Max Planck’s phantom-problems paper supplied the external-viewpoint doctrine behind radical behaviorism

Evidence

In 1946 Planck’s long-held views on the unity of science and scientific reasoning would be summarized in his paper on “phantom problems” in science, including the “mind-body problem” and the “problem of free will.” Planck viewed the mind-body controversy, like all phantom problems in philosophy and science, as a failure to specify “the viewpoint of the observation” and adhere to it consistently (italics mine). He argued that the “internal” or “psychological” viewpoint and the “external” or “physiological” viewpoint were too frequently confused: “What you feel, think, want, only you can know as firsthand information. Other people can conclude it only indirectly, from your words, conduct, actions and mannerisms. When such physical manifestations are entirely absent, they have no basis whatever to enable them to know your momentary mental state.” The external viewpoint was thus the only one admissible “as the basis of our scientific observation of volitional processes.” The establishment of this “external viewpoint” as the basis for the scientific study of human behavior is critical to our story, and Planck’s paper suggests the influence that his thinking exerted on Meyer (and even the possibility that Planck had read Meyer’s 1921 work). In any case, the resonance between Planck’s argument and Meyer’s is plain. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2559

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘external viewpoint as the only admissible basis’ is the epistemological move that surveillance capitalism later weaponizes — inner states replaced by observable behavior records. — connects to: Max Meyer proposed studying behavior from the Other-One’s external viewpoint — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2556; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether surveillance’s legitimacy claim descends from this scientific ‘external viewpoint’ privilege — the paper hints Planck may have influenced Meyer, but the intellectual lineage to behavioral surplus is underexplored.