[rusk]

Behaviorism was the dominant psychological theory of the 20th century. Specifically it tried to downplay introspection, and personal experience and reduce behavior to learned "reflexes". This was debunked quite a while ago, 1970s or so, by Chomsky and others so it sounds absurd to us. but it was the dominant thinking in psychology (at least in the US) up until that point.

The founder of 20th century behaviourism, Watson, specifically stated /"Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness"/

Watson's fundamentalist view lasted about as long as took for it to be tried out on a generation of people and then debunked.

The undisputed champion of behaviorism was B.F. Skinner who wrote /"what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the observer's own body"/

Skinner was so successful in the experimental field that his school of thought pretty much ran away with things.

Until it tried to take on language, and ran into Chomsky: https://crackerbarrel.weebly.com/

It's kind of absurd really looking back, and I'm certain that although it dominated academic thought I doubt it was taken as seriously on the ground. But Academia is where a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting is done and so, yeah perhaps the more nuanced sides of psychology got neglected as "namby pamby" for a few decades but man was the behaviorist outlook brutally effective. In fact it still is the quickest and cheapest way (if not exactly personally satisfying) way to deal with personal psychological conditions.

[mach1ne]

Your link is interesting, but I don't like your take on somehow this argument between behaviorism and Chomsky being solved and the former being now "ridiculous looking back". This is just the dance of theories, and as a matter of fact, Chomsky has lately started to look like he is quite wrong assessing that a genetic component is required for language acquisition.

https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/007180

[rusk]

> Chomsky has lately started to look like he is quite wrong

Such is the march of science. It's okay to be wrong as long as you were falsifiable to begin with.

[nairboon]

> Specifically it tried to downplay introspection, and personal experience and reduce behavior to learned "reflexes". This was debunked quite a while ago, 1970s or so, by Chomsky and others so it sounds absurd to us.

Just because this gets repeated again and again, and is even in some textbooks, doesn't make it true.

Skinner wasn't ever "debunked". The point of Skinner was, in the early half of the last century, that we cannot reliably and objectively "introspect" into the brain. Remember that stuff like MRI was invented 10 years after Chomsky supposedly "debunked" Skinner and fMRI only in the early 90s.

With the advanced methods of today, it is very easy to label the work of scientists a century ago as absurd. But they didn't have all these modern measurement technology back then.

[rusk]

Skinner was never "debunked" - as I said, behavioral methods are still used extensively and effectively. However in a historical context behaviorism was the dominant theory for a good 50 years or so. The adage about "every problem looks like a nail when you've a hammer". The issue is not about Skinner, more to do with mainstream academic thought, which being human is absolutely prone to its indulgences.

I don't want to get into an ideological firefight. I was more responding to GP assertion that GGP's statement was based "on nothing". I was just providing the substance upon which the original statement was probably based.

[FrustratedMonky]

Perhaps that is the point, lets not toss IIT out the window because we have not yet figured out a good way to measure it.

Were early theories of mind 'pseudoscience' because we didn't yet have MRI's to make them testable?