Watson: The thinking man's behaviourist

The first World War disrupted the proposal to hold an international congress of philosophy in England in 1915. When the philosophers got together again it was at a meeting in Oxford in 1920 jointly organized by the Mind Association, the Aristotelian Society and the British Psychological Society; invitations were extended to delegates from America and France. The roll call of luminaries was impressive: it included Bertrand Russell (who, in fact, failed to appear) Henri Bergson, James Ward, Sir James Frazier, Frederic Bartlett, Henry Head, and even the philosopher–statesmen, A. J. Balfour and Lord Haldane (Hoernlé, 1921). J. B. Watson, at that time a professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, was greatly flattered to be invited to take part in a symposium on his behaviouristic theory of thinking and was determined to attend. When his university failed to come up with the fare he asserted (in jest, one supposes) that if necessary ‘I am going to try to work my passage either as an engineer’s assistant : : : or a husky freight mover’ (Cohen, 1979). That he failed to make it in the end was for quite other reasons. The scandal surrounding his affair with a graduate student and the separation from his wife, events that came to a head in the spring and summer of 1920, put paid to his plans. None the less his views, as described in his 1919 book Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviourist, were discussed at the congress and criticized by Bartlett and his wife (E. M. Smith), by G. H. Thomson (subsequently renowned for his work in mental testing), by T. H. Pear (the first professor of psychology at Manchester), and by A. Robinson (professor of Logic and Psychology at Durham). Watson’s response was published alongside the comments in this journal in 1920. That Watson’s theorizing should be the object of such sustained and serious attention may seem surprising to psychologists of later generations. In so far as he is discussed at all, it is almost as a figure of fun – a proponent of self-evidently absurd notions. As I recall, two of his proposals were held up for particular derision. One was the suggestion that perception should be studied by means of conditioning procedures (why do this when human subjects can be instructed to respond verbally with ‘red’, or ‘green’, or whatever?); the other was his suggestion that thinking consists of subvocal