Behaviorism and Logical Positivism: A Reassessment of the Alliance

This is the story of the unresolved tension between two dominant intellectual traditions of 20th century America: the behaviorist view of science as an ongoing human activity of cognitive adaptation, and the logical positivist view of science as a logically-ordered, verifiable corpus of knowledge. Smith traces the development of behaviorism during its heyday in 1925-1945, and challenges the supposition that the behaviorist movement in psychology was strongly influenced by logical positivist philosophy. He examines the thought of three major neobehaviorists--Edward C. Tolman, Clark L. Hull, and B.F Skinner--and their interactions with logical positivists, and concludes that despite these interactions, the alliance was a limited one and that important discrepancies remained. ISBN 0-8047-1301-4: $42.50.