>This was the state of affairs throughout most of the 20th century, and it set neuroscience back decades.
This doesn't seem to be based on anything.
This doesn't seem to be based on anything.
The founder of 20th century behaviourism, Watson, specifically stated /"Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness"/
Watson's fundamentalist view lasted about as long as took for it to be tried out on a generation of people and then debunked.
The undisputed champion of behaviorism was B.F. Skinner who wrote /"what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the observer's own body"/
Skinner was so successful in the experimental field that his school of thought pretty much ran away with things.
Until it tried to take on language, and ran into Chomsky: https://crackerbarrel.weebly.com/
It's kind of absurd really looking back, and I'm certain that although it dominated academic thought I doubt it was taken as seriously on the ground. But Academia is where a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting is done and so, yeah perhaps the more nuanced sides of psychology got neglected as "namby pamby" for a few decades but man was the behaviorist outlook brutally effective. In fact it still is the quickest and cheapest way (if not exactly personally satisfying) way to deal with personal psychological conditions.
Such is the march of science. It's okay to be wrong as long as you were falsifiable to begin with.
Just because this gets repeated again and again, and is even in some textbooks, doesn't make it true.
Skinner wasn't ever "debunked". The point of Skinner was, in the early half of the last century, that we cannot reliably and objectively "introspect" into the brain. Remember that stuff like MRI was invented 10 years after Chomsky supposedly "debunked" Skinner and fMRI only in the early 90s.
With the advanced methods of today, it is very easy to label the work of scientists a century ago as absurd. But they didn't have all these modern measurement technology back then.
Were early theories of mind 'pseudoscience' because we didn't yet have MRI's to make them testable?
I don't want to get into an ideological firefight. I was more responding to GP assertion that GGP's statement was based "on nothing". I was just providing the substance upon which the original statement was probably based.