ABSTRACT
While behaviorism perhaps can claim to rival functionalism as the most peculiarly American of the schools, some of its predecessors were from Europe rather than the United States. John B. Watson’s Behaviorism contained the famous passage that shows how extremely environmentalistic his view was. Conditioning was the key to the understanding of behavior, and its potential was considered limitless. Watson’s Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist has a very systematic outline. First it considers the problems and scope of psychology and psychological methods; then it follows the traditional, typical structuralist sequence, which behaviorism inherited from functionalism and functionalism from structuralism. The fundamental tenet of all behaviorism is strict objectivity; one must study overt behavior and leave out consciousness. The behaviorism of the early part of the latter half of the 20th century could perhaps be characterized as kind of physicalism, in part influenced by the logical positivist movement in philosophy, which in turn arose out of the critical empiricist tradition.
