10 TITCHENER— " PSYCHOLOGY AS THE [April 3, 



In his second article Watson discusses two topics " which may 

 seem to many to be stumbhng-blocks in the way of a free passage 

 from structuraHsm to behaviorism." These topics, one sees with 

 some surprise, are Image and Affection : with surprise, I say, be- 

 cause we had already been prepared to ignore consciousness and to 

 eliminate introspection. It turns out, however, that the difficulty 

 is methodological. For if the physiological counterpart of the 

 image is cortical, then that mode of behavior which is to replace the 

 introspective psychology of thought lies inaccessible within the skull. 

 If " affection is a mental process distinct from cognition (sic)," then 

 affection cannot be an " organic sensory response." So image and 

 affection have to be dealt with ; and Watson deals with them faith- 

 fully; the existence of the image is denied outright, and affection is 

 carried willy-nilly to the periphery. 



Watson offers three bits of evidence for his contention that "there 

 are no centrally initiated processes." In the first place there are ex- 

 perimentalists who maintain that thought-processes may go on inde- 

 pendently of imagery. In the second place there is no objective 

 experimental evidence of the presence of different types of imagery. 

 In the third place even the structuralists seek to reduce higher 

 thought-processes to groups of obscure organic processes. I think 

 that these arguments can be met in terms almost as brief as their 

 statement. In the first place, the view that thought is independent 

 of imagery hardly constitutes a presumption that there are no central 

 processes of any kind. In the second place Fernald does not deny 

 type, but asserts that " an individual's type can be adequately indi- 

 cated only by an extended statement " f and that is the opinion now 

 generally held by psychologists. But let us suppose that types can- 

 not be indicated at all : by what logical inference may we pass from 

 this negative finding to the denial of imagery? In the third place 

 the reduction of thought to organic processes always implies in the 

 background a cortical set corresponding to the Aufgahe. Watson, 

 nevertheless, denies that there are centrally initiated processes, and 

 proposes to find the behaviorist equivalent of thought in movements, 



27 M. R. Fernald, " The Diagnosis of Mental Imagery," Psych. Monogr., 

 XIV., I, 1912, 128 ff. 



