person as to whom he sees coming along the road at a moment
when he is firmly convinced that Jones is sure to come. If everybody
were shortsighted and obsessed with beliefs as to what was going to be
visible, we might have to make the best of such testimony, but we should
need to correct its errors by taking care to collect the simultaneous
evidence of people with the most divergent expectations. There is no
evidence that this was done in the experiments in question, nor indeed
that the influence of theory in falsifying the introspection was at all
adequately recognized. I feel convinced that if Professor Watson had
been one of the subjects of the questionnaires, he would have given
answers totally different from those recorded in the articles in
question. Titchener quotes an opinion of Wundt on these investigations,
which appears to me thoroughly justified. "These experiments," he says,
"are not experiments at all in the sense of a scientific methodology;
they are counterfeit experiments, that seem methodical simply because
they are ordinarily performed in a psychological laboratory, and involve
the co-operation of two persons, who purport to be experimenter and
observer. In reality, they are as unmethodical as possible; they possess
none of the special features by which we distinguish the introspections
of experimental psychology from the casual introspections of everyday
life."* Titchener, of course, dissents from this opinion, but I cannot
see that his reasons for dissent are adequate. My doubts are only
increased by the fact that Buhler at any rate used trained psychologists
as his subjects. A trained psychologist is, of course, supposed to have
acquired the habit of observation, but he is at least equally likely to
have acquired a habit of seeing what his theories require. We may take
Buhler's "Uber Gedanken" to illustrate the kind of results arrived at
by such methods. Buhler says (p. 303): "We ask ourselves the general
question: 'WHAT DO WE EXPERIENCE WHEN WE THINK?' Then we do not at all
attempt a preliminary determination of the concept 'thought,' but choose
for analysis only such processes as everyone would describe as
processes of thought." The most important thing in thinking, he says, is
"awareness that..." (Bewusstheit dass), which he calls a thought. It
is, he says, thoughts in this sense that are essential to thinking.
Thinking, he maintains, does not need language or sensuous
presentations. "I assert ra