IN THE BEGINNING …

Abstract

I stumbled across systematic psychology almost by accident.I had entered the graduate program at Columbia, intending to specialize in social and clinical psychology.But to make ends meet (and master some of the funda- mentals more securely while doing so), I had accepted a stipend of $37.50 per month to serve as the "reader" in the introductory course for male undergraduates (Columbia College).The first two semesters were fairly uneventful intellectually, but in the spring of 1945 Fred S. Keller returned from his Morse Code research with the U.S. Army Signal Corps and resumed his teaching duties, which included that course.When he handed out a mim- eographed outline that proposed a "consid- eration [of] principles derived from the analysis of human and animal behavior by the ex- perimental method," I realized that something was up.Soon he was into such esoteric matters as the static laws of the reflex, Type S and Type R conditioning, extinction, generalization, stimulus discrimination, response dif- ferentiation, chaining, and their application to verbal behavior and thinking.By then I was beginning my fourth semester (plus two summers) of graduate study.That was just enough training for me to have made two disturbing observations: First, in R. S. Woodworth's laboratory course I had dis- covered that even in "experimental psychology" many of the best known theories yielded no predictions sufficiently specific to be subjected to empirical test.If they made no predictions, they could not be very useful.Second, the different areas within psychology seemed to be completely compartmentalized,

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