Recent Issues. Chapter 12: The Behavior of Organisms at Fifty. Quote 25

“How do we learn to talk about private events? Most of the first paragraph of Watson’s manifesto was an attack on introspection. Data obtained through introspection, said Watson, were not “objective” and could not be used in a natural science. That was an anticipation of logical positivism, but I disagreed with Watson’s distinction between objective and subjective. It was not, I thought, a difference in nature, character, or quality of the data, or even of their accessibility. It was a difference in the way in which verbal behavior could be brought under the control of private events.” (p. 132)