The Ghost in the Machine (2 page)

 

 

A.K.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part One

 

 

ORDER

 

 

 

I

 

 

THE POVERTY OF PSYCHOLOGY

 

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out
of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed,
and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.
Swift, Voyage to Laputa

 

 

The Four Pillars of Unwisdom

 

 

Proverbs ix, I, says that the house of wisdom rests on seven pillars,
but unfortunately does not name them. The citadel of orthodoxy which
the sciences of life have built in the first half of our century rests
on a number of impressive pillars, some of which are beginning to show
cracks and to reveal themselves as monumental superstitions. The four
principal ones, summarised in a simplified form, are the doctrines

(a) that biological evolution is the result of random mutations
preserved by natural selection;
(b) that mental evolution is the result of random tries preserved by
'reinforcements' (rewards);
(c) that all organisms, including man, are essentially passive
automata controlled by the environment, whose sole purpose in
life is the reduction of tensions by adaptive responses:
(d) that the only scientific method worth that name is quantitative
measurement; and, consequently, that complex phenomena must be
reduced to simple elements accessible to such treatment, without
undue worry whether the specific characteristics of a complex
phenomenon, for instance man, may be lost in the process.

 

 

These four pillars of unwisdom will loom up repeatedly in the
chapters that follow. They provide the background, the contemporary
landscape, against which any attempt to design a new image of man must
be silhouetted. One cannot operate in a vacuum; only by starting from
the existing frame of reference can the outline of the new design be
set off clearly, by way of comparison and contrast. This is a point of
some importance, and I must insert here a personal remark to forestall
a line of criticism which past experience has taught me to expect.

 

 

If one attacks the dominant school in psychology -- as I did in my last
book and as I shall do again in the present chapter -- one is up against
two opposite types of criticism. The first is the natural reaction of the
defenders of orthodoxy, who believe that they are in the right and that
you are in the wrong -- which is only fair and to be expected. The second
category of critics belongs to the opposite camp. They argue that, since
the pillars of the citadel are already cracked and revealing themselves
as hollow, one ought to ignore them and dispense with polemics. Or, to put
it more bluntly, why flog a dead horse? *

 

* See Appendix Two: 'On Not Flogging Dead Horses.'

 

This type of criticism is frequently voiced by psychologists who believe
that they have outgrown the orthodox doctrines. But this belief is often
based on self-deception, because the crude slot-machine model, in its
modernised, more sophisticated versions, has had a profounder influence on
them -- and on our whole culture -- than they realise. It has permeated
our attitudes to philosophy, social science, education, psychiatry. Even
orthodoxy recognises today the limitations and shortcomings of Pavlov's
experiments; but in the imagination of the masses, the dog on the
laboratory table, predictably salivating at the sound of a gong,
has become a paradigm of existence, a kind of anti-Promethean myth;
and the word 'conditioning', with its rigid deterministic connotations,
has become a key-formula for explaining why we are what we are, and for
explaining away moral responsibility. There has never been a dead horse
with such a vicious kick.

 

 

 

 

 

The Rise of Behaviourism

 

 

Looking back at the last fifty years through the historian's inverted
telescope, one would see all branches of science, except one, expanding
at an unprecedented rate. The one exception is psychology, which seems
to lie plunged into a modern version of the dark ages. By psychology
I mean in the present context academic or 'experimental' psychology,
as it is taught at the great majority of our contemporary universities,
and as distinct from clinical psychiatry, psychotherapy or psychosomatic
medicine. Freud, and to a lesser degree Jung, are, of course, immensely
influential, but their influence is more strongly felt in the humanities
-- in literature, art and philosophy -- than in the citadel of official
science. By far the most powerful school in academic psychology, which at
the same time determined the climate in all other sciences of life, was,
and still is, a pseudoscience called Behaviourism. Its doctrines have
invaded psychology like a virus which first causes convulsions, then
slowly paralyses the victim. Let us see how this improbable situation
came about.

 

 

It started just before the outbreak of the First World War when a
professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, named John Broadus
Watson, published a paper in which he proclaimed: 'the time has come when
psychology must discard all reference to consciousness. . . . Its sole
task is the prediction and control of behaviour; and introspection can
form no part of its method.' [1] By 'behaviour' Watson meant observable
activities what the physicist calls 'public events', such as the motions
of a dial on a machine. Since all mental events are private events which
cannot be observed by others, and which can only be made public through
statements based on introspection, they had to be excluded from the domain
of science. On the strength of this doctrine, the Behaviourists proceeded
to purge psychology of all 'intangibles and unapproachables'. [2] The
terms 'consciousness', 'mind', 'imagination' and 'purpose', together
with a score of others, were declared to be unscientific, treated as
dirty words, and banned from the vocabulary. In Watson's own words, the
Behaviourist must exclude 'from his scientific vocabulary all subjective
terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even
thinking and emotion as they were subjectively defined'. [3]

 

 

It was the first ideological purge of such a radical kind in the domain
of science, predating the ideological purges in totalitarian politics,
but inspired by the same single-mindedness of true fanatics. It was
summed up in a classic dictum by Sir Cyril Burt: 'Nearly half a century
has passed since Watson proclaimed his manifesto. Today, apart from
a few minor reservations, the vast majority of psychologists, both in
this country and in America, still follow his lead. The result, as a
cynical onlooker might be tempted to say, is that psychology, having
first bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now,
as it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness.' [4]

 

 

Watsonian Behaviourism became the dominant school, first in American
academic psychology and subsequently in Europe. Psychology used to be
defined in dictionaries as the science of the mind; Behaviourism did away
with the concept of mind and put in its place the conditioned-reflex
chain. The consequences were disastrous not only for experimental
psychology itself; they also made themselves felt, in clinical psychiatry,
social science, philosophy, ethics, and the graduate student's general
outlook on life. Although his name was less familiar to the public,
Watson in fact became, next to Freud, and Pavlov in Russia, one of the
most influential figures of the twentieth century. For, unfortunately,
Watsonian Behaviourism is not a historical curiosity, but the foundation
on which the more sophisticated and immensely influential neo-Behaviourist
systems -- such as Clark Hull's and B.F. Skinner's -- were built. The
more painful absurdities in Watson's books are forgotten or conveniently
slurred over, but the philosophy, programme and strategy of Behaviourism
have remained essentially the same. The next few pages are intended to
demonstrate this -- regardless of what the members of the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Dead Horses say.

