Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction

In the previous chapter we saw how pragmatism emphasised the connection of ideas with their practical consequences and how functionalism, exemplified in the work of Dewey, applied this approach to psychology. For the functionalists, mental states had to be understood in terms of the functions that they performed, and these functions were a matter of allowing an organism to survive in its environment. The idea of a pure realm of consciousness, completely divorced from the practical demands of action, was rejected; mental states could only be studied validly in connection with the behaviour to which they were intrinsically connected. This strain of thought was taken to a more radical conclusion by behaviourism. To the most radical of the behaviourists – and both J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, two of the thinkers to be discussed in this chapter, described themselves as radical behaviourists – functionalism had not gone far enough. It was not simply the case, as the functionalists had argued, that one cannot talk about mental states without also talking about behaviour, but that so-called ‘mental states’ were nothing more than types of behaviour. Before examining the ideas of Watson and Skinner, however, we turn to one of the important precursors of behaviourism, E. L. Thorndike.