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.36 At the same time, the neobehavioristsknew that the forces determining action (especially dispositions)could not themselves become the objects of direct study.Hence theirpromulgation of operationism.Operationism provides the major connecting thread between neobehaviorism and cognitivism.Today s cognitive psychologists are as deeply committed to operationism, andthus to positivism, as the neobehaviorists were.As operationists, cognitive psychologists deploy fictional entities in exactly the same wayas their forebears.Even though computer modeling has replaced themaze or the Skinner box as the analogy of choice, the former plays thesame obfuscatory role as the latter.As Kendler realized, the worm inthe neobehaviorist apple was its failure to discover genuine causal entities.Those committed to operationism can never overcome thatproblem.The fixation on physicalist analogies satisfies their longingfor explanations with some solid basis but, like a neurotic symptom,does no more than provide them with secondary gain while simultaneously blocking the path to solutions to their deep-seated problems.Both behaviorism and neobehaviorism were modernist in that theiradherents strove to express timeless, universal, and all-inclusivetruths.In the arts, modernist discourse was limited to the explicationand application of unquestioned principles.37 In exactly the same way,as Sigmund Koch has commented, behaviorism constituted psychology s philosophy of science.38 The form of the typical journal articlein an experimental journal during neobehaviorism s heyday embodiedthat worldview; the bulk of the article consisted of the method and theresults sections, giving the impression that only technical questions required discussion.39 Like modernism, behaviorism and neobehaviorism were programmatic (rather than substantive) and hierarchical(that is, their leaders had hero status in the profession, and most professionals were content to follow in their footsteps).Neobehaviorismwas cool. Publicly it expressed itself in a highly formal, neological,neomathematical language in which not a hint of emotion was to befound.Privately matters were different.The available archives arefilled not just with emotions like joy, exaltation, foreboding, anger,and hatred but with strong intimations that Hull, Spence, and theircolleagues felt the call of destiny.In that respect, neobehaviorists resembled abstract expressionist painters of the New York School; anAlex Colville or an early Frank Stella painting manifests detachment, 192 | Faithful unto This Lastself-confidence, and self-subsistence.There is no hint of the longingfor power, fame, and glory that drove the abstract expressionists intotheir studios.40Starting in the mid-1960s, the values, goals, and aspirations of theentire psychological profession changed insensibly but deeply andpervasively.Tough-minded, foundationist, positivist experimentalpsychology has endured but is no longer treated as the inescapablebasis of all psychological knowledge.It has become a mere specialityin a practically oriented, pluralist profession.Neobehaviorism s dominance did not ensure its impregnability.Today it is a terra incognita.Contemporary psychologists no longer know the names of the leading neobehaviorists, let alone understand their concepts or followtheir research practices.Behaviorism unified the psychological profession, but at a heavycost.By fusing American pragmatic, instrumental positivism with logical positivism, the behaviorist theorists of the 1950s provided psychologists with a language that was value-free both epistemologicallyand morally.By using that language to interpret data gathered byseemingly theory-neutral techniques, psychologists could conduct re-search in every realm of human life.Furthermore, by unknowinglypledging their alliance to methodological behaviorism, American psychologists hoped to avoid all prior theoretical commitments.Theproblem with value- and theory-neutrality is that it inhibits discussionof the grounds for one s beliefs.In the human sciences, where we mustfollow to its uttermost limits the discussion of what it means to be aknowing subject actively embedded in a rich and historically stratifiedsocial context, any form of positivism rapidly places crippling limitations on the enterprise.The limitations of methodological behavior-ism impose a technological treatment of mind on empirical and theoretical outcomes before any specific investigations have begun
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