 

 

Watson's book
Behaviourism
, in which he rejected the concepts of
consciousness and mind, was published in 1913. Half a century later,
Professor Skinner of Harvard University, who is probably the most
influential contemporary academic psychologist, proclaims the same
views in even more extreme form. In his standard work
Science and Human
Behaviour
the hopeful student of psychology is firmly told from the very
outset that 'mind' and 'ideas' are non-existent entities, 'invented for
the sole purpose of providing spurious explanations. . . . Since mental
or psychic events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science,
we have an additional reason for rejecting them'. [5] By the same logic,
the physicist may, of course, reject the existence of radio waves,
becanse they are propagated through a so-called 'field' which lacks the
properties of ordinary physical media. In fact, few of the theories
and concepts of modern physics would survive an ideological purge on
Behaviourist principles -- for the simple reason that the scientific
outlook of Behaviourism is modelled on the mechanistic physics of the
nineteenth century.

 

 

The 'cynical onlooker' might now ask: if mental events are to be excluded
from the study of psychology -- what is there left for the psychologist
to study? The short answer is: rats. For the last fifty years the main
preoccupation of the Behaviourist school has been the study of certain
measurable aspects of the behaviour of rats, and the bulk of Behaviourist
literature is devoted to that study. THs development, odd as it seems,
was in fact an unavoidable consequence of the Behaviourist's definition
of scientific method (the 'fourth pillar' mentioned above). According
to his self-imposed limitations, the Behaviourist is only permitted to
study objective, measurable aspects of behaviour. However, there are few
relevant aspects of human behaviour which lend themselves to quantitative
measurement under laboratory conditions, and which the experimenter can
investigate without relying on introspective statements about private
events experienced by the subject. Thus, if he wanted to remain faithful
to his principles, the Behaviourist had to choose as objects of his study
animals in preference to humans, and among animals rats and pigeons in
preference to monkeys or chimpanzees, because the behaviour of primates
is still too complex.

 

 

Rats and pigeons, on the other hand, can, under appropriately
designed experimental conditions, be made to behave as if they were
indeed conditioned reflex automata, or almost so. There is hardly a
self-respecting psychological faculty in the Western world without some
white albino rats disporting themselves in so-called Skinner boxes,
invented by that eminent Harvard authority. The box is equipped with a
food tray, an electric bulb, and a bar which can he pushed down like the
lever of a slot machine, whereupon a food pellet drops into the tray. When
a rat is placed into the box, it will sooner or later press the lever
down with its paw, and will be automatically rewarded by a pellet; and it
will soon learn that to get food it must press the bar. This experimental
procedure is called 'operant conditioning' because the rat 'operates' on
the environment (as distinct from Pavlovian 'classical' or 'respondant'
conditioning, where it does not). Pressing the bar is called 'emitting an
operant response'; the food pellet is called a 'reinforcing stimulus' or
'reinforcer'; withholding the food pellet is a 'negative reinforcer'; the
alternation of the two procedures is 'intermittent reinforcement'. The
rat's 'rate of response' -- i.e., the number of times it presses the
bar in a given period of time -- is automatically recorded, plotted on
charts, and regarded as a measure of 'operant strength'.* The purpose of
the box is to enable the Behaviourist to realise his cherished ambition:
the measurement of behaviour by quantitative methods, and the control
of behaviour by the manipulation of stimuli.

 

* Operant strength is usually measured, for technical reasons, by the
'rate of extinction' -- how long the rat will persist in pressing
the lever after the supply of pallets has been stopped.

 

The Skinner box did produce some technically interesting results. The
most interesting was that 'intermittent reinforce -- ment' -- when
pressing the bar was only sometimes rewarded by a pellet -- could be
as effective, and even more effective than when it was always rewarded;
the rat, which had been trained not to expect a reward after every try,
is less discouraged, and goes on trying much longer after the supply of
pellets has been stopped, than the rat which had previously been rewarded
after every try. (The words 'expect' and 'discouraged' which I have
used would, of course, be disallowed by the Behaviourist because they
imply mental events.) This proudest achievement of some thirty years of
bar-pressing experiments is a measure of their relevance as a contribution
to psychology. As one eminent critic, Harlow, wrote already in 1953:
'a strong case can be made for the proposition that the importance of
the psychological problems studied during the last fifteen years has
decreased as a negatively accelerated function approaching an asymptote
of complete indifference'. [6] Looking back at the further fifteen years
that have passed since this was written, one would come much to the same
conclusion. The attempt to reduce the complex activities of man to the
hypothetical 'atoms of behaviour' found in lower mammals produced next
to nothing that is relevant -- just as the chemical analysis of bricks
and mortar will tell you next to nothing about the architecture of a
building. Yet throughout the dark ages of psychology most of the work
done in the laboratories consisted of analysing bricks and mortar in
the hope that by patient effort somehow one day it would tell you what
a cathedral looked like.