Chapter II: Behaviorism From the Standpoint of a Psychologist (2)

There is also but one broken vase. And it, too, is the cause of our being aware of it. Cat and vase are evidently of the same order of things to the extent that they both have an existence within the beholder (which the beholder knows through consciousness), and a certain inferred existence of their own. But how about the emotion awakened by the broken vase? Has that an existence independent of those experiencing it?

Ever since the days of ancient Greece, and probably since long before, certain philosophers have been trying to prove that not even the cat has such an outside existence. Things exist only in the philosopher’s mind, and therefore the one thing which exists is the philosopher. The only way to refute this theory is by using your brains to an extent sufficient to arrive at the conclusion that, since some of the things you see look amazingly like yourself, and react much as you do to yet other things, then it is at least highly probable that these other people and other things actually are.

Now the behaviorist’s contention is merely the reverse of this all-in-the-mind theory--and is equally absurd. To him there is nothing in the mind; there is no mind. Instead of all being inside, all is outside.

Yet Dr. Watson considers himself privileged to speak not only of emotions and emotion-reflexes, but of “purpose,” “failure,” and “success.” We begin with “random” squirms, he says, and now and then one of these “random” squirms is “successful,” it accomplishes its “object.” Unconscious “seeking motions” are continued until they are “satisfied.” Such expressions are to be found scattered through all his writings.

But a seeking motion must be a motion which seeks something. If the babe be unconscious, how does it know when the seeking has been successful? Does it move in hopes of finding pleasure or of avoiding pain? It can feel neither pleasure nor pain. Does it squirm to improve its general welfare? That is what the tropism theory assumes. But without consciousness there can be no such thing as welfare. It makes no slightest difference to the organism what happens to it, whether it lives or dies.

Our unconscious Eliza refuses to cross the ice, even when bayed at by an unconscious bloodhound. There is no reason why she should. An unconscious Eliza would be as comfortable inside of a bloodhound as anywhere else. And an unconscious bloodhound is as comfortable fasting as when fed.

Nevertheless, Dr. Watson, who is “not concerned with problems of consciousness,” is about to introduce us to language, morality and reform!

4. TINKS! TINKS! KWAKS! KWAKS!

“Give me the baby,” Dr. Watson begs,[17] “and I’ll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood.... I’ll make it a thief, a gunman, or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless. Even gross difference in anatomical structure limit us far less than you may think.... Make him a deaf-mute, and I will still build you a Helen Keller.... Men are built, not born.”

Shall we indeed give Dr. Watson the baby? Not yet. If baby is as plastic as he would have us suppose, the choice of a teacher carries with it momentous consequences. You see, we don’t want him to make a thief, a gunman, or even a dope-fiend. This is just an old-fashioned prejudice, a hang-over from the days of consciousness. But we have it. A Helen Keller, a carpenter or a good stone-mason will do very well. We must, however, be reassured as to teacher’s intentions. He has, no doubt, some high principle to guide him. Let him reveal it.

“The psychologist, having chosen human behavior as his material, feels that he makes progress only as he can manipulate and control it.”[18] Very good. But this is not quite the point.

“In this work there is involved not only ability to predict situation from response, and the probable response given the situation, but the experimental manipulation of stimulus and the creation of response.... Stimuli must be added to or subtracted from until appropriate response is attained.”[19]

The method at least is plain. Baby is helpless protoplasm in the grip of whatever situation he finds himself. Dr. Watson does not allow even chance to interfere with those all-important initial synapses which, once made, will turn conduct over to habit. Baby is a mechanism, with no ability save that of wax to receive. His only “chance” is that the situation shall be all that could be desired. Not even the word “probable” placed before response promises any individual initiative, since the psychologist proposes to predict (he clearly means “work back to”) the situation of which any given response was the answer. One wonders where the teacher’s initiative is to come from, whether he too is the inevitable result of a chain of situations reaching back to the beginning of time; and if so, where the first situation came from--to say nothing of the first baby. But, which is more to the point, what is the meaning of that word “appropriate” preceding “response”? What makes a response “appropriate”? Obviously an appropriate situation. And we cannot tell whether a situation is appropriate or not until we know what response we wish to produce.

