ABSTRACT
People want different things. There cannot be any general method of getting what you want; or general instruction in how to get what you want. On the other hand, Mowrer seems to think there can be a general theory of learning what to do to get what you want. This seems to me to make his account of learning pretty fictitious. He is describing a response mechanism which he has constructed, and which only here and there resembles a human being. But when it comes to learning theory, as Mowrer writes about it, then that terminology is a way of trying to justify pseudo-science and nothing more. A mans understanding may grow with the decisions he makes. But you cannot give an account of this unless you consider the sort of reasons that enter into them. You have to understand the mans life too. But not in the sense in which an organism has a life.
