1. Early Materialists.
Some of Watson's more im-
mediate
contemporaries had more in common with his
bold, metaphysical brashness,
than his later followers.
Albert P. Weiss, for instance, published a book entitled
A Theoretical Basis of Human Behavior in 1925 in
which he banned consciousness and introspection from
psychology and claimed
that all behavior could be
interpreted in terms of physiochemical
processes. Nev-
ertheless he argued that
what is distinctive of a human
being is that his environment is social.
Psychology is
therefore a bio-social science which is particularly
concerned
with the impact of the social environment
on a biological organism. Weiss
was particularly inter-
ested in child
development and learning, but he never
seriously tackled the conceptual
problems facing his
reductionism, of how features of the social environ-
ment, such as commands, promises, and
moral exhorta-
tion can be analyzed in
purely physical terms.
Another early behaviorist, who showed equal naiveté
about the
environment, was W. S. Hunter. He held
that consciousness or experience for
the psychologist
is merely a name which he applies to what other
people call “the environment.” This suggestion epito-
mizes the epistemological innocence of
most of the
early behaviorists, against which Koffka reacted so
strongly. Hunter, however, distinguished himself in
other ways. He thought
that the new look in psychol-
ogy deserved a
new name and attempted, without any
success, to substitute
“anthroponomy” for “psychol-
ogy.” He also was the first to use the
temporal maze
for the study of motor learning.
A more ingenious and interesting theorist of early
behaviorism was E. B.
Holt. He was one of the first
to try to deal with Freudian phenomena within
a
behavioristic framework and his The Freudian Wish
and its Place in Ethics (1915) is a classic in this tough-
minded tradition, which was later to
include O. H.
Mowrer, J. Dollard, and N. E. Miller. Holt also devel-
oped Watson's idea that thinking is
subvocal talking
and theorized about the connections between language
and conditioning. He thus anticipated later much more
ambitious, if
abortive, attempts to exhibit language as
a system of conditioned
responses.
Karl S. Lashley was a pupil of Watson's who made
distinguished contributions
to the physiology of the
nervous system. This, however, did not prevent
him
from making pronouncements about the subject matter
of psychology
and about its methods, for instance, that
introspection is “an
example of the pathology of scien-
tific
method” (Lashley, 1923). His physiological find-
ings, however, as expressed in his Brain Mechanisms
and Intelligence (1929), did not support other
doctrines
of Watson. His postulates of equipotentiality—that
one
part of the cortex is potentially the same as another
in its
capacity for learning, and of mass action—that
learning is a
function of the total mass of tissue, favored
a centralist theory of
learning rather than Watson's
peripheralist theory. He became very critical
of S-R
theories which postulated a simple connection between
stimulus
and response and which ignored the role of
intervening cortical processes.
The simple switching
function accorded by Watson to the brain, which
he
inherited from Descartes, was denied.
Lashley, however, never departed from Watson's
materialistic standpoint. Like Weiss and Hunter he
believed
that ultimately behavior could be describable
in the concepts of mechanics
and chemistry. It is also
significant that all these early behaviorists
shared an
inductivist view of scientific method. They thought of
the
different sciences as having different subject mat-
ters and as consisting of generalizations about them
derived
from reliable data drawn from these subject
matters. In this respect they
shared not only Watson's
methodological recipes but also the view of
scientific
method from which these recipes arose (Peters, 1951).