“Until we know more about the control of behavior during the tender years of infancy, it seems almost a dangerous experiment to bring up a child. The old argument that a good many millions of children have been successfully reared in the past few millions of years has just about broken down in the light of the now generally recognized lack of success of most people in making satisfactory adjustments to society.”[20]

What has also just about broken down is the argument that it is not a dangerous experiment to bring up a child--for the reason that no sane parent ever thought that it was not a dangerous experiment, quite the most dangerous and gloriously all-important experiment which life affords. If the child has no will or say in the matter, parenthood involves a higher responsibility even than that which a man has for his own soul--though of course the behaviorist will plead that he has no soul to be responsible for, and that--but there is no use going back again to the beginning of time. We shall have to give the teacher not only a soul but a free will, _pro tempore_, or he will stick on our hands just as Eliza stuck on the ice, and refuse to move. Things are not moving very rapidly as it is. What, for instance, is meant by “satisfactory adjustments”? Is there some doubt, after all, how baby will adjust himself to what is happening around him? No, says Dr. Watson.

“Without going too far beyond our facts [how far would be ‘too far’?] it seems possible to say that the stimulus is always provided by the environment, external to the body, or by the movements of man’s own muscles and the secretions of his glands; finally, that response always follows relatively immediately upon the presentation or incidence of the stimulus.... These are really assumptions, but they seem to be basal ones for psychology.”[21]

“Give me the baby”]

Since they are basal we will have to grant them, else we will be left relatively immediately without any psychology at all. A satisfactory adjustment, then, must be the usual and inevitable adjustment, but to a satisfactory situation. Those children who were successfully reared during the past few millions of years must have had satisfactory situations to begin with. And it is “now generally recognized” that they were exceptions, and not “most people.” There must be some criterion, then, by which a satisfactory situation--that is, one producing satisfactory response, or conduct--may be recognized. Has Dr. Watson any such criterion to offer? No. He says on page twelve of this same book, which gives us his “standpoint”: “Psychology is not concerned with the goodness or badness of acts, or with their successfulness, as judged by occupational or moral standards.”[22]

I am afraid, then, it will not be possible to let Dr. Watson have the baby after all. Behaviorism has no ethics; no standard of conduct. Yet behaviorists are preparing to build “infant laboratories,” and to save children from “unscientific parents.” Dr. Watson, in particular, calls upon us to make “systematic, long-sustained genetic studies upon the human species, begun in infancy and continued until past adolescence,”--an excellent idea. And he demands it because only thus can we gain that “experimental control over human conduct so badly needed both for general social control and for individual happiness.” He has, then, ethical notions, though he nowhere explains how he came by them. What are they? This question at least can be answered by noting what sort of conditioning he wishes to give the reflexes. And of these, love should be the most important.

“The original situation which calls out the observable love responses seems to be the stroking or manipulation of some erogenous zone, tickling, shaking, gentle rocking, patting and turning upon the stomach across the attendant’s knee,” so psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist would have us believe. And sex emotions, however understood, become later on the touch-offs of the gonads and of the interstitial glands. How are these reflexes to be conditioned so as to act in response to something besides tickling, shaking, gentle rocking, patting and turning upon the stomach across the attendant’s knee? They are not to be conditioned at all. The behaviorist wants to condition fear and rage as much as possible, but he advises that love be left where we find it soon after birth.

“In our opinion,” says Dr. Watson (still in this same book) “conditioned love responses [i. e. responses awakened otherwise than directly through the aforementioned zones], especially those directed [towards] father and mother, breeding too great dependence upon parents as they do, are probably the most sinister factors in the whole system of human organization.” And he laments the fact that such conditioning is not only tolerated by society, but actually encouraged by it. This is a most melancholy philosophy, and seems to put masturbation above marriage.

And what of the future? “The research psychologists in the infant-behavior laboratories, once they are established, will in time learn how to remove these conditioned emotional reactions.”

No doubt parents frequently do make their children too dependent. So Dr. Watson advises that babies be hard-boiled; for the conditioning which he objects to takes place, according to his own account, chiefly during the second year.

