Tolmen Stuart biography

He switched to psychology and, under the leadership of Edwin Holt, began to work in Harvard, where he received the title of Doctor of Philosophy in the year. In the summer of the year, Tolmen studied in Germany along with a specialist in gestalt psychology Kurt Koffka. In the last year of graduate school, studying the traditional, in the spirit of Titchens, structural psychology, Tolmen got acquainted with Watson’s behaviorism.

Being a graduate student, Tolmen questioned the scientific utility of the introduct. In his autobiography, written in the year, he wrote that Watson’s behaviorism became a “powerful stimulus and support” for him. After defending the dissertation, Tolmen became a teacher of the North-Western University in Evanston, Illinois, and in the year he moved to the Berkeley University in California.

It was at the University of Berkeley, when he taught a course of comparative psychology and conducted research on rating, he felt dissatisfaction with Watson behaviorism and began to develop his own approach. His career at the University of Berkeley was interrupted by the beginning of World War II, during which he worked at the OSS strategic service, which later became the precursor of the CIA.

From for a year, he contributed to the opposition movement directed against the introduction of an oath of allegiance to the state in California. The purposeful behaviorism is targeted behaviorism - the system of Tolmen, which combines an objective study of behavior, taking into account purposefulness or orientation to achieve a specific goal. The main provisions of Tolmen’s teachings are presented in his work “Purposeful behavior in animals and humans” Purposive Behavior in Animal and Men.

His system of targeted behaviorism may at first glance seem like a curious mixture of two contradictory concepts: goal and behavior. The attribution of a certain goal of the body implies the attracting of the concept of consciousness - that is, the mentalist concept that is not a place in the psychology of behavior. Nevertheless, Tolmen made it clear that he remains a consistent behaviorist in his methodology and in the subject of research.

He has encouraged psychologists to accept the concept of consciousness. Like Watson, he rejected the introduction and was not interested in any implied internal experiences of organisms, which were not available for objective observation. The purposefulness of behavior, Tolmen wrote, can be determined in terms of objective behaviorism, without references to the introduction or assumptions that the body “feels” due to one or another experience.

It was quite obvious to him that any behavior was aimed at achieving a specific goal. For example, the cat tries to get out of the “problem drawer”, the rat is mastered in the maze, and the child learns to play the piano.

As Tolmen himself said, the behavior "smells of goal." Any behavior is aimed at achieving some goal, at the development of some means. The rat repeatedly and persistently passes the labyrinth, each time making fewer mistakes to get to the exit faster. In other words, the rat learns, and the very fact of training - for a rat or for a person - is an objective behavioral evidence of the presence of a goal.

Note that Tolmen deals only with the reactions of organisms. All its measurements were carried out in terms of changes in response, as the functions of learning. And these measurements provide objective information. Watson behaviorism criticized the attribution of any purpose to any type of behavior, since the purpose of behavior implies the assumption of consciousness.

Tolmen answered this that it makes no difference for him whether the body has consciousness or does not possess. The experiences of consciousness associated with targeted behavior, if they even take place, have no effect on the behavioral reactions of the body. Tolmen was engaged in exclusively pronounced reactions.