The Future of Contextual Behavioral Science & Role of Theology

Metapattern Institute — June 2026

Jun 27, 2026

Jesuits Ireland — Bernard Lonergan SJ 1904-1984

Introduction

Summer has finally arrived, and I’m fortunate to be away from my day job until September on a care benefit leave. This unexpected window of time is a profound relief—not just for the rest, but because it has finally liberated me from the relentless, day-to-day pressure of work, providing the breathing room to do more reading, thinking, and writing. It also clears the way for an important event: my father’s tentative return home on July 7, 2026. Following several weeks of hospitalization, surgery, and an extensive rehabilitation process, I am looking forward to his return home since he continues to be one of my most vital intellectual and dialogue partners. Conversation has always been my primary way of working through ideas, and he has been my chief interlocutor for as long as I can remember. It is a genuine joy to have him back for the summer, allowing us the space to explore these developing concepts and engage in deeper discussions together.

I’ve been publicizing IACT (Integral Awareness & Commitment Training/Therapy) since 2024 and working with it in one form or another in my own daily practice since roughly 2017, but the ideas behind it have really started to take deeper root lately. I’m not setting any strict agendas for the summer, but I am looking forward to simply diving back into the roots of contextual behavioral science. I want to spend some time revisiting the foundations of Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in further depth to flesh out the theory a bit more as I continue to follow my intellectual muse.

This return to foundational principles was driven by two primary catalysts. Over the past year, I finished an extensive study of Lacanian and Žižekian theory, which resulted in my essay on the Facticity of the Cross and various discussions at the Philosophy Portal. The experience left me deeply dissatisfied and frustrated, feeling reminiscent of some academic nonsense I encountered years ago. I found Žižek’s “Christian atheism” to be hollow, preserving the imagery of the Cross while abandoning its core; he reduces Christ to a mere structural element of subjective destitution rather than the freedom and awe of divine revelation, essentially dissolving the concept of God into nothing but a “Big Other” that disappears upon closer examination and leads people into a maze of postmodern neo-marxist smoke and mirrors—and aperspectival madness. His work is less a theological exploration and more of an active dismissal of divine revelation and diverse religious traditions, treating the sacred as an empty void. Or a nauseating cultural and endless psychoanalysis session parading as negative theology.

Notwithstanding these frustrations, my recent dialogues have been exceptionally fruitful. Several key individuals have offered perspectives that now serve as the bedrock for the concepts explored in this post.

Regarding the realm of behavioral science, Gareth Holman has been my chief collaborator over the last year. A clinical psychologist based in Seattle and co-author of Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Made Simple, Gareth has helped refine my views through his deep knowledge of the FAP tradition and his adherence to core CBS tenets.

Theological clarity has come through my interactions with scholar Cleo Kearns, author of T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions and The Virgin Mary, Monotheism and Sacrifice. Her recent Philosophy Portal presentation on God and Christian atheism, alongside our personal discussion, helped sharpen my focus on the importance of active religious commitment within this project.

Michel Bauwens, the theorist behind the P2P Foundation, has bridged these concepts with their practical societal applications. Known for his work on the partner state and the Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto, his expertise in cooperative production and shared value has anchored the public-facing dimensions of my research.

The Philosophy Portal community, led by Cadell Last, has also been an indispensable space for evaluating and polishing the ideas presented hereafter. I am deeply appreciative of the portal community’s intense and energetic dialogue, which has been instrumental in advancing my thinking.

I. Behaviorism Redux

In my ongoing dialogues with Gareth, we frequently returned to the necessity of situating contextual behavioral science within a broader psychological landscape. Modern psychology is traditionally mapped across four successive forces: psychoanalysis, behaviorism, various humanistic and existential branches, and finally, transpersonal psychology and its transcendental dimensions. This fourth force focuses on the further reaches of human nature, encompassing spiritual experiences, mystical states, and transcendental phenomena that lie beyond the boundaries of the individual ego. Contextual behavioral science occupies a peculiar position within these movements and schools. While its lineage and methodology firmly root it in the second force of behaviorism, its mature application has developed robust empirical models for the very concerns that defined the third and fourth forces—values, existential purpose, the architecture of the self, and contemplative awareness. By operationalizing the observing self and the capacity for non-reactive presence, the science acts as a rigorous bridge into transpersonal territory, providing a functional account of how we might contact a perspective that transcends our immediate historical and psychological content.

