The Ghost in the Machine (4 page)

 

 

This 'clean and fresh programme', as Watson himself called it, was based
on the naive idea that psychology could be studied with the methods
and concepts of classical physics. Watson and his successors were quite
explicit about this; their efforts to carry out their programme became a
truly procrustean operation. But while that legendary malefactor merely
stretched, or cut off, the legs of his victim to make him fit his bed,
Behaviourism first cut off his head, then chopped him up into 'bits of
behaviour in terms of stimulus and response'. The theory is based on the
atomistic concepts of the last century, which have been abandoned in all
other branches of contemporary science. Its basic assumptions -- that all
activities of man, including language and thought, can be analysed into
elementary S-R units -- were originally founded on the physiological
concept of the reflex arc. The newborn organism came into the world
equipped with a number of simple, 'unconditioned' reflexes, and what it
learnt and did in its lifetime was acquired by Pavlovian conditioning. But
this simplicist schema soon went out of fashion among physiologists. The
greatest among them in his time, Sir Charles Sherrington, wrote already
in 1906: 'The simple reflex is probably a purely abstract conception,
because all parts of the nervous system are connected together and no
part of it is probably ever capable of reaction without affecting and
being affected by various other parts. . . . The simple reflex is a
convenient, if not a probable, fiction.' [22]

 

 

More recently, a leading neurologist, Judson Herrick, summed up the
situation:

 

During the past half-century an ambitious programme of reflexology
was elaborated, notably by Pavlov and the American school of
Behaviourism. The avowed objective was to reduce all animal and human
behaviour to systems of interlocking reflexes of various grades of
complexity. The conditioning of these reflexes by personal experience
was invoked as the mechanism of learning. The simple reflex was
regarded as the unit of behaviour, and all other kinds of behaviour
were conceived as brought about by the linkage of these units in
successively more complicated patterns.
The simplicity of this scheme is attractive but illusory. In the
first place, the simple reflex is a pure abstraction. There is no
such thing in any living body. A more serious defect is that all the
information we have about the embryology and phylogenetic development
of behaviour shows clearly that local reflexes are not the primary
units of behaviour. They are secondary acquisitions. [23]

 

With the decline of the reflex, the physiological foundations on which
S-R psychology was built, had ceased to exist. But that did not unduly
worry the Behaviourists. They shifted their terminology from conditioned
reflexes to conditioned responses, and kept manipulating their ambiguous
terms, in the manner we have seen, until responses became controlled by
stimuli still in the womb of the future, reinforcement turned into a kind
of phlogiston, and the atoms of behaviour evaporated in the psychologist's
hands even as the physicist's hard little lumps of matter had evaporated
long ago.

 

 

Historically, Behaviourism started as a reaction against the excesses
of introspective techniques, as practised particularly by German
psychologists of the so-called Würzburg school. At first its
intention was merely to exclude consciousness, images and other non-public
phenomena as
objects of study
from the field of psychology;
but later on this came to imply that the excluded phenomena
did not
exist
. A programme for a methodology, which had its arguable points,
became transformed into a philosophy which had no point at all. One
might as well tell a team of land surveyors that for the purpose of
mapping a limited area they could treat the earth as if it were flat --
and then subtly instil the dogma that the whole earth
is
flat.

 

 

Behaviourism is indeed a kind of flat-earth view of the mind. Or,
to change the metaphor: it has replaced the anthropomorphic fallacy
-- ascribing to animals human faculties and sentiments -- with the
opposite fallacy: denying man faculties not found in lower animals;
it has substituted for the erstwhile anthropomorphic view of the rat,
a ratomorphic view of man. It has even re-named psychology, because it
was derived from the Greek word for 'mind', and called it the 'science
of behaviour'. It was a demonstrative act of semantic self-castration,
in keeping with Skinner's references to education as 'behavioural
engineering'. Its declared aim, 'to predict and to control human activity
as physical scientists control and manipulate other natural phenomena'
[24], sounds as nasty as it is naive. Werner Heisenberg, one of the
greatest living physical scientists, has laconically declared: 'Nature
is unpredictable'; it seems rather absurd to deny the living organism
even that degree of unpredictability which quantum physics accords to
inanimate nature.

