Two major experimental results emerged during the 1950's that were difficult to contain in stimulus-response terms. The first of these was the finding...that rats with hypothalmic lesions would overeat and become obese in ad libitum feeding situation but would starve if they had to work even slightly for their food... \r\n \r\n> The second major finding was that a large portion of output fibers from the spinal cord to muscles ended not on contractile tissue but on muscle receptors.¹ \r\n \r\nThis first finding seemed incompatible with any theory which didn't allow for some degree of intentionality, of 'effort.' Of course, behavioral science's reflex arc model has no room for such arcane concepts as 'effort.' The second finding showed that the central nervous system (including the brain) is able to send impulses that appear the same to the receptors as sensory input from the outer world. In other words, our senses have no idea whether they are perceiving the outer world, or perceiving a model of the outer world presented to them by the brain.\r\n \r\n¹ Karl Pribram, 'The Brain' in Millennium: Glimpses into the 21st Century

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We see this theme of lost certainty and splendor not only stated by all the religions of man throughout history, but also again and again even in nonreligious intellectual history. It is there from the reminiscence theory of the Platonic Dialogues, that everything new is really a recalling of a lost better world, all the way to Rousseau’s complaint of the corruption of natural man by the artificialities of civilization. And we see it also in the modern scientisms I have mentioned: in Marx’s assumption of a lost “social childhood of mankind where mankind unfolds in complete beauty,” so clearly stated in his earlier writings, an innocence corrupted by money, a paradise to be regained. Or in the Freudian emphasis on the deep-seatedness of neurosis in civilization and of dreadful primordial acts and wishes in both our racial and individual pasts; and by inference a previous innocence, quite unspecified, to which we return through psychoanalysis. Or in behaviorism, if less distinctly, in the undocumented faith that it is the chaotic reinforcements of development and the social process that must be controlled and ordered to return man to a quite unspecified ideal before these reinforcements had twisted his true nature awry. I therefore believe that these and many other movements of our time are in the great long picture of our civilizations related to the loss of an earlier organization of human natures. They are attempts to return to what is no longer there, like poets to their inexistent Muses, and as such they are characteristic of these transitional millennia in which we are embedded.

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What a startling doctrine [Behaviorism is]! But the really surpising thing is that, starting off almost as a flying whim, it grew into a movement that occupied center stage in psychology from about 1920 to 1960. The external reasons for the sustained triumph of such a peculiar position are both fascinating and complex. Psychology at the time was trying to wriggle out of philosophy into a separate academic discipline and used behaviorism to do so. The immediate adversary of behaviorism, Titchenerian introspectionism, was a pale and effete opponent, based as it was on a false anaology between consciousness and chemistry. The toppled idealism of World War I created a revolutionary age demanding new philosophies. The intriguing succeses of physics and general technology presented both a model and a means that seemed more compatible with behaviorism. The world was weary and wary of subjective thought and longed for objective fact. Anf in America objective fact was pragmatic fact. Behaviorism provided this in psychology. It allowed a new generation to sweep aside with one impatient gesture all the worn-out complexities of the problem of consciousness and its origin. We would turn over a new leaf. We would make a fresh start.\n\n And the fresh start was a success in one laboratory after another. But the single inherent reason for its success was not its truth, but its program. And what a truly vigorous and exciting program of research it was! with its gleaming stainless-steel promise of reducting all conduct to a handful of reflexes and conditional responses developed from them, of generalizing the spinal reflex terminology of stimulus and response and reinforcement to the puzzles of headed behavior and so seeming to solve them, of r unning rats through miles and miles of mazes into more fascinating mazes of objective theorems, and its pledge, its solemn pledge to reduce thought to muscle twitches and peronality to the woes of Little Albert. In all this there was a heady excitement that is difficult to relate at this remove. Complexity would be made simple, darkness would be made light, and philosophy would be a thing of the past.

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