A certain physician in a once-notorious book, entitled “_Les Civilisées_,” insists that another of the characters, generally considered much debauched, is entirely normal and healthy, “_parce qu’il ne cherche pas les femmes que par le coït_.” Our leading behaviorist is more civilized still, for he says:[23]

“In observing the two-year-old only child brought up by an unscientific mother, we find that the child cries unless held in the lap of the mother ... will sleep only when in bed with the mother.... Verbalization [speech] begins: it clusters around the mother just as ... manual and bodily activity clusters around the mother. In a similar way the gut reactions have their center of reference in the mother. Manual, verbal and emotional reactions are tied together by this one, all-exciting stimulus,”--the mother, to wit.

Which means that the gut-reactions, or the stir of the unstriped muscles along the intestinal tract, are what the child feels when it loves its mother, or would be if it could feel anything; and that if the mother be not scientific and careful, there is apt to ensue a “conditioning” likely to depose the gut from its position of supremacy. Unless the behaviorists can save us, our native, purely physical, almost mechanical lust runs the danger of being swallowed up by sentiment and affection.

This danger has been avoided in some parts of the world. Katherine Mayo, whose book, “Mother India,” has received deserved attention, says that the “whole pyramid of India’s woes, material and spiritual poverty, sickness, melancholy, ineffectiveness, not forgetting the subconscious conviction of inferiority which [the Hindu] forever bears and advertises by his gnawing and imaginative alertness for social affronts,” is due to an excess of tumescence, to sex dominant and rampant in Indian life. She is not speaking of the India of dreaming, Vedantic philosophers, but of the real India of every-day life, which she has studied at first hand. There sexual impulses, indulged in upon a purely erogenous plane, are fostered and encouraged even by religion--by the Kali belief; by the “phallic cult for females”; by the training of girl babies so that they may become the playthings of the carnal passions of men. I do not see where we could find a better picture of what is likely to happen to us when Dr. Watson’s “infant-behavior laboratories” once accomplish their task.

And now, having measured the loveliness of sex by the degree of excitement existing in the erogenous zones, Dr. Watson offers us another test for the excellence of conduct in general.

“In my opinion, one of the most important elements in the judging of personality, character and ability is the history of the individual’s yearly achievements. We can measure this objectively by the length of time the individual stayed in his various positions--the yearly increases he received in his earnings.... If the individual is a writer, we should want to draw a curve of the prices he gets for his stories year by year. If from our leading magazines he receives the same average price per word for his stories at thirty that he received at twenty-four, the chances are he is a hack writer and will never do anything but that.”

Bertrand Russell (upon whose authority I take this quotation) has tried to apply this criterion to “Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Milton and Blake,” and confesses himself staggered by the result.

It seems strange that Dr. Watson should have selected excellence in writing--even excellence marked in dollars--as an instance of a workable, objective substitute for those old and by him discredited subjectivities, right and wrong. “A word,” he says,[24] “is just an explosive clutter of sound made by expelling the breath over the tongue, teeth and lips whenever we get around [near to?] objects.” It does not appear how the clutter can be much improved when we express it in written symbols. In neither case does it mean anything.

“Meaning,” according to “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” “never arrives in the scientific observations of behavior.... An animal or human being ‘means’ what he does.” That is, he does not mean what he does. His doing is his meaning. If he makes a clutter of sounds, that is all there is to it. “It is often said that thinking somehow peculiarly reveals meaning. If we look upon thinking as a form of action ... such speculations concerning meaning lose their mystery and hence their charm.”[25]

“To answer what the church means to men,” he continues, “it is necessary to look upon the church as a stimulus and find out what reactions are called out, [and] why.... This might lead us into folklore ... into the influence of parents upon children, causing the race to project the father and mother into a heavenly state hereafter ... finally into the realms of the incest-complex, homosexual tendencies, and so on.”

I do not comprehend the “and so on.” It would seem that we had already gone on about as far as we could go. This passage, unlike our speculations concerning meaning in thinking, has not lost its mystery. Its charm speaks for itself. But one thing is clear. Thinking is speaking, and a word is an explosive clutter of sound.

