https://www-cambridge-org.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/core/books/making-sense/part-3-structure/901712E84314688FE04A85697A7E6668#TXN-fn-87" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">* in the United States. Watson became a standard-bearer of what came to be called the behaviorist approach with his 1913 manifesto in Psychological Review, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it,”⁸⁸ then his 1914 book, Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology.⁸⁹

Watson does not just define an approach to psychology that neutrally sits alongside others. He says that other major approaches are scientifically unsound. Studying the stuff of the mind – complex mental states and consciousness – via methods of “introspection” is too self-referential. How can one use the mind to work out what is happening inside the mind without coming to self-confirming conclusions? (One could make parallel arguments about studying the internal conceptual architectures of language systems – from structuralism to Analytical Philosophy.)

Instead, Watson proposes that psychologists study the reactions of animals and humans to their environments, the things they manifestly do and the environmental reasons they do them. This, instead of speculation about the workings of mind. “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science … [I]ts starting point [is] the observable fact that all organisms, man and animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment … Certain stimuli lead organisms to make … responses … [G]iven the responses, the stimuli can be predicted; given the stimuli, the responses can be predicted.”⁹⁰

On this basis, and contrary to the commonly held views at the time about innately unequal intelligence, Watson concluded that a change in environmental conditions can produce a change in social outcome:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.⁹¹

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⁸⁸ John B. Watson, 1913, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review 20:158–77.

⁸⁹ John B. Watson, 1914, Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.

⁹⁰ Ibid., pp. 1, 7.

⁹¹ John B. Watson, 1925, Behaviorism, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, p. 82.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 286–287. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

John Watson’s “Behavior” §MS3.1.2c