Philosophy as the behaviorist views it?

historical parallels to the discussion of the use of experimental methods in philosophy

Hannes Rusch

pp. 264-282

in: Christoph Luetge, Hannes Rusch, Matthias Uhl (eds), Experimental ethics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

Numerous instances of branchings of new independent disciplines from philosophy can be found in the history of science and scholarship. Standard examples include biology, physics, economics, and psychology, whose pioneers always also were influential philosophers. All of these four sciences possess methodologies of their own now, which always also include experimental methods. Some historians of science even hold that the introduction of experimental methods marks those points in time at which physics and psychology had successfully become independent disciplines of their own — at the time of Galilei in physics and at the time of Wundt in psychology. The examples of economics and biology, however, show that experimental methods can also gain importance within independent disciplines much later — at the time of Priestley and Mendel in biology and at the time of Thurstone in economics (see Roth, 1993).