"Twelve Infants" Quotation
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.
The quotation often appears without context and with the last sentence omitted, making Watson's position appear more radical than it actually was. In Watson's book Behaviorism, the sentence is provided in the context of an extended argument against eugenics. That Watson did not hold a radical environmentalist position may be seen in his earlier writing in which his "starting point" for a science of behavior was "...the observable fact that organisms, man and animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment by means of hereditary and habit equipments." Nevertheless, Watson recognized the importance of nurture in the nature versus nurture discussion which was often neglected by his eugenic contemporaries.
Read more about this topic: John B. Watson
Famous quotes containing the words twelve, infants and/or quotation:
“At twelve I was determined to shoot only
For honor; at twenty not to shoot at all;
I know at thirty-three that one must shoot
As often as one gets the rare chance—
In killing there is more than commentary.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“My arising prodigal
Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire ...”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)