Behaviourism

What it is

The founding statement is Watson's paper Psychology as the behaviorist views it, published in 1913. The attribution is standard but is carried here at medium confidence, because the only record traceable from this vault is a 1948 reprint rather than the original publication.

The programme's discipline was its appeal. If a claim could not be cashed out in observable behaviour it was not a claim psychology should make, which cleared out a great deal of introspective theorising and produced a rigorous experimental literature on learning.

In effect

In this library behaviourism appears mostly as the losing side of one argument. B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour attempted to treat language as learned behaviour like any other. Noam Chomsky's review of it, with universal grammar behind it, is the usual marker for the point at which the programme stopped being the default position in psychology.

That is not the whole of the exchange, and this vault keeps both sides. Kenneth MacCorquodale and David Palmer are recorded as the replies from the behaviourist side.

One part of the programme survived intact and is still in commercial use. Variable reward, the schedule of reinforcement work, is the piece of behaviourism the attention industry kept.

What it does not say

It does not say behaviourism was refuted by experiment. A research programme is not the kind of thing that fails a replication. It lost its position as the default framework through an argument about what psychology should count as explanation.

It does not say the behaviourist side conceded. The replies from MacCorquodale and Palmer are part of the record and are held here alongside Chomsky's review.

It does not rest on research in the sense this site usually means. It is a school of thought, and nothing on this page is a finding.

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