Not so Clever Hans

Jerry Fodor

  • If a Lion Could Talk: How Animals Think by Stephen Budiansky
    Weidenfeld, 219 pp, £20.00, December 1998, ISBN 0 297 81932 1

Maybe, some day, we’ll have serious and well-confirmed theories about how minds work; theories that actually explain interesting things. Historians of science will then be able to consider psychology as just another episode in the long struggle. If so, I bet they’re struck by how often in 20th-century behavioural science methodological nuttiness got in the way. Why, they’ll wonder, did psychology feel compelled to embark on its investigations by tying one hand behind its back and using the other to shoot itself in the foot? Didn’t problems about the mind seem hard enough to bear without adding a freight of procedural inhibitions?

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