Critical Expressivism- Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom, 2014a

Wilson
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental
branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the
prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential
part of its methods … the behaviorist … recognizes no
dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man,
with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of
the behaviorists’ total scheme of investigation. (1913, p. 158)
Everything about Titchner’s psychology is dismissed here in one fell paragraph:
introspection has no place; behavior is all that matters; and since both
man and beast exhibit behavior, the study of animal behavior belongs with the
study of human behavior.
To psychologists who believed in the study of mind or consciousness, two
major assumptions made the study of animals irrelevant to the study of humans.
First, animal mind or consciousness, if it existed at all, was too different from
human consciousness to be of use. Second, introspection was the only method
of studying mind; introspection involved speaking or writing, and animals
couldn’t speak or write. (They could, however, as Yerkes would try to prove, take
multiple-choice tests!) But in rejecting consciousness, Watson disposes of the
first major assumption separating human and animal study. In rejecting introspection
as a method, he disposes of the second: animals (or humans, for that
matter!) need not talk at all to be of interest to psychologists, who should only
be concerned with behavior.
In redirecting psychology’s gaze from mind to behavior, Watson didn’t just
open the door to animal studies—which is why he met Yerkes, who studied primates—but
he also redefined psychology’s application and goals. In Titchener’s
psychology, an understanding of an individual’s thoughts and feelings had a
crucial role to play in ethics, and he went so far as to assert, “Psychology is the
foundation of ethics” (1898, p. 296). Titchener saw ethics as general laws that
must be determined from the particular “facts of life” (1898, p. 296). He recognized
that these facts of life are different in different societies, not to mention
different for different individuals, so ethics must be sensitive to these differences.
One way to assure such sensitivity was to use the insights of psychology—drawn
from the experience of individuals—as an ethical check on the laws of ethics.
The same concern for individual differences in relation to generalizable laws
is evident in Titchener’s discussion of the application of psychology to pedagogy:
The problem of pedagogy is to lay down rules or norms of
education … the abstract “child” of psychology does not exist
for education, not “the child,” but real children, Katie Jones
and Tommy Smith. Psychology cannot deal with Jones-ness
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