Abstract

Field and Hineline (2008) offer a sympathetic explanation for the resistance of psychologists and philosophers to explaining behavior as temporally organized phenomena occurring as a function of other events, also often distributed over time. This resistance is supported by the contingencies maintained by the everyday verbal community that make dispositioning the default causal attribution for English speakers. Temporal organization of events is hard to "see," and the linearly organized verbal responses that describe such organization cannot model it. Whereas multiple scales of spatially extended phenomena can be pictured to aid in understanding (as seen, for example, on the "Powers of Ten" website: http://powersof10.com/), pictures of events occurring at multiple time scales are schematics at best. The analysis provided by Field and Hineline helps make sense of the difficulties inherent in explaining behaving