''In my mind's eye":
introspectionism, detectivism, and the basis of authoritative self-knowledge.
In short, we were told that
introspectionism was seen to work briefly as a methodology in psychology until the "imageless thought controversy".
At the dawn of the twentieth century, American experimental psychology was largely concerned with devising scientific methods to crack the code of consciousness, itself guilelessly described by psychology historian Daniel Robinson as that thing which "every man, woman and child know to be true during every waking hour of daily life." (13) But as the century progressed, instead of a focus evermore inward on this quest, many forces from both within psychology and outside the discipline combined to inexorably supplant
introspectionism and mentalism with behaviorism as the dominant school of psychological thought.
Itself a reaction against late-nineteenth
introspectionism (Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Wundt, William James), behaviorism (John B.
As a result of many methodological conflicts in which different laboratories kept failing to reproduce each others' results,
introspectionism declined and the more experimentally promising paradigm of behaviourism took over as a leading trend in psychology.
It was developed in reaction to
introspectionism, a doctrine that states psychology must be based essentially on data derived from introspection.
My aim is simply to gesture in the direction of those accounts of belief which are offered when, recoiling from Cartesian
introspectionism, we insist that psychological notions have as their central role a causal/explanatory task vis-a-vis behaviour and we stress that psychological states are attributed on the basis of observed patterns and dispositions in behaviour.
Tolman was unhappy with Watson's stimulus-response psychology then in vogue and proposed a new behaviourism that would come somewhere between
introspectionism and the newly dominant stimulus-response psychology.
One suspects that his view was closer to
introspectionism, at least in practice.
This helped to spawn an industry of
introspectionism that was ultimately self-destructive.