POSTIVIST

ORIENTATION TO
PSYCHOLOGY
 INTRODUCTION
• The marvelous achievements of the experimental natural sciences prompted the
emergence of a materialistic metaphysical doctrine, positivism.
• Positivism teaches that the task of science is exclusively the description and
interpretation of sensory experience. It rejects the introspection of psychology as well
as all historical disciplines.
• Auguste Comte, by no means the founder of positivism but merely the inventor of its
name, suggested as a substitute for the traditional methods of dealing with human
action a new branch of science, sociology.

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 INTRODUCTION
• Positivism focuses the idea in which people believe the goal of knowledge is only to

describe what people experience, and that science should only study that which is

measurable.

• Anything that is not measurable or experienced is irrelevant.

• Failure of the positivist program led to the rise of neopositivist movement.

• The two main varieties of the neopositivistic assault on economics are panphysicalism and

behaviorism.

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 INTRODUCTION
• Panphysicalism teaches that the procedures of physics are the only scientific method of all

branches of science.

• It denies that any essential differences exist between the natural sciences and the sciences

of human action. This denial lies behind the panphysicalists' slogan "unified science."

• Sense experience, which conveys to man his information about physical events, provides

him also with all information about the behavior of his fellow men.

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 Overview of Behaviourism
● Behaviorism proposes to study human behavior

according to the methods developed by animal and

infant psychology.

● It seeks to investigate reflexes and instincts,

automatisms and unconscious reactions.

● The focus of the school of behaviourism was the need

for objectivity.

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 Development of Behaviourism

• The recognition of the need for greater objectivity in psychology has a long history.
• It can be traced to Descartes, whose mechanistic explanations for the operations of
the human body were among the initial steps toward an objective science.
• More important in the history of objectivism is the French philosopher Auguste
Comte, founder of the movement known as positivism that emphasized positive
knowledge (facts), the truth of which was not debatable.
• According to Comte, the only valid knowledge is that which is social in nature and
objectively observable. These criteria rule out introspection, which depends on a
private individual consciousness and cannot be objectively observed.

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 Why the rise of Behaviourism?

• Structuralism and functionalism played important roles in the early development of

twentieth-century psychology. Because each viewpoint provided a systematic approach
to the field, they were considered competing schools of psychology.
• The year 1913 brought a declaration of war, a deliberate break with both of these
positions. A protest movement began that was intended to destroy the older points of
view.
• Its leader wanted no modification of the past, and no compromise with it. This
revolutionary movement was called behaviorism, and it was promoted by the 35-year-old
American psychologist John B. Watson.

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 Contributions of John B Watson
• The basic tenets of Watson’s behaviorism were simple, direct, and bold.

• Scientific psychology should only with observable behavioral acts that could be

described objectively in terms such as “stimulus” and “response.”

• Watson’s psychology rejected all mentalistic concepts and terms. Words such as

“image,” “sensation,” “mind,” and “consciousness”—which had been carried over

from the days of mental philosophy—were meaningless for a science of behavior, so

far as Watson was concerned.

• Watson was particularly vehement in rejecting the concept of consciousness.

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 Contributions of John B Watson

• Watson was particularly vehement in rejecting the concept of consciousness.

• He believed that consciousness had absolutely no value for behavioral

psychology.

• Further, he said that consciousness had “never been seen, touched, smelled,

tasted, or moved. It is a plain assumption just as unprovable as the old concept of

the soul”.

• Therefore, introspection, which assumed the existence of conscious processes,

was irrelevant and of no use to a science of behavior.

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 Contributions of John B Watson

• The system of behavioral psychology that was proposed by Watson was with the

philosophical tradition of objectivism and mechanism, animal psychology, and

functional psychology.

• Watson offered a clear statement of the relationship between animal psychology

and behaviorism: animal psychology, which grew out of evolutionary theory and

led to attempts to demonstrate the existence of mind in lower organisms and the

continuity between animal and human minds.

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 Edward Thorndike
• Edward Lee Thorndike was one of the first

American psychologists to receive all of his

education in the United States.

• His interest in psychology was awakened, as it

was for so many others, when he read William

James’s The Principles of Psychology

• He had planned to conduct his research with

children as subjects, but this was forbidden.

• When Thorndike learned that he could not study

children, he chose chicks instead. 11

 Edward Thorndike

• Thorndike went to New York, taking with him his two best-trained chicks.

