110 Marie-Cécile Bertau and John L. Roberts
have continued to underpin much of what passes under the rubric of
psychological science.
2.2. The Private, Invisible Mind
Across the historical trajectory of behavior as a category relating to the
visible effects of learning, several theoretical dimensions may be discerned:
neutral observation, mind as conjecture (the problem of other minds),
positivistic description, and laws framed through causality working
through external, material events. Because the researcher’s participation
would problematize the spectatorial form of observation borrowed from
the Newtonian paradigm in physical sciences, any attention given to the
intentional, shared, social, and linguistic experiences of learning remains
within the implicit ground of these studies. Such an ideal of neutral
observation, thus, requires a bracketing of other minds (as analogous to the
seemingly speechless lives of non-human animals) and of the institutional
context of the experiment itself: the laboratory as a peculiar, non-
naturalistic site with the (passive) subject participant regulated and
observed by the researcher controlling the situation. As Pavlov
meticulously catalogued the salivation of dogs in response to a conditioned
stimulus such the ringing of a bell, or Watson noticed the cries of fear from
Little Albert in his conditioned response to the presentation of a harmless
white rat, mind was increasingly depicted as unnecessary to a rigorous
program of observation and of determining physical events in the world.
For Skinner, whose operant conditioning brought the organism’s own
actions into view (such as a rat’s pressing of a lever for food, or a student’s
study for a passing grade) mind was expressed as epiphenomenal (i.e.,
mind was a by-product of the organism’s conditioned learning).
Experiences of will, desire, intention were ancillary or collateral to the
conditions responsible for causing behavior, which – invoking
psychology’s historically Darwinian entanglements – merely had survival
value.