Behavior is a science

Behavior is a science

Behaviorism is a psychological movement rather than a philosophy of mind. The basic premise of radical behaviorism is that the study of behavior should be a natural science, such as chemistry or physics, without any reference to hypothetical inner states of organisms as causes for their behavior.

Less radical varieties are unconcerned with philosophical positions on internal, mental and subjective experience.

Behaviorism Cafe

Behaviorism Cafe

The primary tenet of behaviorism, as expressed in the writings of John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and others, is that psychology should concern itself with the observable behavior of people and animals, not with unobservable events that take place in their minds.

The behaviorist school of thought maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as thoughts and beliefs.

Pavlov/Freud

Pavlov/Freud

Cognitive Revolution

The cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences. It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research. The relevant areas of interchange were the combination of psychology, anthropology, and linguistics with approaches developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience.

A key idea in cognitive psychology was that by studying and developing successful functions in artificial intelligence and computer science, it becomes possible to make testable inferences about human mental processes. This has been called the reverse-engineering approach.

By the early 1970s according to some accounts, the cognitive movement had all but "routed" behaviorism as a psychological paradigm, and by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant research line of inquiry in most psychology research fields.

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