ONE Introduction The history of psychology in the twentieth century is a story of the divorce and remarriage of psychology and philosophy. ...

Robert Cummins has recently used the program of Clark Hull to illustrate the effects of logical positivist epistemology upon psychological theory. On Cummins's account, Hull's theory is best understood as a functional analysis, rather than a nomological subsumption. Hull's commitment to the logical positivist view of explanation is said to have blinded him to this aspect of this theory, and thus restricted its scope. We will argue that this interpretation of Hull's epistemology, though common, is mistaken. Hull's epistemological views were (...) developed independently of, and in considerable contrast to, the principles of logical positivism. (shrink)

This book is about the eminent behavioral scientist B. F. Skinner, the American culture in which he lived and worked, and the behaviorist movement that played a leading role in American psychological and social thought during the twentieth century. From a base of research on laboratory animals in the 1930s, Skinner built a committed and influential following as well as a utopian movement for social reform. His radical ideas attracted much public attention and generated heated controversy. By the mid-1970s, he (...) had become the most widely recognized scientist in America, surpassing even Margaret Mead and Linus Pauling. Yet Skinner himself was an unassuming family man from a modest middle-class background, a machine-shop tinkerer whose tastes ran to English and French literature. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and historical styles appropriate to the evidence, the authors assembled in this volume examine Skinner's remarkable rise to prominence in the wider context of America's intellectual, cultural, and social history. (shrink)

The neobehaviorist Clark L. Hull and his disciple Kenneth Spence shared in common many views on the nature of science and the role of theories in psychology. However, a telling exchange in their correspondence of the early 1940s reveals a disagreement over the nature of intervening variables in behavior theory. Spence urged Hull to abandon his interpretations of intervening variables in terms of physiological models in favor of positivistic, purely mathematical interpretations that conflicted with Hull's mechanistic explanatory aims and ontological (...) commitment to materialism. This dispute is set against the background of similar disputes in physics, and the origins of Hull's and Spence's divergent views on theoretical explanation are described. (shrink)