Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Mentalism (psychology)" in English language version.
The stimulus-response (S-R) psychology of Watson (1913) is ultimately about behavior and is definitely mechanistic. The behavior-analytic approach of Skinner (1938, 1953) is not ultimately about behavior, and it is definitely not mechanistic. As operant psychologists, we are not concerned with identifying stimuli and responses that bear some fixed relationship to one another and that can be used as building blocks to explain complex behavior patterns. As operant psychologists, we are concerned, first and foremost, with the functions of behavior or, in lay terms, with purpose (Lee, 1988; Morris, 1993; Skinner, 1974), even though we do not analyze and use the term purpose as a lay person would. [...] Functionalism would have been a better term for what we are about but, unfortunately, that term has already been used to describe a school of psychology quite different from ours.
The stimulus-response (S-R) psychology of Watson (1913) is ultimately about behavior and is definitely mechanistic. The behavior-analytic approach of Skinner (1938, 1953) is not ultimately about behavior, and it is definitely not mechanistic. As operant psychologists, we are not concerned with identifying stimuli and responses that bear some fixed relationship to one another and that can be used as building blocks to explain complex behavior patterns. As operant psychologists, we are concerned, first and foremost, with the functions of behavior or, in lay terms, with purpose (Lee, 1988; Morris, 1993; Skinner, 1974), even though we do not analyze and use the term purpose as a lay person would. [...] Functionalism would have been a better term for what we are about but, unfortunately, that term has already been used to describe a school of psychology quite different from ours.
The stimulus-response (S-R) psychology of Watson (1913) is ultimately about behavior and is definitely mechanistic. The behavior-analytic approach of Skinner (1938, 1953) is not ultimately about behavior, and it is definitely not mechanistic. As operant psychologists, we are not concerned with identifying stimuli and responses that bear some fixed relationship to one another and that can be used as building blocks to explain complex behavior patterns. As operant psychologists, we are concerned, first and foremost, with the functions of behavior or, in lay terms, with purpose (Lee, 1988; Morris, 1993; Skinner, 1974), even though we do not analyze and use the term purpose as a lay person would. [...] Functionalism would have been a better term for what we are about but, unfortunately, that term has already been used to describe a school of psychology quite different from ours.
In that sense, the behaviorists were right: as a method, introspection provides a shaky ground for a science of psychology, because no amount of introspection will tell us how the mind works. However, as a measure, introspection still constitutes the perfect, indeed the only, platform on which to build a science of consciousness, because it supplies a crucial half of the equation—namely, how subjects feel about some experience (however wrong they are about the ground truth). To attain a scientific understanding of consciousness, we cognitive neuroscientists "just" have to determine the other half of the equation: Which objective neurobiological events systematically underlie a person's subjective experience?
