The Active Organism in Theoretical Behaviorism

摘要

Contemporary psychology appears to contain a number of coexisting scientific revolutions. One paradigm, theoretical behaviorism, has rested on the premise of a passive organism. But a paradigm holds more than ideology. Each of our coexisting paradigms appears to offer: (1) an empirical ‘window’; (2) a set of primitive and defined ‘reals’ observable through the window; (3) a scientific club; (4) an empirical dialectic, and (5) a social construction of reality. Considering all the levels of operation of theoretical behaviorism, we may well argue that the learning-theory movement promoted scientific understanding of the active organism which, in an ideological sense, it tended