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Skinner1987 PDF
Skinner1987 PDF
Mary Henle has a unique talent for letting the history of psychology and its pre-
sent theory and practice enlighten each other. Readers of her book might wonder about
the number 1879 in the title. It is the year in which Wilhelm Wundt established his
laboratory in Leipzig, and it is the date chosen by the American Psychological Associa-
tion in 1979 for its formal celebration of the hundredth anniversary of scientific
psychology. During the recent decades of this eventful century, Henle has done much
to keep scientific discourse on a respectable level and to enrich our knowledge with
evidence directly pertinent to decisive questions. Witnessing how she argues, disproves,
and exposes untenable positions with the resources of a skilled debater and witty satirist
is like watching the finely controlled lunges of a seasoned fencer. Scholars and students,
fortunate enough to supplement their reading with this collection of essays, will feel
encouraged to use their standard resources with increased intelligence and circumspection.
is commonly supposed.” Indeed, I do not believe it was an alliance at all, and, hence,
not quite accurately called a “failed alliance.”
The book begins with an excellent chapter, “The Logical Positivist View of Science,”
essentially a blend of Fregean logicism and Machian empiricism. (Smith cites Willard
Van Orman Quine’s critique of logical positivism along behavioristic lines, and it may
be worth noting that as an undergraduate at Oberlin Quine took a course that used John
B. Watson’s Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist’ as a text.)
Of the three neobehaviorists, Hull most actively promoted a connection with logical
positivism. As Smith points out, the assassination of Moritz Schlick weakened the Cir-
cle, and the logical positivists turned to the Unity of Science movement. Hull attended
the Third International Congress for the Unity of Science in Paris in 1937, was one
of the organizers of the Congress in 1939, and gave a paper at the meeting in 1941 at
the University of Chicago. In that paper he spoke of the “striking and significant similarity
between the physicalism doctrine of the logical positivists and the approach characteristic
of the American behaviorism, originating in the work of J. B. Watson. Intimately related
to both of the above movements are the pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey on
the one hand, and the operationism of Bridgman, Boring, and Stevens, on the other.
These several methodological movements, together with the pioneering experimental
work of Pavlov and the other Russian reflexologists are, I believe, uniting to produce
in America a behavioral discipline which will be a full-blown natural science” (p. 192).
At various times Hull invited to the Institute of Human Relations at Yale Otto Neurath,
J. H. Woodger, Arne Naess, and Gustav Bergmann. As Smith points out, however,
Hull’s own logic was closer to John Dewey’s Logic, the Theory of Inquiry.3Hull’s Prin-
ciples of Behavior4 shows very few signs of logical positivism.
In his senior year at M.I.T., Tolman read William James, thought of becoming
a philosopher, but chose psychology. At Harvard, a seminar with E. B. Holt introduced
him to neorealism, a position confirmed for him by Ralph Barton Perry’s attack on the
idealism of James Royce and by Perry’s essay on “Docility and Purposiveness.” Tolman
would continue to use “docile” in Perry’s sense of “teachable” and to speak of purpose
throughout his life.
Neorealism, as Smith says, left Tolman in an embarrassing position. Could pur-
poses and cognitions be seen in the behavior of another organism or were they internal
“determiners” of behavior? His equivocation was clear in Purposive Behavior in Animals
and Men.5 “Within a single paragraph,” Smith points out, “he describes purposes and
cognitions as ‘immanent’ in behavior . . . and on the other hand as ‘determinants’ or
‘causes’ of behavior that are ‘invented’ or ‘inferred’ by observers” (p. 90).
By 1935, however, Tolman had clarified his position on intervening variables, and
Smith attributes the change to his sabbatical year (1933-1934) in Vienna: “His pro-
nouncements about intervening variables in the period immediately after his trip had
much the flavor of Carnap’s approach. Instead of psychological laws in general, he spoke
of functional relations between antecedent conditions and dependent behavior” (p. 1 17).
I believe there is something missing in that account. In 1931, Tolman taught Summer
School at Harvard. There were only a few summer school students in those days, and
Fred S. Keller and I attended his classes. I am afraid we took an unfair part in the discus-
sions. I spent a good deal of time with Tolman alone. I had taken my degree and was
working on rate of ingestion and of food-reinforced lever-pressing in white rats. Later
that year I sent him a copy of my paper “The concept of the reflex in the description
208 BOOK REVIEWS
of behavior,” the major part of my thesis, and he wrote that he had read it with excite-
ment and had discussed it with his seminar.
