History of Psychology: XXXIII. On Textbook Lessons from History, or How the Conditioned Reflex Discovered Twitmyer

Abstract

A number of recent textbooks have claimed that the American psychologist E. B. Twitmyer discovered the conditioned reflex in 1902 independently of and even prior to Pavlov. Various explanations for the obscurity of Twitmyer's discovery were offered. However, closer scrutiny of Twitmyer's publications, viewed in their contemporary context, does not find much support for such speculative explanations. It is argued that Twitmyer's work with the knee jerk constituted neither a knowing nor an unknowing discovery of the “conditioned reflex.” Instead a retrospective and anachronistic view of history, employing an overly simple notion of discovery and a reified concept of the conditioned reflex, had discovered Twitmyer in order to teach some “lessons from history.”