The behavioral tradition went through a hard rupture in the middle of the last century. Classical and operant conditioning was powerful and directly shaped behavior, but they faltered before the generative, symbolic character of human language. That was the vulnerability Noam Chomsky exposed in his 1959 review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, arguing that no account of conditioned reflexes could explain the speed, the syntax, or the open-endedness of how we speak — a review that did much to push mainstream psychology toward the cognitive revolution. A deeper philosophical objection came a few years later from the Canadian, Charles Taylor, whose The Explanation of Behaviour (1964) argued that human action is irreducibly purposive, and that any science built on brute behaviorism, stripped of the agent’s own ends and meanings, would always give an incomplete account of human nature. Taylor’s charge still looms large over the field.

By the 1980s, cognitive approaches—centered on the work of Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis to identify and rectify distorted thinking—had become the psychological mainstream. However, Steven Hayes and his associates identified a critical discrepancy in the evidence: dismantling studies failed to consistently demonstrate that altering the specific content of a thought was the actual mechanism driving behavioral change or situational improvement. Choosing to reform rather than abandon the behavioral tradition, Hayes and his team began reconstructing the field from its core principles.

Their philosophical foundation was functional contextualism, a pragmatic framework influenced by William James and John Dewey and formalized through the World Hypotheses of Stephen Pepper. This approach moves away from the search for absolute internal truths, establishing “workability” as its definitive measure. Within this paradigm, an analytical method is validated as “true” only if it enables the broad and precise prediction and influence of behavior toward a life characterized by significance and value. This foundational philosophy subsequently split into two major streams: a basic science focused on the complexities of human language and a practical framework for relational therapeutic intervention.

Relational Frame Theory (RFT) serves as the foundational science of language within this tradition, offering a post-Skinnerian account of what makes human thought singular: our learned capacity to relate anything to anything else by arbitrary convention rather than by physical likeness. While other species organize their world based on physical attributes—such as size, proximity, or volume—humans are trained to establish relationships through arbitrary conventions. Once these relational skills are established, we begin to derive new connections that were never explicitly taught. For example, if a child learns that the label “dog” refers to a specific animal, she instinctively understands that the animal also refers back to the word and eventually, other dogs. Similarly, if she understands that a nickel is worth less than a dime and a dime less than a quarter, she can deduce, without further instruction, the relative value between the nickel and the quarter. A significant consequence of this mental capacity is that the emotional weight associated with one part of a relational network can permeate the entire symbolic order or linguistic frame. Consequently, a mere word, a specific memory, or a passing thought can trigger the same physiological alarm as an actual physical or linguistic event. This process is central to how we construct meaning, how we become imprisoned by our own symbolic language, and, ultimately, how we develop the capacity for perspective-taking.

The therapies came, in good part, from radical behaviorists returning to the clinic. Robert Kohlenberg — a student of Ivar Lovaas at UCLA, and a lifelong Skinnerian — turned in the mid-1980s to psychotherapy and, with Mavis Tsai, built Functional Analytic Psychotherapy, which finds the lever of change in the live, in-session relationship between therapist and client, in the clinically relevant behavior that surfaces in the room itself. Alongside it, Hayes, with Kirk Strosahl and Kelly Wilson, was developing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which works not by disputing the content of a thought but by changing a person’s relationship to it — through acceptance, defusion (loosening a thought’s grip by seeing it as a thought), contact with the present moment, self-as-context, a turn toward chosen values, and committed action. In 1993 Kohlenberg, Hayes, and Tsai set FAP and ACT side by side as “radical behavioral psychotherapy,” intensive in-depth therapies derived, against every expectation, from Skinner. Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy — a cousin from a neighboring line — had meanwhile made the governing move explicit: that real change asks us to hold two contraries together, radical acceptance and the demand for change at once. Hayes would later gather the whole development under a name that stuck: the third wave of cognitive behavioral therapy.

The naming of the field followed long after its core developments. By 1988, the philosophical foundation was established; FAP was codified by 1991, and ACT evolved throughout the 1990s. However, the formal banner of “contextual behavioral science”—and the open, non-proprietary association that sustains it—only emerged in 2005 with the establishment of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. This association serves as a broad collective, integrating behavior analysis, cognitive and dialectical therapies, and a growing emphasis on evolutionary science. This evolutionary integration is largely driven by the Prosocial framework developed by David Sloan Wilson and Steven Hayes, which synthesizes multilevel selection theory with Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for managing the commons. As will be explored in the third section, these rules for sustainable community resource management highlight how the modern name was essentially retrofitted onto a set of traditions that preceded it.