 

 

Behaviourism has dominated the stage throughout the dark ages of
psychology, and is still, in the 1960s, dominant in our universities;
but it never had the stage all to itself. In the first place there have
always been 'voices in the wilderness', mostly belonging to an older
generation which had come to maturity before the Great Purge. In the
second place, there was Gestalt psychology, which at one time looked like
a serious rival to Behaviourism. But the great expectations which the
Gestalt school aroused were only partly fulfilled, and its limitations
soon became apparent. The Behaviourists managed to incorporate some
of their opponents' experimental results into their own theories,
and continued to hold the stage. The interested reader can find this
controversy outlined in
The Act of Creation
, and there is no need to
go into it here.* But the net result was a kind of abortive Renaissance
followed by a Counter-Reformation. Lastly, to round off the picture,
there is a younger generation of neurophysiologists and communication
theorists who regard orthodox S-R psychology as senile, but are often
forced to pay lip-service to it, if they want to get on in their academic
careers and get their papers published in the tight sort of technical
journal -- and who become in varying degrees infected in the process by
the doctrines of flat-earth psychology.

 

* Particularly in Book Two, Chapter Twelve, 'The Pitfalls of Learning
Theory', and Chapter Thirteen, 'The Pitfalls of Gestalt'.

 

It is impossible to arrive at a diagnosis of man's predicament --
and by implication at a therapy -- by starting from a psychology which
denies the existence of mind, and lives on specious analogies derived
from the bar-pressing activities of rats. The record of fifty years of
ratomorphic psychology is comparable in its sterile pedantry to that of
scholasticism in its period of decline, when it had fallen to counting
angels on pin-heads -- although this sounds a more attractive pastime
than counting the number of bar-pressings in the box.

 

 

 

 

 

II

 

 

THE CHAIN OF WORDS AND THE TREE OF LANGUAGE

 

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to
speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.
Oscar Wilde

 

The emergence of symbolic language, first spoken, then written, represents
the sharpest break between animal and man. Many social animals have some
system of communication by signs and signals, but language is a
species-specific, exclusive property of man. Even 'mongolian' idiots,
incapable of looking after themselves in the most primitive ways, are
capable of acquiring the rudiments of symbolic speech but not dolphins
and chimpanzees, highly intelligent as they are in other respects. Nor
rats and pigeons.

 

 

Language, then, one would expect, is a phenomenon whose study more than
any other would show up the absurdity of the ratomorphic approach. It not
only does that; it also provides the best opportunity for introducing,
by way of contrast, some of the basic concepts of the new synthesis in
the making. This contrast between the orthodox and the new approach can
be summed up by two key words: the chain versus the tree.

 

 

 

The Chain

 

 

The long extract which follows is representative of the orthodox
Behaviourist approach to language. It is taken from a textbook for
college students to which various professors at distinguished American
universities have contributed. [1] The author of the extract is himself
chairman of a psychology department. It was published in 1961; the
dialogue featured in the extract is adapted from an earlier textbook. I
mention these details to show that this text, fed to thousands of
students, is in the most respectable academic tradition. It is headed
'Complex Activities' and it is the only passage devoted to the glories
of human language in this entire textbook:*

 

