ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century psychology has had a strong prejudice against abstraction, that is, against the view that the world is understood by means of rules that transcend the perception of a particular physical stimulus or the comprehension of a domain of related events. In the United States, the prejudice has been bound up with behaviorism and its successor positions. Behaviorists were determined to find the equivalent of the reflex arc in physiology – stimulus-response linkages that could be described with precision by a physical description of the stimulus, the response, and the conditions of their co-occurrence during learning. So complete was their dedication to such physical description that they felt confident that the study of animals could substitute for the study of humans in building a complete theory of behavior.
