Eliezer, to steal one of your phrases: You know, you’re right.
That said, I was already quite willing to call Watson mistaken. He was mistaken about other things—in particular, he latched onto classical conditioning and treated it as the One Simple Principle That Can Explain All Behavior—so it’s not terrifically surprising. One gets the impression that he was primarily interested in making a name for himself.
Amusingly, Skinner gets most of the flak for the sort of ridiculosity that Watson espoused, even though he explicitly stated in his monographs that internal mental life exists (in particular, he stated that it is a type of behavior, not an explanation for behavior).
Eliezer, to steal one of your phrases: You know, you’re right.
That said, I was already quite willing to call Watson mistaken. He was mistaken about other things—in particular, he latched onto classical conditioning and treated it as the One Simple Principle That Can Explain All Behavior—so it’s not terrifically surprising. One gets the impression that he was primarily interested in making a name for himself.
Amusingly, Skinner gets most of the flak for the sort of ridiculosity that Watson espoused, even though he explicitly stated in his monographs that internal mental life exists (in particular, he stated that it is a type of behavior, not an explanation for behavior).