Gestalt against behaviorism: is excluding direct experience a methodological mutilation?

Wolfgang Köhler, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Behaviourism proposes to study the mind by refusing to look at it — to admit only what an outside observer can see and to strike direct experience from the record.1234 But direct experience is the one thing given to us first and with certainty; a science that begins by discarding its primary data has amputated itself for the sake of a false rigour. We may and must study behaviour, but not by pretending the experienced world is not there.5

Sources

  1. He even aimed at formulating laws governing the flow of direct experience. The well-known psychological school of behaviorism has leveled against the older psychology the criticism that it was misguided both with respect to its subject-matter and its aim.
    Gestalt Psychology
  2. This difference, I promise, will become startlingly clear as soon as we discuss the observation of direct experience. Since objective experience is so much more legitimated by its use in physics and behavioristic psychology, we shall first examine the treatment of it by introspectionists, with the result that, for all practical or concrete purposes, introspectionism will be found to be astonishingly similar to…
    Gestalt Psychology
  3. Then, some increase of self-criticism and a careful elimination of religious or metaphysical interests in students of psychology might be a remedy for these defects, and a very welcome gesture towards sober behaviorism at the same time. But the behaviorist has other reasons for not accepting direct experience as a field of scientific research.
    Gestalt Psychology
  4. But that cannot change my report about my own case in which affairs are as I have described them. It is in the terms of this description that I must decide whether I shall become a behaviorist or not. What then about the behaviorist's statement that observation in physics deals with objective reality whereas, in the treatment of direct experience, it deals with something subjective?
    Gestalt Psychology
  5. It does not mean at all, that all forms of so-called introspection are justified, even less does it mean that generally the products of so-called introspection are independent of introspection.
    Gestalt Psychology

Where the argument is made

  • Gestalt Psychology (1929): the argument that behaviourism's refusal of direct experience discards the primary data of psychology

How the argument was received

That psychology must be rigorous and public in its methods I grant; that rigour requires the denial of experience I deny. The behaviourist discipline caught real laxity in the old introspection; it overcorrected into a refusal to see. My quarrel is not with measuring behaviour but with the metaphysical amputation that calls experience unreal.