Related to mind and body (and determinism), another persistent question in psychology’s history is whether human behavior is completely explicable in terms of mechanical laws. According to mechanism, the behavior of all organisms, including humans, can be
A var iety of other dualist positions can be found in the history of philosophy. For example, psychophysical parallelism holds that environmen- tal experience causes both mental events and bodily responses simultaneously but that the two are totally independent of each other. According to a related dualist position, called double aspectism, a person cannot be divided into a mind and a body but is a unity that simultaneously experiences events phys- iologically and mentally. Just as heads and tails are two aspects of a coin, mental events and physio- logical events are two aspects of a person. Similarly, other dualists maintain that there is a preestablished harmony between bodily and mental events. That is, the two types of events are different and separate but are coordinated by some external agent—for example, God.