Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

Behaviorism was an attempt to make psychology a completely
rigorous science, and to do that, unobservable entities would
the behaviorists, we cannot speak of the mind at all, much less
unconscious, empirically unavailable regions within it. We can talk
about only what we can see and measure: stimulus and response.
This movement grew out of a philosophical school of the time
known as .
The logical positivists tried to formulate what they called a
: Only entities for which we
have evidence would be allowed to be considered meaningful.
What is evidence? It is a sense perception that gives you good
reason to believe it exists. Seeing is not only believing, but it is
essential for having any meaningful beliefs whatsoever.
If physicists had to give up absolute space and the luminiferous
aether, then psychology would have to give up the mind, the id,
The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had won the Nobel Prize
for his work showing that he could teach dogs to salivate at the
sound of a bell. Such operant conditioning opened the door for this
new psychology, in which the rigorous connections of stimulus and
response could be measured and associated.
expanding view that psychology was the study of consciousness.
Consciousness is inaccessible, if it even exists at all. Therefore,
the study of psychology should be merely the study of
human behavior.
Watson’s work was picked up by B. F. Skinner, who was
limited psychology to the study of how people behave when
confronted with particular stimuli. He closely studied how various
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