. Many of the propositions and pronouncements presented in support of cognitive neuroscience by Ilardi and Feldman essentially are unsupported assertions. It is axiomatic, and accepted by radical behaviorists, that all behavior has as its foundation a biological component. As such, Ilardi and Feldman's characterizations of Skinner's work as anti-biological are misplaced at best, and demonstrate a significant lack of understanding of the importance of behavior as the variable of psychological inquiry. As Skinner (1988) pointed out, an organism behaves because "of its biological equipment at that moment. Eventually neurology will tell us all we need to know about the equipment" (p. 301). As discussed in my original article, a point seemingly missed in its entirety by Ilardi and Feldman, the importance of biology in behavior does not imply that by discovering the neurological concomitants of behavior that we should have to lose the significance of behavior as our dependent variable of inquiry in the process. As such, the entire cognitive neuroscience perspective leaves the issue of the causation of behavior not only unanswered, but unaddressed, because the biology of the organism becomes the central dependent variable of analysis within the confines of this biological science using psychological labels.
My main argument in this debate is that what is important for psychological science, including applied areas such as clinical psychology, is to study the behavior of the organism as a whole, including both its biological and environmental foundations, in context of