ABSTRACT
Of course, as we all know, a central plank of behaviorism was the view that "the time seems to have come when psychology must abandon all reference to consciousness" (Watson, 1914). Why should psychology have been dominated for so many years by this essentially counterintuitive position? It is worth contrasting the way by which Watson rejected preceding scientific frameworks that used, among other approaches, the introspective method with the arguments of the polemicists of 40 years later who attacked behaviorism itself. Watson devoted only a single unscholarly paragraph to the problems of the introspective method as applied in the imageless thought controversy. He then argues that because the body-mind problem is intractable, it should be eliminated from science and that "there is no reason why appeal to consciousness should ever be made in any of the truly scientific fields [of psychology such as] experimental pedagogy, psychology of drugs, psychology of advertising" (Watson, 1914, p. 13). That was the end of his argument, what little there was of it. By contrast, when behaviorism itself was confronted in the 1950s and 1960s the rejection was based on detailed critiques both of Hullian grand theory (Koch, 1954, MacCorquodale & Meehl, 1954) and of Skinnerian theory by Chomsky (1959) (see also Taylor, 1964). Because an intellectual assessment of the empirical disputes of the imageless thought controversy and of the introspectionist method is entirely pos-
sible, although it leads to rather different conclusions from Watson's (see e.g., Humphrey, 1951; Ericsson & Simon, 1985), Watson's failure to confront his predecessors intellectually suggests that the behaviorist position on consciousness should be viewed as ideology rather than science. Indeed this would also fit with behaviorism's having very considerable popularity outside psychology as well as within it, as it did particularly in the 1920s (Burnham, 1968) (see also Schwartz, 1986).
