The behaviorists, particularly John B. Watson in the United States and then, most famously, B. F. Skinner, made a science based on stimulus and response: food pellets, bells, electric shocks; salivation, lever pressing, maze running. Watson said that the whole purpose of psychology was to predict what responses would follow a given stimulus and what stimuli could produce a given behavior. Between stimulus and response lay a black box, known to be composed of sense organs, neural pathways, and motor functions, but fundamentally off limits. In effect, the behaviorists were saying yet again that
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