As British and American idealism waned, new realisms displaced them. The common background of these new realisms emphasized the problem of the external world and the mind-body problem, as bequeathed by Reid, Hamilton, and Mill. During this same period, academics on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that the natural sciences were making great strides. Responses varied. In the United States, philosophical response focused particularly on functional psychology and Darwinian adaptedness. This article examines differing versions of that response in William (...) James and Roy Wood Sellars. James viewed the mind as a “fighter for ends.” His neutral monism, by taming the mind-body problem and the problem of the external world, provided a secure metaphysics of mind as functional activity. In contrast, Sellars ’s scientific realism endorsed physical reality but was not mechanistic or reductionist. His critical realism and evolutionary naturalism offered novel metaphysical and epistemological positions in comparison with other American and British realisms. James and Sellars are distinguished from British philosophy in 1890–1918 in the types of realism they endorsed and in their success at introducing Darwinian evolutionary considerations and functional psychology into mainstream philosophy. (shrink)

High-level cognitions can enter consciousness through the activation of certain action sets and the presentation of external stimuli (“set-based entry,” for short). Set-based entry arises in a manner that is involuntary and systematic. In the Reflexive Imagery Task, for example, subjects are presented with visual objects and instructed to not think of the names of the objects. Involuntary subvocalizations arise on roughly 80% of the trials. We examined whether or not set-based entry can also occur in the case of involuntary (...) counting. Subjects in Experiment 1A were instructed to not count the number of objects presented in an array. Involuntary counting arose on a high proportion of the trials (a mean proportion of ∼0.90) for stimulus arrays having 2–5 objects, and such counting arose less frequently across trials when the array consisted of 6–10 objects (a mean proportion of ∼0.21). The data from Experiment 1B revealed that, when people choose to perform Set X, they also experience thoughts about an unselected Set (Set Y ). Subjects were trained on one set (e.g., to “color name”) and then, when presented with stimuli, were given the choice to perform the trained set or a novel set. Consistent with theories proposing that the conscious contents represent several potential action plans, subjects were equally likely to experience set-related imagery or set-unrelated imagery. Our findings regarding set-based entry are relevant to many subfields of psychology and neuroscience (e.g., the study of high-level mental processes, attention, imagery, and action control). (shrink)

The operationalization of scienti?c notions is instrumental in enabling experimental evidence to bear on scienti?c propositions. Conceptual change should thus translate into operationalization change. This article describes some important experimental works in the psychology of concepts since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is argued that since the early days of this ?eld, psy- chologists.

The central claim of this paper is that radical behaviorism and cognitive psychology can both make important contributions to an experimental analysis of a cognitive skill such as memory performance. Though they currently differ in what constitutes an explanation of many phenomena, behaviorists and cognitive psychologists share interests in such human activities as problem solving and memory. We show how the behavioral approach may apply to one case that seems to epitomize cognition—the dramatic improvement in the memory span performance of (...) one individual on a task often used by cognitive psychologists to assess short-term memory. After 230 hours of practice, ability to recall random digits improved from a span of 7 digits to a span of 80. Although a detailed account of the mechanisms that mediated such improvement has been given, we show that the acquisition of such exceptional memory skill can also be explained within the framework of behavior analysis. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century psychology became the study of "behavior." This article reviews developments within animal psychology, functional psychology, and American society and culture that help explain how a term rarely used in the first years of the century became not only an accepted scientific concept but even, for many, an all-encompassing label for the entire subject matter of the discipline. The subsequent conceptual and linguistic activity of John B. Watson, Edward C. Tolman, Clark L. Hull, and B.F. Skinner, (...) as they attempted to explain "behavior" throughout the course of the twentieth century, is then discussed. Finally, the article suggests the need for greater conceptual and linguistic diversity in psychology. In this last regard, reference is made to cognition and consciousness, to William James and John Dewey, and to the fact that prediction and control might not be the most relevant aims of contemporary psychology. (shrink)