Watson john broadus

Early life
Watson grew up in Travelers Rest, South Carolina and attended Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. A precocious student, he entered college at the age of 16 (he became amember of the Kappa Alpha Order) and left with a masters degree aged 21. He spent a year as a principal for grade school, then entered the University of Chicago to study philosophy with John Dewey on therecommendation of Furman professor, Gordon Moore, who was a major proponent of the view that life and the behavior of living organisms could be explained entirely by chemistry and physics withoutrecourse to a supposed "vital force". Accordingly, Loeb taught that all behavior was dictated by instinct and learned responses to stimuli.
The combined influence of Dewey, Angell, Donaldson and JacquesLoeb led Watson to develop a highly descriptive, objective approach to the analysis of behavior that he would later call "behaviorism." Watson's behaviorism is typically considered[by whom?] ahistorical descendent of British empiricism, and particularly of the views of John Locke. However, Watson said nothing substantive about these things. Rather, his philosophy of science stems from[citationneeded] the history of experimental physiology through the influence of Loeb. The reflex studies of Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov (1829–1905) and Vladimir Bekhterev (1857–1927) were particularlyinfluential. Later, Watson became interested in the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), and eventually included a highly simplified version of Pavlov's principles in his popular works.
[edit] Dissertation onanimal behavior
Watson graduated from the University of Chicago in 1903. His dissertation "Animal Education: An Experimental Study on the Psychical Development of the White Rat, Correlated with the Growthof its Nervous System.[citation needed] "Animal Education" described the relationship between brain myelinization and learning ability in rats at different ages. Watson showed that the degree of...