Behaviorism in the 1920's
1955; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2710411
ISSN1080-6490
Autores Tópico(s)Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology
ResumoIN its review of John B. Watson's edition of Behaviorism in 1925 The New York Times noted that the book initiated new epoch in the intellectual history of man.' Within the next five years Behaviorism became a movement taken up by the press and debated in periodicals ranging from parent magazines to journals of philosophy. Behaviorism was espoused or challenged by most of the major minds, and even more of the lesser ones of the period. In 1930, The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences called it, major intellectual revolution.2 Watsonian Behaviorism had emerged from the animal psychology laboratory and should have aroused little interest beyond academic psychology. That it became, instead, one of the most popular ideas of the decade was partially related to the promotional talent of its founder, Dr. John B. Watson. More meaningfully, perhaps, its popularity should be related to the needs of the era in which it flourished. The needs of the era, indeed, were articulated in the controversy the movement aroused. Because Behaviorism proposed one over-arching dogma, all contemporary ones were unsettled, and high priests hurried to grand restatements of principles that provide a mine of material for the intellectual historian. Man, said Dr. Watson, is a machine. Nothing more. All human functions, including thinking, can be observed and described in terms of stimulus and response. In itself, this premise was something less than revolutionary. The radical materialists of the French Enlightenment had posited a similar idea. There was, however, a significant difference in the reaction of the eighteenth century and that of the twentieth. When La Mattrie published L'Homme Machine in 1747 the book caused a scandal and was promptly suppressed. Watson found an audience
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