Give two reasons why Watson rejected the idea of mind and consciousness?
Answers
Answer:
while rejecting the mine and consciousness Watson could not escape
Answer:
John Watson, in 1913, delivered his Behaviorist Manifesto and that, traditionally, has been
marked as the beginning of behaviorism. There were, in fact, other antecedent developments
during the preceding decade. The newly emerging comparative psychology was developing
objective methods and an objective subject matter, e.g., Loeb was explaining observed
behavior in terms of tropisms or involuntary, automatic reactions to stimuli (Schultz and
Schultz, 1992). In 1911 Meyer published The fundamental laws of human behavior in which
a fully behaviorist account of human action was put forward (Wozniak, 2002). The call for a
science of behavior was being put forward by a number of people during the 1890s and 1900s
(Hunt, 1993). In Watson’s pronouncements, however, these advocates of an objective
approach to the explanation of human endeavors were drawn together. Behaviorism, over the
next couple of decades, would gain prominence. The mental testing movement and Gestalt
psychology would provide stiff opposition during the 1920s (Jones and Elcock, 2001) but by
the time the 1930s had arrived behaviorism would dominate experimental psychology. Long-
standing theoretical issues would be dismissed, e.g., the mind‒body problem, and theoretical
concerns would be shunted aside, if not banished altogether. Topics such as personality,
thought, language, emotional development, and motor skills would be reinterpreted in terms
of conditioning processes (Hilgard, 1987) and the study of mental phenomena would be
considered unscientific.
Watson focused on objective data and emphasized the prediction and control of behavior as
the aim of scientific psychology.
The interest of the behaviorist in man’s doings is more than the interest of the
spectator—he wants to control man’s reactions as physical scientists want to control
and manipulate other natural phenomena. It is the business of behavioristic
psychology to be able to predict and to control human activity. To do this it must
gather scientific data by experimental methods. Only then can the trained behaviorist
predict, given the stimulus, what reaction will take place; or, given the reaction, state
what the situation or stimulus is that has caused the reaction. (Watson, 1924/1966, p.
11)
To that end Watson rejected introspection as an acceptable, experimental methodology as
well as dismissing any explanation of behavior based upon mentalism. In doing that Watson
rejected consciousness as psychology’s subject matter.
Behaviorism, on the contrary, holds that the subject matter of human psychology is
the behavior of the human being. Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neither a
definite nor a usable concept. The behaviorist, who has been trained always as an
experimentalist, holds, further, that belief in the existence of consciousness goes back
to the ancient days of superstition and magic. (Watson, 1924/1966, p. 2)
Watson’s overriding interest was in the correlating of observable stimuli (ranging from an
environmental situation to an internal organic condition) and responses (anything done by an
organism) with each other. As Watson (1924/1966) put it, a problem has been explained
when the stimulus has been determined and the response has been identified.