Not always audible, however. Dr. Watson reduces the greater part of our thought to what he terms “sub-vocal speech.” And Mr. Eggen agrees. “We do not think with our brain ... we think with our muscles,” he says.[26] The yokel, always suspected of thinking with his feet, thus comes into his own.

“Thinking,” says the behaviorist,--and I now quote from David Wechsler, “Psychology as a Practical Science in Modern Life,”[27]--“thinking is but a sub-vocal speech--that is, it consists of certain muscular movements of the throat and chest [like those observed in a semi-literate man when he is attempting to read to himself] which are not accompanied by the production of sounds.” _Id est_, they are not _always_ accompanied by sounds, and some of them are observable only by means of instruments. The child, we are told, begins by doing all his thinking aloud--but some of us eventually learn to do it without noise. Prof. Wechsler adds that the muscular theory of thinking is “not as far-fetched as it seems.”

Why is it not? Because these sub-vocal movements seem always to be going on when we are thinking, and to some minds--or should I say muscles?--it seems logical to say that an accompaniment or a consequence is a cause. The same sort of sub-vocal speech will lead us to conclude that the foam in the wake of a steamer is what causes the vessel to go. I have often noticed that a little troupe of dogs usually accompanies Mrs. Belfeather in her walks in the park. I now learn that these dogs _are_ Mrs. Belfeather.

That great psychologist, Eric Peters, once said to Chlorine Garnet, “I uses my eyes to see with an’ my brains to think thoughts.”[28] Evidently Peters is not a behaviorist. Neither was Shenute, who died in the year 451, famous for his anti-pagan propaganda among the Copts of Egypt. But he seems to have had some of our moderns in mind, for he said: “They also make the sound of birds, having filled books, for themselves and you, with vain words: Tinks! Tinks! Kwaks! Kwaks! saying: We are making the sound of birds.”

“What possible good does it do,” demands Dr. Watson,[29] “when discussing brick-laying or sub-vocal arithmetic to guess at what goes on in the synapse, in the efferent or afferent leg of the reflex arc, or in the muscle itself?” Such problems, he adds, “belong to the realm of physiology, and this section of physiology has not yet been written.”

So he proceeds to write it, not as physiology, but as behaviorism. These “Kwaks! Kwaks! Tinks! Tinks!” and explosive clutterings of ours must be conditioned. And they begin to get conditioned the moment the parents begin to pay some attention to them--which usually happens without delay. Snoodlekins explodes, “Dada! Dada!” Paterfamilias is brought into the presence. Wrong! The explosions continue. A watch is displayed and dismembered. Wrong again! Then somebody hits upon the rag doll in the corner. It fills the bill. Silence reigns, interrupted only by goo-goos. And if the parents or other attendants did not afterwards undo this conditioning by beating upon iron bars or what not, and so insist upon the rising generation adapting its language to the usages current among the old, “dada” would become the child’s word for doll. This is a faithful translation into every day kwaks of what Dr. Watson says in the more refined tinks of the scholar, and I do not wish for a moment to deny that things happen much as he says they do.

But the point is, Snoodlekins discovers through the trial and error method that explosive clutterings of sound will cause things to move around the house. He finds that if he says “doll,” slaves will hurry to place a doll in his hands. Does this not give the word a meaning, in the meaningful sense of the term? Does it not imply will and purpose upon the baby’s part; consciousness, likes, dislikes; the ability to feel pain and pleasure; the desire to eschew the one and pursue the other? And do we not by implication admit similar intelligence and emotional capacity on the part of the parents and attendants? Otherwise why should they care whether a yell or a coo assaulted their ears?

“Every time I question young children, or even college graduates,” Dr. Watson complains,[30] “I am struck by their dumbness.” But surely they are not as dumb as this. By dumb presumably he means unverbalized, speechless. But of what use is speech to an unconscious, will-less piece of protoplasm without a mind? Can the imagination of even the least dumb among us see how or why a speech-mechanism has been developed and an almost infinite number of reflex arcs conditioned to respond to its innumerable demands if there be nobody anywhere in a condition to know whether silence or bedlam reigns?