• He continued his animal research at Columbia, working with cats and dogs in puzzle

boxes of his own design.

• He was awarded his doctoral degree in 1898. His dissertation, “Animal Intelligence: An

Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals,” was published in the

Psychological Review and enjoys the distinction of being the first psychology doctoral

dissertation to use animal subjects

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 Contributions of Edward Thorndike

• One of the most important researchers in the development of animal psychology,

Thorndike fashioned a mechanistic, objective learning theory that focused on overt

behavior.

• He did not interpret learning subjectively but rather in terms of concrete connections

between stimuli and responses, although he did permit some reference to

consciousness and mental processes.

• Thorndike called his experimental approach to the study of association connectionism.

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 ASSOCIATIONISM
The notion of combining or compounding ideas and the reverse notion of analyzing them

marks the beginning of the mental-chemistry approach to the problem of association. In

this view, simple ideas may be linked or associated to form complex ideas.

Association is an early name for the process psychologists call “learning.” The reduction

or analysis of mental life into simple ideas or elements, and the association of these

elements to form complex ideas, became central to the new scientific psychology.

Just as clocks and other mechanisms could be disassembled—reduced to their

component parts—and reassembled to form a complex machine, so could human ideas.

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 ASSOCIATIONISM
Locke treated the mind as though it behaved in accordance with the laws of the natural

universe.

The basic particles or atoms of the mental world are the simple ideas, conceptually

analogous to the atoms of matter in the mechanistic universe of Galileo and Newton.

These elements of the mind cannot be broken down into simpler elements, but, like their

counterparts in the material world, they can combine, or be associated, to form more

complex structures.

Thus, association theory was a significant step in the direction of considering the mind,

like the body, to be a machine.

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 Contributions of Edward Thorndike

He wrote that if he were to analyze the human mind he would find

“connections of varying strength between

(a) situations, elements of situations, and compounds of situations, and

(b) responses, readinesses to respond, facilitations, inhibitions, and directions of

responses.

If all these could be completely inventoried, telling what the man would think and do and

what would satisfy and annoy him, in every conceivable situation, it seems to me that

nothing would be left out. … Learning is connecting. The mind is man’s connection-

system.”
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• This position was a direct extension of the older philosophical notion of

association, but with one significant difference. Instead of talking about

associations or connections between ideas, Thorndike was dealing with

connections between objectively verifiable situations and responses.

• He argued that behavior must be reduced to its simplest elements: the

stimulus–response units. He shared with the structuralists and the British

empiricists a mechanistic, analytical, and atomistic point of view. Stimulus–

response units are the elements of behavior (not of consciousness) and are the

building blocks from which more complex behaviors are compounded.

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Laws of Learning

Thorndike formally presented his ideas about the stamping in or stamping out of a response

tendency as the law of effect:

Any act which in a given situation produces satisfaction becomes associated with that

situation, so that when the situation recurs the act is more likely than before to recur also.

Conversely, any act which in a given situation produces discomfort becomes disassociated

from that situation, so that when the situation recurs the act is less likely than before to recur.

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Laws of Learning

A companion law—the law of exercise or the law of use and disuse—states that any

response made in a particular situation becomes associated with that situation. The

more the response is used in the situation, the more strongly it becomes associated

with it.

Conversely, prolonged disuse of the response tends to weaken the association. In

other words, simply repeating a response in a given situation tends to strengthen that

response.

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Laws of Learning

Further research persuaded Thorndike that the reward consequences of a response (a situation

that produces satisfaction) are more effective than mere repetition of the response.

Through an extensive research program using human subjects, Thorndike later reexamined the

law of effect.

The results revealed that rewarding a response did indeed strengthen it, but punishing a

response did not produce a comparable negative effect. He revised his views to place greater

emphasis on reward than on punishment.

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 IVAN PETROVITCH PAVLOV

● Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov, the first son of a priest in Ryazan in central Russia where he

attended a church school and theological seminary.
● In 1870 he abandoned his theological studies to enter the University of St. Petersburg,
where he studied chemistry and physiology.
● After receiving the M.D. at the Imperial Medical Academy in St. Petersburg, he studied
during 1884–86 in Germany under the direction of the cardiovascular
physiologist Carl Ludwig (in Leipzig) and the gastrointestinal physiologist Rudolf
Heidenhain (in Breslau).

