Abstract

"Now" is privileged in most psychological theories, which portray their processes as proceeding from moment-to-moment. As in any science, this adherence to contiguous causation hinders an account of phenomena that involve remote events or temporally extended organization. In addition, our scientific discourse is framed by the everyday patterns we have learned in explaining our own actions and those of others, yielding a bipolar constraint of explanatory language. Thus, tripolar relations among organism, environment and behavior are reduced to cause–effect, noun–verb, agent–action. This imposes exclusionary emphases upon organism-based or upon environment-based terms as accounting for behavior. Especially with remote causation or temporal dispersion, implicitly assumed contiguous causation appears to be defended through a practice we have called "dispositioning."