Psychology Term Comparison of Three Term Paper

In their book, Progress in Modern Psychology: The Legacy of American Functionalism, Owens and Wagner (1992) suggest that contemporary psychology reflects a common vision of the naturalistic framework that was first inspired by William James and later refined by John Dewey, James Rowland Angell, Harvey Carr, among others. In this regard, Owens and Wagner argue that one of the key contributors to early functionalism was John Dewey. In sharp contrast to the aforementioned structuralist approach which would analyze a situation into its continent parts, Dewey believed that sensation and the subsequent motor responses could not be legitimately separated, but rather comprised a more linear analysis that provided a coordinated response to a given condition (Owens & Wagner, 1992).

Behaviorism.

According to Zuriff (1985), behaviorism is not the science of behavior (consisting of findings, principles, laws, and theories that are formulated through the study of behavior) but rather provides a conceptual framework in which the assumptions, values, and presuppositions that support this science can be analyzed more fully. While behaviorism is a comprehensive framework, there are four key components involved:

Behaviorism provides researchers with guidance concerning what types of psychological questions are worthy of pursuing and what methods and concepts are considered acceptable for this purpose;

Behaviorism, as a philosophy of mind, provides some assumptions concerning human nature as well as about the essential workings of the mind; and,

There are several important empirical assumptions involved in behaviorism such as assumptions about behaviors and their relationship to the environment, as well as a paradigm concerning the relative effectiveness of various methods in scientific research and theorizing (Zuriff, 1985).

According to this author, unlike the structuralism and functionalist approaches, the highly empirical hypotheses that comprise the background theory for behaviorism may be significantly different from one another.

References

Badcock, C.R. (1976). Laevi-Strauss: Structuralism and sociological theory. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Hawkes, T. (2003). Structuralism and semiotics. New York: Routledge.

Noble, C.E. (2006). Structuralism. In Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved July 15, 2006, from Encyclopedia Britannica Premium Service.

Owens, D.A., & Wagner, M. (1992). Progress in modern psychology: The legacy of American functionalism. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

Piaget, J. (1968). Structuralism (Le Structuralisme, Paris P.U.F., 1968) translated and edited by C. Maschler (London: Routledge &…