Empiricism and Behaviorism

the turn of the twentieth century, the field of Psychology found itself in a war between two contending theoretical perspectives: Gestalt psychology versus Behaviorism. With its roots within the United States, behaviorists in America were developing a theory that believed psychology should not be concerned with the mind or with human consciousness. Instead, behavior and the actions of humans would be the foremost concern of psychologists. Across the Atlantic, Gestalt psychology emerged by placing its criticism upon the methodology of introspection, especially by ways of disparaging behaviorism. Although the two theories originated on separate continents, their opposing ideas were brought together after World War II and continued to battle each other for almost half a century.

An American psychologist, by the name of John B. Watson, is historically known for “selling” the idea of Behaviorism to other American psychologists during the 1900s. Watson insisted that “psychology had failed to become an undisputed natural science because it was concerned with conscious processes that were invisible, subjective, and incapable of precise definition” (Hunt, page256). Watson’s position on human behavior was that it could be explained entirely in terms of reflexes, stimulus-response associations, and the effects of multiple reinforcements upon a person--entirely excluding any mental processes. Watson’s work was based on the experiments of Ivan Pavlov, who had studied animals’ responses to conditioning. In Pavlov’s most well-known experiment, he rang a bell each time he presented the dogs with food. Every time the dogs would hear the bell, their initial response would be to salivate because they believed that food was going to be offered. Pavlov then rang the bell without bringing food, yet the dogs continued to salivate. In essence, the dogs had been “conditioned” to salivate at the sound of the bell. From this research, Pavlov concluded that humans also react to stimuli in the same way--a finding that Watson would later emphasize.

In modern psychology, behaviorism is most closely associated with B.F. Skinner, a man who molded his reputation by testing Watson’s theories in the laboratory. Skinner’s studies led him to believe that people operate on the environment to produce certain consequences, along with sim...

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...alist thought and empiricism primarily embodies the question of how humans gain knowledge.

In rationalism, pure reason is used in determining the fundamental natures of things and it is through human intuition and deductive reasoning that humans can obtain knowledge. Rationalists assert that there is an already existing innate knowledge, which is independent of experience, which God has bestowed upon every human individual. Descartes believed that, without innate ideas, no other information could be known. Furthermore, our innate knowledge is not learned through experience but is known intuitively through reason.

Empiricists criticized the rationalists at this point, arguing that the matters of the innate ideas were in fact learned through one’s previous experiences. They emphasized that large amounts of knowledge were gained through interaction with society—which occurs in early childhood and therefore cannot be considered intrinsic. Moreover, empiricists accentuate the notion that knowledge stem from internal mental experiences (such as emotion and self-reflection). For empiricists, facts precede theories and it is plausible for one to be a fair, unbiased observer of “facts”.