Dr. Watson objects to the evidence of “journalists” being received upon any matter involving human conduct, because they always make their depositions “in terms of some phases of the original nature of man.” But nobody can say anything otherwise. A man born deaf could understand Beethoven’s “Choral Symphony” in terms of acoustics, because on that side he would not be “dumb.” But could he understand what it is which the world prizes in the melody that lifts up Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the last movement? And yet acoustics explains everything in music--except the music. Trying to describe human conduct except in terms of the nature of man is like trying to dip a net into the sea without getting it wet.

“Consider for a moment what people mean, or at least should mean, when they say they are conscious or have consciousness,” the “Myth” proceeds. “They mean, in the words of the behaviorist, that they can carry on some kind of brief sub-vocal talk with ‘themselves’ behind the closed doors of the lips.” Do they, Dr. Watson? But what do you mean, “mean”? Have you not told us that “meaning never arrives in the scientific observations of behavior”? Have you not told us that we are nothing but a mass of reactions? Can one reaction “mean” anything to another reaction?

And why tell us that we “should” do this or that? You have given us only our “life history” as the determiner of our acts. That history found us with certain reflexes with which we had nothing to do; certain “situations” arose to which we automatically responded; our reflexes became “conditioned” in a way that we could neither help nor hinder. In “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist” you say, “A host of stimuli act concurrently, but the organism reacts now to one, now to another, depending upon which group of stimuli becomes prepotent.” It does not depend upon us, you see. The credit or the blame rests either with our original protoplasm or with the stimuli which have made up its life history. If slaves we were born, if in slavery we have grown up, you cannot set us free and make us morally responsible now by letting us talk a little sub-vocally to selves which do not exist.

Yet this is precisely what Dr. Watson attempts to do--or at least he warns us how helpless we will be if we don’t learn to talk. The old Chinese philosopher, Lao Tse, once said, “Those who do not know, talk; those who know keep silence.” Dr. Watson says, going on with his Myth of the Unconscious--calling it mythical because he prefers the no-conscious: “The child brought up in isolation or among taciturn parents or in groups where verbalization is frowned upon ... can only act when brought face to face with objects in their appropriate settings.” That is, he cannot think. “This is typical of the behavior of animals. It is typical of the behavior of many primitive peoples; of men like Jack Dempsey, Calvin Coolidge, or a great many athletes and acrobats.”[31]

If the acrobatic, athletic, primitive, Dempsey-like Calvin Coolidge has to be content not to think of consequences it is no great wonder that we could not get Eliza logically and behavioristically across the ice.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] “Behavior, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology,” New York, 1914.

[5] _Harper’s Magazine_, September, 1927.

[6] “The Training of Young Children,” _Harper’s Magazine_, August, 1927.

[7] From Dr. Watson’s own account of these experiments in “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist.”

[8] “The Behaviorist Looks at Instincts,” _Harper’s Magazine_, July, 1927.

[9] “Behavior, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology,” p. 1.

[10] Vol. XIII.

[11] September, 1926.

[12] “The Behaviorist Looks at Instincts,” _Harper’s Magazine_, July, 1927.

[13] “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” p. 215.

[14] “The Unconscious,” p. 59.

[15] “The Metaphysics of the Instrument,” in _The Monist_, July, 1927.

[16] “Varieties of Religious Experience,” Lecture III, “The Reality of the Unseen.”

[17] “The Behaviorist Looks at Instincts,” _Harper’s Magazine_, July, 1927.

[18] “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” p. 7.

[19] “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” p. 8.

[20] _Ibid._, p. 8.

[21] “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” p. 10.

[22] _Ibid._, p. 8.

[23] “The Myth of the Unconscious,” _Harper’s Magazine_, September, 1927.

[24] “The Myth of the Unconscious,” _Harper’s Magazine_, September, 1927.

[25] _Op. cit._, p. 355.

[26] _Current History_ for September, 1926.

[27] _Ibid._, December, 1926.

[28] “The Trained Flea,” by Octavus Roy Cohen, _Saturday Evening Post_, December 17, 1927.

[29] “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,” p. 372.

[30] “The Myth of the Unconscious,” _Harper’s Magazine_, September, 1927.

[31] _Harper’s Magazine_, September, 1927, page 104, col. 2.