ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on elderly debate between 'behaviourism' and 'mentalism', as represented respectively by Skinner and Chomsky. It looks at the concept of 'patient-centredness', beginning with the sophisticated analysis by Mead and Bowers, one of a series of important papers that they undertook around this topic. The chapter describes the role of qualitative research in the discourse community, and the view of the relationship between language and thought embedded in it. In the early years of the twentieth century, psychologists began to recognise how amorphous, open-ended and subjective their terminology was. One of the central aims of behaviourism was to rigorously use precise terms for phenomena which were observable pieces of behaviour - and by extension to eliminate from enquiry what was not observable, and therefore what had to be considered unscientific. The scientist's view, of course, is that language is there to describe experimental work as dispassionately as possible.