The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science encompasses a unique branch of the behavioral family—one that can be described as an existential-humanistic approach to cognitive behavioral therapy. Unlike many of its predecessors, this tradition treats values, religious experiences, and the self as serious areas of inquiry rather than an academic embarrassment. It reaches its most profound point through Relational Frame Theory’s exploration of perspective-taking—specifically the fluid relations of I and you, here and there, and now and then. Through this empirical investigation, the science arrives at a concept referred to as “self-as-context”: a content-free and stable vantage point. This allows an individual to observe their own feelings and thoughts as they pass without becoming overwhelmed. Ultimately, through its own rigorous methodology, behavioral science has effectively reconstructed the “observing self” found within contemplative traditions.

The personal appeal of this field lay in that very opening. Having spent years immersed in Zen practice and the structural architecture of Ken Wilber’s integral theory, I was surprised to discover a branch of behaviorism that remained receptive to the profound questions many of its academic peers had dismissed. This shared receptivity facilitated a rapid connection with Gareth; while he approaches the tradition from its clinical applications, my entry point is through its contemplative and philosophical boundaries. The inclusivity of this framework allowed a trained FAP clinician and an integral-humanist to find significant common ground. Inspired by our ongoing discussions, I have been revisiting some foundational texts, re-examining his work Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Made Simple alongside a fresh analysis of the writings of Tsai and Kohlenberg.

IACT represents my endeavor to realize the potential of that newfound openness. By integrating the multi-perspectival framework of integral theory with the psychological flexibility models central to CBS, it establishes a foundation within a post-metaphysical, fallibilist moral psychology and new form of integral humanism. This approach is anchored by the core virtues of awareness, courage, and love, serving simultaneously as a methodology for human development and a clinical intervention for suffering. Although I have utilized this framework for several years, I feel I have yet to fully articulate its depth; this summer’s research and writing pursuits are a dedicated effort to further that ongoing refinement.

II. Transcendental Thomism

The second conversation turned me back to my theological roots. A long talk with Cleo Kearns this month, together with her lecture at Philosophy Portal, returned me to a tradition with deep roots in the city I write from. I studied at Concordia, whose lineage is bound up with Bernard Lonergan — the Quebec-born Jesuit who, with the German theologian Karl Rahner, stands among the great names of the movement called transcendental Thomism. Montreal was formative ground for him: he came to the city to study at Loyola, one of Concordia’s founding colleges, and returned in the 1940s to teach, before the work that made his name carried him on to Rome, Toronto, and Boston. It was here, in fact, at the Thomas More Institute — the adult-education college still active in Montreal, with which Concordia keeps a long association — that Lonergan delivered the 1945 lecture series, “Thought and Reality,” that became the seed of Insight and its Generalized Empirical Method. And the theologian who later anchored critical theology at Concordia, Charles Davis, knew Lonergan’s thought intimately and reckoned with it seriously throughout his own work. That formation is the thread I want to follow forward here, and I have written about it elsewhere. (For the longer account of that Montreal lineage — Lalonde, Davis, and the critical-theology formation — see “Critical Theology & Integral Humanism.”)

To see why that tradition matters to a modern behavioral science, it helps to know the problem it was built to solve. For centuries Catholic philosophy rested on the confident realism of Thomas Aquinas: through the active power he called the intellectus agens, the mind abstracts the intelligible form of a thing from what the senses supply, and so genuinely reaches the world. That foundation was fractured by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). In his Copernican revolution Kant reversed the old picture — objects must conform to the mind, not the mind to objects — and concluded that we know only the world as it appears to us, the phenomenon, shaped by our own forms of space, time, and cause. The thing-in-itself, the noumenon, stays out of reach. The knowing subject is sealed inside the theater of its own representations, and with that the door to classical metaphysics and natural theology swung shut: reason can no longer reach an absolute beyond the bounds of experience.