That paper contained the equation:
R = f (S, A )
where A represents “any condition affecting reflex strength.” One such condition was
the deprivation with which, in another part of my thesis, I identified “drive”; another
was conditioning. In the paper which Smith says shows Rudolf Carnap’s influence,
Tolman gives the equation:
B = f (S, H, P)
an early behaviorist, who remained close to Watson even after Watson’s departure from
the field, went straight to the nervous system itself. His best-known student, Donald
Hebb, did not call himself a behaviorist. Untouched by logical positivism, Lashley and
Hebb are naturally not mentioned in this book.) I differed from both Tolman and Hull
by following a strictly Machian line, in which behavior was analyzed as a subject mat-
ter in its own right as a function of environmental variables without refereme to either
mind or the nervous system. That was the line that Jacques Loeb,’ who corresponded
extensively with Mach, had taken, although the only facts Loeb marshalled in support
of it were tropisms, in which I was not interested.
In a final chapter, Smith discusses the reemergence of psychologism, especially in
philosophical theories of knowledge. All three neobehaviorists “embarked on careers
in psychology with strong interests in epistemology” but “their psychologizing of the
knowledge process placed a deep gulf between their indigenous epistemologies and the
epistemological views of the logical positivists” (p. 301). Smith seems to feel that the
neobehaviorists never reached an adequate understanding of their own behavior as scien-
tists. Although all three anticipated the “new image of scientific knowledge,” Smith says
that “only some of their notions of science continue to be fruitful . . . It is unlikely
that any of the specific formulations of Tolman, Hull, or Skinner will figure in current
or future versions of the new image - if for no other reason than they do not represent
the latest developments even in their own tradition” (p. 321). I do not think the story
is quite finished, however. The chapters, “Logical and Scientific Verbal Behavior” and
“Thinking,” in my Verbal Behavior were, I think, steps in the right direction, and cur-
rent explorations of the distinction between rule-governed and contingency-shaped
behavior are certainly relevant. Some Zuriff, Boakes, or Smith of the future will have
to carry the story forward.
NOTES
1. B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
2. John B. Watson, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1919).
3. John Dewey, Logic, the Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938).
4. Clark L. Hull, Principles of Behavior: An Introduction to Behavior Theory (New York: D. Appleton-
Century, 1943).
5. Edward C. Tolman, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men (New York: Century, 1932).
6. B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957).
7. G. E. Zuriff, Behaviorism: A Conceptual Reconstruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
8. Robert Boakes, From Darwin to Behaviorism: Psychology and the Minds of Animals (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1984).
9. See Philip J. Pauly, Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1987).
ment of Tolman’s thinking is quite likely a case in point, especially given his broad-
minded eclecticism and his well-known fondness for freewheeling intellectual exchange.
Unfortunately, because Tolman left few personal records of his intellectual activities,
the details of the case remain unclear.
In regard to the reemergence of psychologism, the “naturalized epistemology” of
W. V. Quine, who is mentioned by Skinner in connection with the tension between logical
positivist and behavioral epistemologies, is a good example of the sort of psychologistic-
ally inclined theories of knowledge that have displaced logical positivism as a dominant
philosophical approach to epistemology. It is interesting to note that during the thirties
Quine and Skinner shared a common tenure as Junior Fellows in Harvard’s Society of
Fellows, and that Thomas Kuhn, a leading architect of the “new image” of science, credits
some of the inspiration for his views to his later contact with Quine in the Society of
Fellows. The relationship of Quine and Skinner, whose behavioral orientations to the
theory of knowledge have much in common, will doubtless exercise future intellectual
historians, who may well be able to trace aspects of the new image to the climate of
behavioral thinking in the thirties.
D. J. Mulvaney and J. H. Calaby. ‘So Much That is New’: Baldwin Spencer (1860-1929).
Parkville: Melbourne University Press, 1985. 492 pp. $35.00 (cloth)
Tigger Wise. The Self-Made Anthropologist: A Life of A . P. Elkin. Sydney and Lon-
don: Allen & Unwin, 1985. 286 pp. $29.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper)
(Reviewed by Richard Gillespie)
The history of Australian anthropology has been as desolate and sparsely populated
as the landscape itself. The publication in the same year of biographies of two of
Australia’s most famous anthropologists is therefore a most welcome event, indicative
of a growing interest in the history of anthropology and the history of Australian science.
In reading the two books I was hopeful that they would explore the overall develop-
ment of anthropology in Australia, mapping the intellectual and institutional terrain,
and outlining anthropologists’ relations with Aborigines, missionaries, pastoralists and
miners, and state and federal governments. But biography is a difficult historical form,
and consequently in both these works the authors, perhaps because of a fear of wandering
aimlessly in uncharted territories, have stayed close to the story of their subject, only
occasionally showing us glimpses of the larger themes.
Certainly Baldwin Spencer is sufficiently imposing a character to maintain our in-
terest. The son of a leading Manchester industrialist, Spencer studied medicine and
biology at Manchester and Oxford, attended E. B. Tylor’s lectures on anthropology,
and assisted Tylor in setting up the collections in the Pitt-Rivers Museum. With no im-
mediate prospect of a chair in Britain, Spencer applied for and was appointed to the
professorship of biology at the University of Melbourne in 1887, a position he held un-
til his retirement. Spencer’s anthropological work was squeezed into an energetic career
as biologist and teacher, university administrator, director of the National Museum of