Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 47 of 138
Psychology redefined as the science of behavior
Methodological behaviorism was a movement in psychology. It attempted to put psychology on a respectable scientific footing, along with other natural sciences, by insisting that psychology should study only objectively observable behavior. The “laws” that such a discipline was supposed to discover were laws that would correlate the input stimulus to the organism with the output response behavior; and for this reason, behaviorist psychology was sometimes called “stimulus-response” psychology. The behaviorists were so influential that for a time they even succeeded in changing the definition of psychology. Psychology was no longer the “science of the mind” but the “science of human behavior.” This view was called “methodological behaviorism” because it proposed a method in psychology rather than a substantive claim about the existence or nonexistence of the mind. The real objection to dualism, the methodological behaviorists claimed, was not that it postulates nonexistent entities, but rather that it is scientifically irrelevant. Scientific claims have to be objectively testable, and the only objectively testable claims about the human mind are claims about human behavior.