Phil Gervaix asks: > Today's question may sound quite technical, but... > I am studying motivation at school with my students, using a book by 2 > French authors who introduce their chapter on reward & punishment by > presentiing Tolman and Hull as opponents (actually resorting to a boxing > sport metaphor: "Ladies & gentlemen, on my right..." kind-of-thing). > Hull is presented as a hard core behaviorist, and Tolman as a precursor of > cognitivists. > My question is many-fold: > 1. > Is it right or fair to present them this way? > 2. > What are the historical and intellectual relationships between both? Who > came first? Who shot first? > 3. > Was there an open and contemporaneous controversy between them? Did they > refute, contradict, influence eachother? Or is it more like a textbook > controversy? >
My understanding of the relation between Hull and Tolman was that they were antagonists who took their dispute seriously both intellectually and personally. In a graduate seminar on the history of psychology, Mike Rashotte presented his research on the correspondence between Hull and Spence and shared these letters with my seminar (this correspondence is located in the APA Psychology Archives at Akron). Their letters are lively and full of commentary on Tolman's latest research, some of it is quite pointed and personal--an interesting rebuttal of the dispassionate and objective researcher portrayed in research methods. I can't find any evidence that Rashotte ever published anything based on his study of this correpsondence (the nearest I've been able to find is a recent chapter on behaviorism but Rashotte worked with this correspondence in the late 1970s). People I know who attended Midwestern Psychological Association meetings as graduate students during the Hull/Spence/Tolman era talk about the liveliness of the arguments at these meetings. In particular, students who attended Iowa during this time talk about the preparation Spence gave his students, who were assigned to attend particular paper presentations and came armed with pointed questions for presenters from the "other camp." Claudia Stanny ________________________________________________________ Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D. e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Psychology Phone: (850) 474 - 3163 University of West Florida FAX: (850) 857 - 6060 Pensacola, FL 32514 - 5751 Web: http://www.uwf.edu/psych/stanny.html --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
