Edward Chace Tolman

Born: April 14, 1886, West Newton, Massachusetts, USA.

Died: November 19, 1959, Berkeley, California, USA.

Interests: experimental psychology, general psychology, personality psychology and social psychology, philosophy, psychology and theoretical psychology.

Education: Bachelor's degree, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1911; MA, Harvard University, in 1912; doctor, Harvard University, 1,915

. Professional career: professor of psychology at Northwestern University, . 1915; professor of psychology at the University of California, . 1918-20, . Lecturer, . 1920-2, . professor, . 1923-8, . Professor, . 1928-54, . Professor Emeritus, . 1954; president of ARA, . 1937; chairman of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Problems, . 1940 Honorary Doctor of Science at Yale University, . 1951, . McGill University, . 1954; honorary Doctor of Law, University of California, . 1959,
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Edward Chace Tolman was born in a wealthy liberal family of Quakers and pacifists. He learned of its moral values, but just as his brother, a famous chemist and theorist, did not inherit his father's passion for business. Tolman feast for his family, studying at MIT elektroinzhenernoe case, but in the last year he read the Principles of Psychology William James Eve in 1911 went to Harvard for a course in philosophy and psychology. James died shortly before this, but his students P. B. Perry and E. B. Holt continued to advocate them initiated synthesis of philosophy and psychology. In the air the idea of behaviorism, and Perry with Holt tried to translate the functionalism of James in behavioral terms. By that time, when Tolman began to study psychology, comparative psychology professor Yerkes textbook Behavior (1914) D. B. Watson. Mц?nsterberg, however, insisted on the fact that the main method of psychology is introspection, still remained an influential figure in Harvard. Experiments conducted in his laboratory, including Tolman research is devoted to the influence of odors on the memorization of nonsense syllables, were carried out on the basis of strictly objective measurements. This discrepancy between theory and practice has been erased Yerkes and Watson, Tolman, and soon embarked on a path of behaviorism James. In 1918 he moved to the University of Berkeley in California and began teaching a new course of comparative psychology, which was based on models Yerkes, and conduct research on learning in rats in a maze.

Tolman introduced into the philosophy of behaviorism, different from the type of atomism stimulus-response Watson. William James criticized the atomistic view of consciousness and coming from this postulate that consciousness and perception are constructions, mechanical workshop of the brain ". He maintained a holistic view, believing that the complex relations can be perceived directly, and this view was developed by Perry and Holt. Another view, based on the phenomenology of Husserl and works Kyulpe of Wurzburg, although associated with James, confessed Gestalt psychology in Germany. Tolman attended courses Perry and Holt at Harvard, then spent some time with the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, when he visited Germany to study German.