ZING - YANG Kuo

If we accept mechanistic and non-Darwinian concepts of behavior as basic to behaviorism, we must consider both Jacques Loeb (Loeb, 1889, 1918) and John B. Watson as the pioneer behaviorists. The word "behaviorism" was coined by Watson (1913, 1914), and the movement was, at first, a method-ological revolt rather than an attempt to build a new system of psychology. At that time, psychology was still the handmaiden of philosophy, and Watson himself had been trained by philosophically-oriented psychologists, although his own researches were mainly on animal behavior. (In this respect, Loeb, as an experimental biologist, was freer from the bondage of philosophy.) Soon such philosophers as Bertrand Russell and Ralph Barton Perry became interested in behaviorism, and psychologists like Tolman, Weiss, Lashley, and even Watson himself attempted to give behavioristic interpretations of the mental entities-thinking, memory, and the like-losing sight of the original aim of the behavioristic movement. To call thought processes subvocal speech (Watson, 1914, 1919); to give be-havioristic interpretations of consciousness, ideas, memory, and the like (e.g., Tolman, 1951); to substitute for mental faculties various new names of "hypothetical constructs"; to devise ingenious and elaborate schema of cerebral structures, applying the principles of electronic computers or information processing; to explain reasoning, intelligence, memory, etc., or to rename "volition" or "will" as drive or motivation (with physiological implications): all these are philosophical speculations at best. They hardly help us solve any basic problems in behavior. Instead, the behaviorist should concentrate his efforts on behavioral problems, leaving all the problems of mental concepts alone; these, as a matter of fact, shQuld be imperceptibly and ultimately absorbed, never to reappear, as our knowledge of behavior advances and broadens and as our experimental techniques, especially the biophysical and biochemical ones, are improved. The fundamental error of the behaviorists, therefore, was that they paid too much attention to the claims of philosophers and philosophically-oriented psychologists and tried to use objective or physiological constructs as replacements for the names of the old mental entities. Watson's greatest contribution to the behavioristic movement was not his hypothetical constructs, but his repudiation of introspection as a scientific method, his pioneer work in the study of the behavior of newborn infants , and this statement in the forceful and courageous preface to his 1919 book Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist: