Swarm Intelligence

The Fall of the Behaviorist Empire

Through most of the 20th century, mainstream academic psychologists,

at least in the United States, were not allowed to talk about the mind.

From the 1920s on, the influence of behaviorism was wide and pro-

found, and mind was considered to be “the ghost in the machine.” Be-

haviorism had emerged from the logical positivism of the early 20th cen-

tury, which postulated that science can theorize only about phenomena

that can be observed directly. In psychology it was clear that nothing

mental could be observed directly, and therefore cognition was off the

list of topics for serious research. The one thing that could