XXII.

"A second aspect of behaviorism was anti-mentalism. And what I mean by this is the behaviorists were obsessed with the idea of doing science and they felt, largely in reaction to Freud,that claims about internal mental states like desires, wishes, goals, emotions and so on, are unscientific. These invisible, vague things can never form the basis of a serious science. And so, the behaviorist manifesto would then be to develop a science without anything that's unobservable and instead use notions like stimulus and response and reinforcement and punishment and environment that refer to real world and tangible events. Finally, behaviorists believed there were no interesting differences across species. A behaviorist might admit that a human can do things that a rat or pigeon couldn't but a behaviorist might just say, "Look. Those are just general associative powers that differ" or they may even deny it. They might say, "Humans and rats aren't different at all. It's just humans tend to live in a richer environment than rats." From that standpoint, from that theoretical standpoint, comes a methodological approach which is, if they're all the same then you could study human learning by studying nonhuman animals. And that's a lot of what they did."

© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007