ABSTRACT
The puzzlement generated by the methodological differences between Gestalt psychology and behaviorism, plus a stint as a clinical psychologist during World War II, encouraged a life-long interest in the philosophy of science that focused on issues directly relevant to efforts as an empiricist and theorist. If victory and defeat were to be assigned, the verdict would have to be that both Tolman’s cognitive theory and Hull-Spence neo-behavioristic formulation lost. Their conceptions, in spite of valiant attempts at ad hoc theorizing, proved incapable of interpreting all the latent learning phenomena in a rigorous manner. Victory was achieved indirectly by Estes’ mathematical modeling of learning phenomena and Skinner’s atheoretical operant approach. Psychology is burdened with a scrap heap of empirical results which have contributed nothing to our field except to increase number of publications and to justify academic promotions. The reversal-extradimensional comparison was important theoretically because Spence’s discrimination-learning model, based upon stimulus-response conditioning principles, predicted an extra-dimensional shift should be easier.
