"Behaviorology" names the science of contingent relations between actions and other events. No label can, of course, capture the complexity of a science. It has its roots in two seminal works by B.F. Skinner: The Behavior of Organisms (1938), and Verbal Behavior (1957). In the first, Skinner established the analysis of behavior in its own right, defined the basic unit of analysis—the operant, and provided the experimental foundation for the science. In the second, Skinner analysed the behavioral interaction variously known as language or symbolic communication.

The origins of behaviorology, though, lie further back in biology: First, in the biological tradition provided by Jacques Loeb, with its emphasis on the study of the organism as a whole and on an epistemology based on experimental control and demonstration; and second, in the evolutionary framework provided by Charles Darwin with its emphasis on the analysis of life forms and functions in their natural setting and on changes in these forms and functions driven by the consequences of selection.

A behaviorological analysis thus experimentally addresses the reciprocal interaction of the organism's actions with an immediate internal or external milieu.  It explains the dynamic properties of this interaction as the effects over time of selective contingencies.

The term "behaviorology" emphasizes the exclusion of a reified agency as responsible for behavior. It affirms that natural and cultural selection processes functionally relate to maintenance and change in the properties of behavior. The name, "behaviorology," thus designates a distinct subject matter and denotes a natural science discipline within the behavioral sciences.