Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction

We saw in the previous chapter that the behaviourists, in their different ways, sought to change the focus of psychology from the study of putatively internal mental states to the study of overt behaviour. In particular, mental states were said to be subjective and private and therefore not amenable to objective scientific study whereas behaviour was amenable to objective scientific study. Thorndike argued that mental states were, in any case, only of interest because they are intimately connected with behaviour; if they had nothing to do with how we act then they would be mere epiphenomena. Watson was to take this further: he argued that there were no mental states as traditionally conceived, only behaviour. Cartesian philosophy viewed people as mechanical bodies that were connected with thinking and feeling souls. Watson rejected the existence of the soul or mind and reconceived the human being in a purely materialistic way as only consisting of the mechanical body. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it, materialism of this sort was “dualism with one term suppressed” (Taylor 1975, p. 81).