Ivan Pavlov, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
I hold that the higher nervous activity — all of it, up to and including the mental life of man — is the work of the brain, a physiological process, and that it is to be known by the objective method of physiology and by no other.1 The subjective psychology offered me its terms — sensation, idea, will, desire, purpose — and I found them useless in the laboratory: they name nothing I can measure, control, or verify, and they explain a fact only by restating it in the language of the inner theater.2
I do not say there is no inner experience; I am not a fool who denies what every man knows of his own feeling. I say that inner experience is not a cause to be invoked and not a means of knowledge; it is itself something to be explained, one day, as higher nervous activity, when physiology has come far enough.3 To reach that day one must put the subjective concepts aside entirely and follow the objective method without compromise, for the two cannot be mixed — the moment you explain a reflex by what the dog "wants," you have stopped doing science and begun telling a story.
The road of physiology is long and hard and it is the only one that arrives. I chose it, and I held to it against every temptation to soften it, because half-measures here are not caution but confusion.45
Probably this is the reason why the physiology of the higher nervous activity does not advance in proportion to what we 223 224 liECTUEES ON CONDITIONED EEPLEXES might expect from the intensely interesting and abundant material which it gives us.Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes
After these instructive facts were obtained, we desired to know whether the investigation of the corresponding nervous phenomena could be made with similar exactitude by means of subjective analysis For this purpose I sought to acquaint myself with the conditions — I addressed myself to books on the subject I did not find in the books what I was ANALYSIS OP NERVOUS PHENOMENA 113 looking for, perhaps because it is…Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes
Why was this^ What was the matter It is plain enough. Because in these new facts we had not yet found any causal relations, we could not then explain what kinds of connection existed between the phenomena, by what they were conditioned But when we had explained these connections, when we saw that from a certain cause follows this or that effect, at that self-same moment we felt calm and satisfied Why had we…Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes
I and my collaborators, to whom I am sincerely grateful, have with com- plete success demonstrated these experiments in my two systematic courses on conditioned reflexes, as well as m the reports to scientific societies, and before many native and foreign colleagues in my labora- tories.Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes
And what has he profited by this He borrowed his conceptions from that body of knowledge concerning the human intellect which, as the workers in this field themselves admit, has not yet the right, in spite of its antiquity, to call itself a science.Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes
The philosophical core of Pavlov's program and the point of its deepest and most persistent controversy. The reduction of the mental to the physiological — mind as the higher nervous activity of the brain, to be known only objectively — allied Pavlov with the behaviorist rejection of mentalism and, after his death, made his work the sanctioned materialist foundation of Soviet psychology, a status enforced with the full weight of the state (the 1950 "Pavlovian session") in ways his own science never demanded. Against the reduction stands the whole line of objection — from the phenomenologists and the humanistic psychologists to the cognitive revolution — that consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and purpose are not eliminable, that a physiology of reflexes leaves out precisely what is to be explained. The debate over whether the mind is exhaustively the brain, and knowable only from without, is as alive now, in the neuroscience of consciousness, as it was in Pavlov's laboratory.