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 IVAN PETROVITCH PAVLOV
● During the years 1890–1900 especially, and to a lesser
extent until about 1930, Pavlov studied
the secretory activity of digestion.
● By observing irregularities of secretions in normal
unanesthetized animals, Pavlov was led to formulate the
laws of the conditioned reflex, a subject that occupied
his attention from about 1898 until 1930. 

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 CONTRIBUTIONS OF IVAN PAVLOV
Ivan Pavlov’s work on learning helped to shift from associationism to objective and quantifiable
physiological events such as glandular secretions and muscular movements. As a result, Pavlov’s work
provided Watson with a method for studying behavior and for attempting to control and modify it.
During his distinguished career Pavlov worked on three major problems:
● The first concerned the function of the nerves of the heart.
● The second involved the primary digestive glands. His brilliant research on digestion won
worldwide recognition and the 1904 Nobel Prize.
● His third research area, for which he occupies a prominent place in the history of psychology, was
the study of conditioned reflexes.

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 CONTRIBUTIONS OF IVAN PAVLOV
CONDITIONED REFLEX
● Reflexes that are conditional or dependent on the formation of an association or connection
between stimulus and response.
● The notion of conditioned reflexes originated, as so many scientific breakthroughs did, with an
accidental discovery.
● In working on the digestive glands in dogs, Pavlov used the method of surgical exposure to permit
digestive secretions to be collected outside the body where they could be observed, measured, and
recorded (Pavlov, 1927/1960).

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 CONTRIBUTIONS OF IVAN PAVLOV

CONDITIONED REFLEX

One aspect of this work dealt with the function of saliva, which the dogs secreted involuntarily whenever

food was placed in their mouths.

Pavlov noticed that sometimes saliva flowed even before the food was given. The dogs salivated at the

sight of the food or at the sound of the footsteps of the man who regularly fed them.

The unlearned response of salivation somehow had become connected with, or conditioned to, stimuli

previously associated with receiving food.

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 CONTRIBUTIONS OF IVAN PAVLOV
PSYCHIC REFLEX

● Psychic reflexes, as Pavlov first called them, were aroused in the laboratory dogs by stimuli other

than the original one (i.e., the food).

● Pavlov reasoned that this reaction occurred because these other stimuli (such as the sight and

sounds of the attendant) had so often been related to feeding.

● Pavlov focused initially on the mentalistic experiences of his laboratory animals. We can see this

viewpoint in the term “psychic reflexes,” his original term for conditioned reflexes. He wrote about

the animals’ desires, judgment, and will, interpreting the animals’ mental events in subjective and

human terms.

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 CONTRIBUTIONS OF IVAN PAVLOV
EXPERIMENTS OF CONDITIONED REFLEXES
● Pavlov’s first experiments with dogs were simple. He held a piece of bread in his hand and showed
it to the dog before giving it to the animal to eat. In time, the dog began to salivate as soon as it saw
the bread.
● The dog’s response of salivating when food is placed in its mouth is a natural reflexive response of
the digestive system; no learning is necessary for it to occur. Pavlov called this an innate or
unconditioned reflex.
● Salivating at the sight of food, however, is not reflexive but must be learned. Pavlov now called this
response a conditional reflex because it was conditional or dependent on the dog’s forming an
association or connection between the sight of the food and the subsequent eating of it.

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 CONTRIBUTIONS OF IVAN PAVLOV

A CONDITIONING EXPERIMENT
● A typical conditioning experiment in Pavlov’s laboratory. The conditioned stimulus (a light, let us
say) is presented; in this example, we will say that the light is switched on.
● Immediately, the experimenter presents the unconditioned stimulus—the food.
● After a number of pairings of the light and the food, the animal will salivate at the sight of the light
alone.
● An association or bond has been formed between the light and the food, and the animal has become
conditioned to respond to the conditioned stimulus

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 CONTRIBUTIONS OF IVAN PAVLOV

A CONDITIONING EXPERIMENT

● This conditioning or learning will not occur unless the light is followed by the food a sufficient

number of times.

● Thus, reinforcement (actually being fed) is necessary for learning to take place.

● It is important to note that Pavlov’s experimental program extended over a longer time period and

involved more people than any research effort since Wundt.

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