 In her (2010) Sullivan offers a detailed history of the Morris water maze task, tracing her account back to Morris’s original publications. Philosophers of neuroscience have uncritically assumed that the water maze is a widely-accepted neuroscience protocol for rodent spatial learning and memory, but the detailed scientific history is not so clear on this interpretation. Scientific commentary over time on what this task measures, including some from Morris himself, reveals no clear consensus. Sullivan traces the source of this scientific inconsistency back to the impact of 1980s-era cellular-molecular reductionism driving experimental behavioral neurobiology protocols like the Morris water maze.