The transcendental Thomists, beginning with the Belgian Jesuit Joseph Maréchal in Le point de départ de la métaphysique (1922–1947), made a daring move. They saw that you could not beat Kant by simply reasserting the old realism against him; you had to take up his own transcendental method — the analysis of what makes knowing possible at all — and turn it against his conclusion. Maréchal argued that Kant had not appreciated the power of the very thing he had found. Look closely at the act of judgment, he said, and you find that the mind is not a static container of categories but a dynamism: a restless, innate drive toward being without restriction, prior to experience and underwriting it. Every time we grasp a finite, limited object, we grasp it against the horizon of the unlimited; to affirm that this is real is already, tacitly, to affirm being as such. The intellect hits the ground running, always already reaching past any particular thing toward the infinite. And that reach is the door back to the real that Kant had bolted shut — opened not by escaping the subject, but by discovering that the subject is structurally open to the absolute.

This core realization—referred to within the tradition as the finality or dynamism of consciousness—serves as the foundational element of the entire school, nurtured uniquely by its prominent successors. Maréchal envisioned this drive as a movement toward Infinite Being; Lonergan identified it as a pursuit of the notion of insight, conscience, and the Infinite Being of Christ; and Rahner saw it as a reach toward absolute esse, the holy mystery. They were united by the belief that the impulse to know is not merely an incidental trait of the mind but its very defining structure. As Rahner famously articulated, the human person is spirit in the world: a being that is embodied, historical, and rooted in a specific life, yet fundamentally designed for self-transcendence, perpetually reaching beyond the immediate toward the totality of existence.

Lonergan operationalized this process into a formal methodology. In his 1957 work Insight, he introduced the Generalized Empirical Method (GEM), which expands the scope of inquiry beyond external sensory data to include the “data of consciousness”—the internal operations of the mind itself. By observing our own mental processes, Lonergan identified a self-correcting cycle spanning four distinct levels, each governed by a specific imperative: we experience (be attentive), we understand (be intelligent), we evaluate the truth of that understanding (be reasonable), and we determine an appropriate course of action (be responsible). He argued that because every finite grasp of a subject remains incomplete, it inevitably generates new questions; this inherent restlessness constitutes a dynamism toward being that unfolds through the very structure of inquiry. Lonergan defined this approach as a form of “critical realism”. A “realism” in the sense that we possess the capacity to arrive at authentic conclusions regarding values and facts; however, it remains “critical” because these truths are not grasped through direct perception. Instead, they are the result of a rigorous, self-correcting process of investigation.

Rahner gave the same openness its sharpest name. Across Spirit in the World (1939) and Foundations of Christian Faith (1976) — the latter of which I am revisiting this summer, and which remains a source of profound excitement — he calls it the Vorgriff, the pre-apprehension: the mind’s anticipatory reach into the infinite that is silently at work in every finite act of knowing or loving. You can see any single object, he liked to say, only because it stands out against a wider horizon that recedes behind it; and behind every such horizon the mind is already straining toward an ultimate one, measuring the small and ordinary against an unthematic, ever-present awareness of infinity. The Vorgriff is a secret, permanent ingredient of personhood — a capax Dei, a capacity for God written into the structure of the human as such — and the term of that openness, what the horizon finally is, he names the holy mystery.

Set this beside the behavioral account and the symmetry is hard to miss. Working entirely within a naturalistic frame, contextual behavioral science has reconstructed something that looks remarkably like the oldest furniture of the contemplative and transcendental traditions: a stable, content-free observer from which experience is simply witnessed. It reached this honestly, by its own empirical and dialogical route. And having arrived there, it tends to treat the arrival as a demystification — to assume that because the observing self can be given an ordinary, evolutionary cause, the mystery is closed. It uses mindfulness to lower stress or improve flexibility while keeping the ceiling of what Taylor calls the immanent frame firmly shut. It has described the mechanics of the eye with great care, and declined to ask what the eye is looking at. Rahner and Lonergan spent their lives on exactly that question.

