Talk:Mentalism (psychology)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 9 January 2019 and 6 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Trenzalore96.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:54, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Many problems with recent edits

I have reverted recent edits made on April 30 and May 1, 2019. There are many problems with these edits, which I will briefly review below.

The changes to the lead unnecessarily separated the first sentence into two, making the lead both less precise and less concise. The changes to the lead also unwisely removed the important distinction between mechanistic behaviorism (e.g. Watson) and functionalistic behaviorism (e.g. Skinner) as discussed in the cited source by Edward Gary Carr.

The three new sections were not well integrated with the rest of the article: they merely repeated a history of "mentalism", basically repeating the history that already existed, producing an odd kind of content fork within the same article. More specifically, there were problems with the content of the added sections.

• The added "History" section started by claiming "Mentalism originated as a branch of philosophy pioneered by leaders such as..." but this is not true. The topic of this article is "mentalism" in psychology, and the idea of "mentalism" as described in this article did not predate the 20th century and behaviorism. For example, if you search for "mentalism" in PsycINFO, the first appearances in the psychology literature are in the 1920s, e.g., in A. A. Roback's monograph Behaviorism and Psychology (1923), J. R. Kantor's article "The significance of the Gestalt conception of psychology" (1925), and Coleman Griffith's textbook General Introduction to Psychology (revised edition, 1928). Early modern philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke were famous for their speculations about the relation between mind and body, but they were not addressing the same problem that 20th-century psychologists used the term "mentalism" to address, which was above all a debate about scientific method.

• The section "Descriptive mentalism", which was based entirely on Eric P. Charles's article "Seeing minds in behavior: descriptive mentalism" (2011) is an interesting idea. Unfortunately, the section merely parroted the ideas in Charles's article, and it's not clear how widely shared Charles's views are. For example, Charles's classification of James J. Gibson's work as "descriptive mentalism" seems like a rather original idea, and perhaps not a consensus view in the field of psychology. There may be a place for a section on "descriptive mentalism" in a future version of the article, but if we are going to report Charles's view then we need to make much more clear that it is Charles's view, and we should explain how "descriptive mentalism" differs from what Charles describes as the prominent alternative kind of mentalism (called "explanatory mentalism" or "causal mentalism"), and we should explain why Charles chose to write an article on "descriptive mentalism" in 2011 (it was because, to quote his article's abstract, he wanted to present "a key to reintegrating insights from behaviorist psychology with mainstream psychology and neuroscience").

• The section on "Comparison with behaviorism" was too vague and confused. The only citation in this section was an article by John C. (Jay) Moore, and as with the citation of Charles's article in the previous section, there was not enough contextualization of Moore's views. For example, for one response to Moore's views that puts them in a larger context of debates about mentalism, see José Burgos's article "Antidualism and antimentalism in radical behaviorism" (2016), listed in the "Further reading" section. Debates about "mentalism" in psychology are complex and subtle, and any explanation of them in this article needs to be better than this, and display a more comprehensive grasp of the literature.

In summary, there were many problems with the recent edits that I reverted. I see that the edits were made by students in an undergraduate history of psychology course, and I imagine that part of the reason for the problems in these edits is that the subject matter of this article may be too complex to be written about coherently by students in a history of psychology survey course who have only a superficial knowledge of the subject. It would be a better assignment for students in a special seminar specifically on the subject of behaviorism and mentalism in psychology taught by an expert on the subject. There are so many ways that this article could be improved by clarifying the debates about "mentalism" in psychology, but I'm sorry to say that the reverted edits were not an improvement. Biogeographist (talk) 16:12, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Objectively Experimental

The article claims that the criticisms against psychology moved by behaviorism has been nullified. I think this is not a neutral point of view. This paper by Hayes and Brownstein analyzes the topic critically: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-53131-005 Here a link to the full text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GmzAuikPZr_Pm-5c7JxkaBd9cHVSxl6v/view — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:4647:C162:0:4C43:ACA4:516F:50E1 (talk) 15:58, 22 October 2021 (UTC)