Behaviorism paper 2: “The Scientific Investigation of the Psychical Faculties or Processes in the Higher Animals” by Ivan P. Pavlov (1906)

Part of a blog series covering the seminal papers in learning—this entry continues the Behaviorism sub-series

In 1906, Ivan Pavlov delivered a lecture—published in Science under the title “The Scientific Investigation of the Psychical Faculties or Processes in the Higher Animals”—that stands as one of the strangest founding documents in the history of learning science. It is a lecture about psychology by a man who denies that psychology is a science. It is a lecture about “psychical faculties” that argues those faculties should be studied as physiology. And it is the public debut, in English, of the concept that would become the backbone of classical conditioning: the conditioned reflex.