Acceso usuarios
Kennon A. Lattal, Masako Yoshioka
Of several definitions of “instrument,” the one most appropriate to this special issue of the Mexican Journal of Behavior Analysis is “a measuring device for determining the present value of a quantity under observation” (Merriam Webster Dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/instrument). The definition is sufficiently broad to cover devices that (1) arrange contingencies of reinforcement and punishment and (2) measure the effects of those contingencies on behavior. Instruments are the stuff of which science is made, and without which science would not exist. Even theoretical science depends, in the final analysis, on instruments, for it is these devices that bring theoretical ideas down to brass tacks by allowing those ideas to be put to empirical test. Behavior analysis is no different from its older and more established fellow-sciences in its dependence on instruments and instrumentation.
Even before Skinner, the quintessential tinkerer with tools and gadgets of all types (e.g., Skinner, 1956), comparative and experimental psychology had a long history of adopting, adapting, and constructing all sorts of instruments from places as diverse as experimental and sensory physiology (e.g., Popplestone & McPherson, 1999) to the local hardware store, or ironmongery (Thorndike, 1898).
