What did Titchener’s use of the term reagent indicate about his views of human subjects and of people in general?
Titchener was inspired by the mechanistic approach. The approach that took humans as machines. He also took his subjects as machines, who were rigorously trained to carry out his observations. They were so trained in their attempts that, they no more realized that they were giving answers in a state of consciousness.
Titchener called his subjects, reagent. He called them this because in his lab all his subjects reacted in a mechanized way. Their training made them one. These reagents only responded by reporting the characteristic they observed, in the stimulus provided.
According to Titchener, the experiments when repeated can provide many results. Repeated attempts give a clear idea, and also make the experiments results less prone to errors.
The reagents in Titcheners lab provided a detailed description of the stimulus. The subjects when made to hear a chord had to identify the different tones involved, the mental feature of the sound and any other basic information that they could gather.