We have said that learning either may be of the respondant
[classical Pavlovian] or of the operant [Skinner, Hull] conditioning
type. . . . The experimental data that we have presented in connection
with our conditioning studies have, however, been limited to rather
simple responses such as salivation [in dogs] and bar-pressing [by
rats]. In our everyday life we seldom spend much time in thinking
about such isolated responses, usually thinking of more gross
activities, such as learning a poem, carrying on a conversation,
solving a mechanical puzzle, learning our way around a new city,
to name only a few. While the psychologist could study these more
complicated activities, as is done to some extent, the general
approach of psychology is to bring simpler responses into the
laboratory for study. Once the psychologist discovers the principles
of learning for simpler phenomena under the more ideal conditions
of the laboratory, it is likely that he can apply these principles
to the more complex activities as they occur in everyday life. The
more complex phenomena are, after all, nothing but a series of
simpler responses [sic.] Speaking to a friend is a good example of
this. Suppose we have a conversation such as the following:
He: 'What time is it?'
She: 'Twelve o'clock.'
He: 'Thank you.'
She: 'Don't mention it.'
He: 'What about lunch?'
She: 'Fine.'
Now this conversation can be analysed into separate S-R units. 'He'
makes the first response, which is emitted probably to the stimulus of
the sight of 'She'. When 'He' emits the operant, 'What time is it?',
the muscular activity, of course, produces a sound, which also serves
as a stimulus for 'She'. On the receipt of this stimulus, she emits an
operant herself: 'Twelve o'clock', which in turn produces a stimulus
to 'He'. And so on. The entire conversation may thus be diagrammed as:
In such complex activity, then, we can see that what we really
have is a series of S-R connections. The phenomenon of connecting a
series of such S-R units is known as chaining, a process that should
be apparent in any complex activity. We might note that there are a
number of sources of reinforcement throughout the chaining process,
in this example the most obvious being the reinforcement of 'She'
by receiving an invitation for lunch and of 'He' by having the
invitation accepted. In addition, as Keller and Schoenfeld point out,
there are such sources of reinforcement as the hearer 'encouraging'
the speaker to continue, the use that the conversationalists make
of the information received (he finds out what time it is), etc.
This example of the analysis of a complex activity is but one of
numerous activities that we could discuss. You should continue to
think of others yourself and try to diagram the chaining process for
them. For instance, what would a diagram look like for a football
end running downfield and catching a pass, for a pianist playing a
piano, or for a girl knitting a sweater? [2]
* An extract from this text also appeared in The Act of Creation,
p. 603.

 

And this is the end of what the student learns about 'complex human
activities'. The rest of this chapter, entitled 'Learning, Retention and
Motivation', is concerned, in the author's own words, with 'salivation
and bar-pressing'.

 

 

Reading this dialogue one has the vision of two cute automatic
slot-machines facing each other on the college campus, feeding each other
with stimulus coins and popping out pre-packaged verbal responses. Yet
this inane exchange between He and She is not a random improvisation
by the author -- he adapted it reverently from another textbook, Keller
and Schoenfeld's
Principles of Psychology
, and other writers have done
the same, as if it were a classic example of human conversation.

 

 

The diagram represents the application to language of the Behaviourist
credo: that all human activities can be reduced to a linear chain
of S-R units. At a first glance, the diagram might impress one as a
simplified but plausible schematisation -- until one takes a closer look
at it. It is based on Skinner's book
Verbal Behaviour
-- the first
large-scale attempt to tackle human language in terms of Behaviourist
theory. According to Skinner, speech sounds are emitted as any other 'bits
of behaviour'; and the process of conditioning which determines verbal
behaviour (including thinking) is essentially the same as the conditioning
of rats and pigeons; the methods of these experiments, Skinner claims,
'can be extended to human behaviour without serious modification'. [3]
Thus when our author speaks of the psychologist's preference for
studying 'simpler responses', he means the responses of salivation and
bar-pressing, as the context shows. But what on earth have the S-R symbols
in the diagram in common with bar-pressing? What justification is there
to call 'Don't mention it -- What about lunch?' a 'conditioned response
unit'? A conditioned response is a response controlled by the stimulus;
and a 'unit' in experimental science must have definable properties. Are
we to believe that He was conditioned to answer each 'Don't mention it'
with a lunch invitation? And in what conceivable sense are we to call
'Don't mention it -- What about lunch?' a