Description
INTRODUCTION
It is customary to introduce psychology text- books by setting forth the author's idea of what psychology should be about; as often as not a homily on the philosophy of science is thrown in for good measure. I feel compelled to main- tain this tradition, but, as there is nothing very original about my ideas on psychology and as I am quite unschooled in the philosophy of science, I shall be brief.
Like most other psychologists, especially those with physiological leanings, I aim to advance understanding of the behavior of living things, to answer the question "What makes this organism behave the way it does?" The method that I have adopted (and that is visible from time to time in this book) is to treat the question as if it had been asked about some man-made object like a radio or a motor car. I am interested in organisms as pieces of ma- chinery, and I would like to know much the same things about them that I once wanted to know about the gadgets that I saw around me: first, what happens when the controls or inputs are manipulated and, a little later, how it hap- pens.
It is the hope (and usually the belief) of physiological psychologists that behavior is not the product of an irreducible something called "consciousness," in the sense that the behavior of masses toward one another is a product of the (so far) irreducible force of gravity. If that hope remains unfulfilled, our understanding of behavior will forever be restricted to sets of probability formulas describing behavior that may occur in given sets of circumstances.
