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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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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


223

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).