HOLT, EDWIN B(ISSELL)

born 1873, Winchester, Mass., U.S. died Jan. 25, 1946, Rockland, Maine U.S. psychologist and philosopher noted for his emphasis on the purposive character of knowing. A student and follower of the psychologist William James, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1901) and remained there to teach until 1918. By 1908, when he completed The Concept of Consciousness (1914), he believed that objects are as perceived: thus, consciousness resembles a photographic lens that provides a correct picture of objects. According to Holt, behaviourism may be regarded as cognitive psychology, or a psychology of meanings, with the specific response relation essentially being what is meant by having a meaning or knowing. In The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics (1915), he suggests that the wish, viewed as purpose or planned course of action, is the response relation that explains mind. Holt retired from Harvard to devote time to writing but in 1926 began 10 years of teaching at Princeton University, where he completed the first volume of Animal Drive and the Learning Process (1931). This work contributed to the development of dynamic psychology, or the psychology of human nature, and sought to explain the significance of radical empiricism for psychology.