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Flat Earth Psychology from the Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler

Flat earth psychology is a term used by Arthur Koestler to describe the school of thought known as Behaviourism. B.F. Skinner's work "The operational analysis of psychological terms "published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Apr. 16. 1984) describes the idea of behaviorism that he inherited from his mentor John Broadus Watson. "The learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior) is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors." J.B. Watson whose work preceded Skinner by thirty years essentially believed that psychology must reject any concept of consciousness and the mind. Or as Arthur Koestler so eloquently states "Behaviorists may only study objective, measure able aspects of human behavior." The irony of the quest of knowledge that is behaviorism is that all the clinical research was performed on rats and dogs, humans, let alone chimpanzees were too complex of creatures to get to the root of the "stimulus-response theory".

The idea that all living organisms may fall under this scope of reality, necessitates that we live in a theoretical world that is solely based on stimulus and reflex (reflex would later be replaced with response). B.F. Skinner writes in his book, Science and Human Behavior (NY, 1953), "(the) mind and ideas are non-existent entities, 'invented for the soul purpose of providing spurious explanations.... Since mental or psychic events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science, we have an additional reason for rejecting them" Koestler notes that Skinner like Watson, "asserted that psychology could be studied with the methods and concepts of classical physics."

To say that Skinner and Watson were anti-Platonist would be an understatement. At the same time, it is hard to argue with the empirical minds hell-bent on maintaining their social status based on their shallow fields of research. C.J. Herrick offers a compelling argument based on sound "scientific and empirical" theory in his book The Evolution of Human Nature (NY, 1961). "All the information we have about the embryology and phylogenetic development of behavior shows clearly that the local reflexes are not primary units of behavior. They are secondary acquisitions." Koestler also uses a quote from Sir Charles Sherrington's work "The Integrative Action of the Nervous System" ( NY, 1906) which further emphasises the absurdity of "simple reflexes". "The simple reflex is probably a purely abstract conception, because all parts of it is probably ever capable of reaction without affecting and being affected by various other parts... the simple reflex is a convenient, if not a probable, fiction."