I am currently reflecting on two significant observations. First, the four imperatives identified by Lonergan—being attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible—align with the Awareness, Acceptance, and Action framework I developed from a behavioral perspective with surprising precision. While IACT was not intentionally modeled after Lonergan’s work, this alignment is striking, and I have yet to fully explore the extent of their shared foundations. Second, I suspect that Lonergan’s critical realism could provide a necessary counterweight to the pragmatism inherent in the field. Contextual behavioral science often adopts a Jamesian focus on truth-as-workability; however, without a broader anchor, “what works” risks devolving into simple instrumentalism. My own perspective aligns more closely with Charles Sanders Peirce and (now) Lonergan: a fallibilist stance that acknowledges our knowledge is consistently incomplete and subject to correction, yet remains realist in its conviction that we are oriented toward an objective reality and an authentic good. I am still determining whether this view represents a challenge to the field of pragmatism or serves as a way to deepen it.

The final point I wish to maintain is that the observing self is a reality, not merely a linguistic artifact to be dismissed. While science may trace its origins through the mechanisms of evolution, relational framing, and the historical development of language, these explanations do not negate its existence. Capacity is not synonymous with its ultimate aim. A scientific discipline can provide an exhaustive account of how a faculty emerged while remaining silent on its final orientation and purpose.

In this sense, I am revisiting Charles Taylor’s critique: while contextual behavioral science has successfully reintroduced purpose through the concept of values—surpassing the limited behaviorism he once criticized—it remains confined by a naturalistic framework. I am left to contemplate whether the content-free observer is an opening rather than a void. It is possible that what science labels as “self-as-context” is, in fact, what Karl Rahner identified as the Vorgriff: a fundamental human openness toward an infinite horizon and unnamed holy mystery.

III. Toward a Second Renaissance & Pragmatic Utopianism

A third dialogue has recently unfolded, this time with Michel Bauwens, focusing on a unique point of convergence: the intersection of evolutionary research by David Sloan Wilson, the integral movement, and contextual behavioral science. As an active participant in the integral movement for several years, Michel joined me for a brief meeting to examine “Prosocial” as a distinct crossroads where Elinor Ostrom’s principles for tending the commons, multilevel selection, and integral developmental theory overlap. Although the Prosocial framework analyzes cooperation through a behavioral lens, Michel’s extensive career dedicated to the public sphere and the commons stems from a different intellectual lineage. Throughout our discussion, we have repeatedly circled back to a core question: what truly occurs when these two distinct paths intersect?

So when I came across a conversation between Rufus Pollock and Zak Stein, my first reflex was to send it straight to Michel. While I am already very familiar with Zak Stein’s work, it was Rufus Pollock’s perspective on the “second renaissance” and “pragmatic utopianism” that was a new and exciting discovery for me. Pollock — the economist behind the Open Knowledge movement and the author of The Open Revolution — has been calling for these concepts as a way of naming the move from retrieval to invention, an inheritance brought back into use so that something new can be built on it. It was not just the vocabulary that lit me up, but hearing two people work the exact seam Michel and I had been working on — the evolutionary science and the integral frame held together, taken seriously at once — already articulated, from the commons side, by other people I had not been following up to this point.

The various threads of my summer research are finally converging here. The Prosocial framework developed by Wilson and Hayes—the evolutionary branch of contextual behavioral science—represents some of the most rigorous practical exploration into the origins of cooperation and shared values within our species. When viewed alongside Rahner’s concept of openness—a universal, unthematic quality present in all individuals regardless of how it is labeled—a compelling possibility emerges: a horizon that is both common to all and possessed by none could serve as the foundational inheritance for a revitalized, cooperative, and new form of public sphere or commons. I suspect that while this science is approaching a central question its own framework cannot yet articulate, the discourse surrounding the commons is nearing that same point from an external perspective. This intersection of three disparate traditions, which rarely find themselves in dialogue, is the specific collaboration that has most captured my attention.

The following ideas remain in flux, presented here as initial observations for the season rather than a completed thesis. I am exploring this central inquiry through lenses that bridge scientific, theological, and societal perspectives. This dialogue is an ongoing part of my current research. I am revisiting the integration of religion into developmental frameworks, and examining these ideas with expert collaborators provides a depth of insight that I intend to cultivate throughout the summer. My objective is to further explore the concept of a “second renaissance”—an era of invention and renewal—while continuing to refine my vision of integral humanism: a framework capable of unifying rigorous science, contemplative traditions, and our collective public existence.

For now, I am looking forward to how the summer will unfold: with my father coming home, the days growing long, and conversations running late around the kitchen table and the barbecue. My thanks go out to Gareth, Cleo, Michel, Cadell, and to every one of you who has been following along and leaving comments.

Integral [+] Facticity

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?