Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich - M. A. Wenger (essay date 1937)

M. A. Wenger (essay date 1937)

SOURCE: "A Criticism of Pavlov's Concept of Internal Inhibition," in the Psychological Review, Vol. 44, No. 4, July, 1937, pp. 297-312.

[In the following essay, Wenger points out a flaw in Pavlov 's theory of conditioned response concerning the notion of "internal inhibition. "]

The concept of the conditioned response, with or without Pavlovian terminology, has become an important consideration in any contemporary theory of the learning process.¹² The major phenomena discovered in the laboratories of Pavlov (18) and Bekhterev (2) have been verified by many other workers. However, Pavlov's interpretations of some of these phenomena have not met with general acceptance. The specific concept bearing the brunt of attack has been that of 'internal inhibition.' About it Razran (19), Guthrie (11), Beritoff (3), Wendt (24), Winsor (28), Chappell (5), Lashley (17), and others have had something derogatory...

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