Experience and Theory as Determinants of Attitudes toward Mental Representation: The Case of Knight Dunlap and the Vanishing Images of J.B. Watson.
Nigel J.T. Thomas
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Source: http://cogprints.org/3750/1/dun-wat-cp.htm
Whatever happened to Watson's images?
The iconophobia, which as we have noted above reigned among psychologists for over 40 years of this century, can I believe be shown to be in part the historical result of confusions of the type we have just been discussing. The psychological "paradigm" that particularly sustained American iconophobia was, of course, behaviorism in its various forms, and the standard-bearer of behaviorism, J. B. Watson, regarded the notion of "the 'centrally aroused sensation' or 'image' " as "the most serious obstacle" to the establishment of a thoroughgoing behaviorism, of a "truly scientific" psychology (Watson, 1914, pp. 16ff.; 1913, pp. 24lff., my emphasis). The persistent belief that images exist, and that thinking is carried out in the brain rather than in the muscles is castigated by Watson as an unscientific, "mediaeval" (Watson, 1930, pp. 5-6) hangover from religious belief (Watson, 1913, p. 424; 1914, p. 20). (As noted by Cohen, 1979, chap. 1, Watson had reacted strongly against a strict religious upbringing.) Of course, Watson did not impose his own personal iconophobic feelings, nor even the behaviorist methodology, on the rest of the psychological community. Larger forces were at work (see O'Donnell, 1985). However, Watson is a pivotal figure, and the development of his own opinions about imagery probably provides the ideal case study of the influences upon attitudes to imagery.
Watson's iconophobia was not a thing of half measures. In a lengthy footnote appended to his famous "behaviorist manifesto," Watson asserts:
There is need of questioning more and more the existence of what psychology calls imagery . . . . I should throw out imagery altogether and attempt to show that practically all natural thought goes on in terms of sensori-motor processes in the larynx. (Watson, 1913/1961, p. 816n.)
He was looking forward to establishing a psychology which would "never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery, and the like" (Watson, 1913/1961, p. 808), and he attempted, with considerable consistency, to carry through this program. People's reports of imagery, he asserted, were "sheer bunk" (Watson, 1928, p. 76). By 1919 he was even attempting to explain common hallucinations, such as the "snakes" frequently "seen" by sufferers from delirium tremens in terms of inappropriate responses to "sinuous shadows on the wall" or other such external or peripheral stimuli (Watson, 1919, pp. 111-112).
Watson appears from all this to have been about as clear an example of the experiential iconophobe as you are likely to find committing himself to print. It would be very tempting to conclude that he was simply one of that 10%-12% of non- or very poor imagers - one who erected this personal quirk into an entire psychological system. However, it seems very strange that such a natural iconophobe should have been moved to enter what was, when he entered it, a systematically iconophilic profession. And consider the following enigmatic remarks, also from the long note to "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" (Watson 1913/1961, p. 816n.):
Until a few years ago I had thought that centrally aroused visual sensations [i.e., images] were as clear as those peripherally aroused. I had never accredited myself with any other kind. However, closer examination leads me to deny in my own case the presence of imagery in the Galtonian sense.6 The whole doctrine of the centrally aroused image is, I believe, at present on a very insecure foundation.
Note also that for his first 2 years as professor at Johns Hopkins University (from autumn 1908), Watson taught experimental psychology from the manuals of the arch-iconophile Titchener (Watson, 1936, pp. 276-277), and he acknowledged a great intellectual debt to Titchener at that time (see his letter of 1908 to Titchener, quoted by Larson & Sullivan, 1976, p. 339). Moreover, Knight Dunlap, his junior colleague at Johns Hopkins, testifies that Watson still accepted "the old doctrine of 'images' " in his early days there. When Dunlap expressed skepticism about images, Watson insisted on their reality, saying that he himself made very effectual use of visual imagery when designing his apparatus. It looks as if Watson originally thought that he had good mental images - even "as clear as those peripherally aroused" (Watson, 1913/196 1, p. 816n.). It was only as his theoretical views developed that he decided that he (and everybody else) had none at all.7
Of course, Watson did not bring about the behaviorist revolution singlehandedly in 1913. Furthermore, he was by no means the first of his contemporaries to question the prevailing iconophilia. Külpe and his students at Würzburg had raised doubts about the functional significance of imagery in thinking (see Humphrey, 1951), and the ensuing "imageless thought controversy" seems to have played a significant part in throwing the whole introspective psychological method into question. (Watson, in his 1913 "manifesto;' was able to play very effectively on how such disagreements could degenerate into quite irresolvable wrangles about the introspective competence of different "observers" [Watson, 1913/1961, p. 804 & n.]). But there also seem to have been rising doubts about the whole conception of mind which sustained the notion of mental "pictures-in-the-head." In 1914, Lovejoy8 wrote that over the previous ten years9 it had "become the fashion with not a few philosophers" to question the conception of "consciousness" that figured so largely in the introspective psychology. Furthermore:
The fate of "consciousness" has been shared by several other ancient notions which once made up its retinue. The existence of sensations, of images, of ideas, of mental states, of "subjective appearances", and the possibility of "introspection", have all been denied by recent philosophical and psychological iconoclasts. (Lovejoy, 1914, p. 42)
Lovejoy was concerned to resist this "iconoclasm"; Watson embraced it, and by cutting it free from the philosophical subtleties with which he had long since grown impatient,10 he probably did more to ensure its (temporary) triumph than anybody else.
Watson tells us (1924, p. viii; 1936, p. 276) that he had been toying since 1903 or 1904 with the idea of applying to humans the sorts of methods, the observation of behavior, that he had already applied so successfully to the study of learning in rats (Watson, 1903), and which he soon went on to apply to other animals (see Cohen, 1979, chaps. 2-3; Watson, 1910). However, there seems to be no good reason to think that he was part of the "iconoclastic" movement when he arrived at Hopkins in 1908. Rather, as we have seen, the reverse seems to have been the case. Dunlap, however, who was already established at Hopkins when Watson arrived, claims to have been an open "iconoclast," criticizing "the conventional doctrine of 'mental images'" in private, since about 1907 (Dunlap, 1914, p. 25). In 1912, the year at whose end Watson "came out" as a behaviorist, Dunlap had published a paper criticizing the then current conceptions of introspection (Dunlap, 1912a) and a textbook (Dunlap, 1912b) in which he expressed some of his "iconoclastic" views on imagery, albeit in an appropriately toned-down form (he did not express himself freely on the subject in print until 1914). Although he never embraced behaviorism (Dunlap, 1932, p. 46), Dunlap was nevertheless sympathetic to Watson's early tentative ideas about applying the methods of the "behavior men," the animal psychologists, to humans, and he seems to have been the first person to give Watson any real encouragement on this (Cohen, 1979, p. 64). His views on imagery appear to have been crucial. By 1910, and perhaps before, the only real factor preventing Watson from conceiving of the study of behavior as embracing the whole of psychology seems to have been "the problem of the higher thought processes" (Burnham, 1968, p. 150). Thought was supposed to be carried on primarily in imagery, and imagery was not behavior (see Watson, 1913, p. 421; 1914, pp. 16ff.). Watson acknowledges that it was Dunlap's "iconoclastic" arguments which eventually led him to the view that images could simply be dropped altogether and replaced by "implicit" muscular responses (Watson, 1924, p. ix). Dunlap's own account of what happened after Watson arrived at Hopkins, which Watson unreservedly endorses as "true" (Watson, 1936, p. 277), is as follows:
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