RE: When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience?
May 13, 2021 at 5:46 pm
(This post was last modified: May 13, 2021 at 5:59 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
I'm not sure that behavioral psychologists exist anymore; behaviorism is as outdated of an approach as Freudianism. Perhaps experimental psychologists are who you have in mind?
Behaviorism offered a very narrow way of answering questions. This is perhaps most notable in the way it would reframe words: Memory became learning, perception became discrimination, language became verbal behavior. But as Noam Chomsky (one of the key players in ending behaviorism) reportedly said, defining psychology as the science of behavior is like defining physics as the science of meter reading. In a general sense, every psychologist is still a "behavioral" psychologist, because behavior is all we can observe. The difference being that behavior is now used as a meter for measuring cognition and mental states.
Behaviorism offered a very narrow way of answering questions. This is perhaps most notable in the way it would reframe words: Memory became learning, perception became discrimination, language became verbal behavior. But as Noam Chomsky (one of the key players in ending behaviorism) reportedly said, defining psychology as the science of behavior is like defining physics as the science of meter reading. In a general sense, every psychologist is still a "behavioral" psychologist, because behavior is all we can observe. The difference being that behavior is now used as a meter for measuring cognition and mental states.
