[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Introducing the two aspects allowed him to discuss the issue of the differing significance ofactions that are physically identical (his example was signing a checkas opposed to signing an I.O.U.).Social status itself was produced byspecific and efficiency factors.The former specify one s social role, thelatter one s status or power.He then broke down the efficiency factorinto variables, claiming that an individual could be defined in terms of The Birth of Psychological Behaviorism | 45his or her relative ranking on all relevant variables.In a footnote heexplicated that point:Much of the criticism that has been directed against mental testing arisesfrom the failure to see that mental tests are actually social tests; that themental test score actually gives the individual s social status in the specificactivity that is being tested.Mental age, fundamentally, means social age.The criticism that mental testers do not know what they are testing merely means that no scientific classification has been developed for normaladult individuals which is based on the overt reactions characteristic of agiven group.the difficulty with the definition of intelligence means thatat present it is impossible to separate the social from the neural factor in theanalysis of the overt reaction.61In that passage Weiss showed a remarkably acute understanding ofthe role mental testing was to play in America from the 1920s to the1960s.He recognized that the testers were committed to workingwithin the confines of a given set of power and status relationshipsand that their task was to predict effective working roles for individuals in society.A Theoretical Basis of Human Behavior was the greatest and mostcomprehensive achievement of the behaviorism of the 1920s.Weissexplicated behaviorist principles fully, especially in the two key areasof language and thought.He also gave careful consideration to criticisms of behaviorism.Compared to Watson s Behaviorism, his is amuch more thorough and scholarly book.But he is a sadly neglectedfigure whose ideas are seldom discussed.Three reasons can be advanced for that neglect.One is Weiss s earlydeath, which was preceded by several years of incapacitating illness.Furthermore, his death came at a low point in behaviorism s fortunes.The second is his personality.Weiss was a modest, rather retiring manwho did little to publicize his ideas.Here, he sharply contrasts withWatson.In particular, Weiss made no attempt to popularize his views.But perhaps the major reason for the neglect of Weiss lay in what wasseen as his extreme reductionism.A coyness about reductionism (as inHull s case) or a successful circuit of what psychologists saw as anepistemological morass (as in Skinner s case) was an essential route tosuccess.Even though Jacob Robert Kantor continued publishing until 1984and even though the school he founded (interbehavioral psychology) 46 | The Birth of Psychological Behaviorismhas many living adherents, I have decided to include an account of histheory in this chapter.62 Like the other psychological behaviorists whofirst published in the 1920s, Kantor did not develop a research-oriented theory.Thus he stood apart from the neobehaviorists, despitethe similarities between his theory and Skinner s.Besides refusing tocreate a research-oriented theory, Kantor rejected operationism anddid not accept the reality of the concept of learning, even if he had intellectual (but not institutional) affiliations with functionalism.Kantor created his mature theory very early in his career.He resembled his behaviorist confreres because its inspiration was negativerather than positive.He was an anti-mentalist, argued against bothmind/body and brain/body dualism, and assigned instincts a fleetingrole in the psychological economy.He also resembled the other behaviorists in his acceptance of Watson s aspirations to create an over-arching theory of behavior, but he could not accept Watson s meansof realizing them.In particular, by taking an antimechanist stanceKantor rapidly distanced himself from Watson.Kantor was also distinctive in rejecting some of the constitutivetenets of the behaviorist school.For him, physics was not the masteror model science; instead, he espoused a scientific pluralism, a plural-ism that he applied to psychology as a whole (he claimed that certainconcepts and data-gathering techniques were unique to psychology)and within psychology (he claimed that the various areas within psychology had fundamentally distinct features)
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]