The Effects of Atomistic Ontology
on the History of Psychology
by Teed Rockwell
(CSU Hayward)
Abstract
This article articulates the presuppositions that psychology inherited from logical positivism, and how those presuppositions effected the interpretation of data and research procedures. Despite the efforts of Wundt, his most well known disciples, Titchener and Külpe, embraced an atomistic view of experience which was at least partly responsible for many of their failures. When the behaviorists rejected the introspectionism of Titchener and Külpe, they kept their atomism, using the reflex as the fundamental psychological unit, rather than the sense datum. When cognitive psychology embraced functionalism, it made the most radical break from atomism in psychology's history, which is reason for optimism. However, there are still certain presuppositions which make cognitive psychology vulnerable to some of the weaknesses of atomism, and research in a variety of areas is starting to uncover them.
There
is much justification for the psychologist's claim that it is possible and
proper for the psychologist to ignore philosophy. If it is possible for
psychology to be a science at all, it must also be possible to take for granted
that certain kinds of things exist, and then start measuring them and/or
theorizing about them. But whenever a science enters into a crisis, whenever
its research program starts to disintegrate in some way, this usually means
that one has to start questioning the set of assumptions about one's subject
matter that formerly made the research project work so well. This set of
assumptions is called an ontology by philosophers. Ontologies include
implicit commitments to what kind of things exist, what determines the
essential nature of those things, and what things are more "ontologically
fundamental" than others. When A is more ontologically fundamental than B,
it is sometimes convenient to say that B is made of "A"s in some
sense, although that phrase contains ontological assumptions of its own which
are far from necessary. Those assumptions are an essential part of an
ontological position which has been so widely accepted by scientifically minded
people that it is often assumed to be the only possible scientific ontology.
This position is called atomism, and the following commitments are usually
considered to be essential to it.
According
to atomism, the universe consists of certain fundamental individuals, each of
which "is what it is" 1) without reference to any of the others, or
2) without reference to any of its parts[1]. What physicists call atoms are not thought of
today as being atoms in the second sense, for they are ontologically dependent
on ("made of") quarks. But physicists gave them this name originally
because it was assumed that they were atoms in this sense, and the fact that
physics continues to search for something like quarks shows that the
epistemological goals of atomism still motivate modern physics. And because
psychology has often used physics as the highest exemplar of a science, it has
been widely assumed that psychology must have atoms of its own if it is to
become a science. I will try to show in this paper that this assumption is
dangerously misleading, and continues to be so because it has been preserved
through many of psychology's scientific revolutions.
Atomistic
ontology's greatest danger comes from the fact that most forms of it deny the
existence of ontology altogether. It seems plausible, after all, that if atoms
are the only things that exist, and each atom is genuinely independent of every
other atom, there should be nothing that needs to be said about Being itself.
Those philosophers who have defended atomism have usually admitted that an
atomistic ontology is something of a paradox (As Wittgenstein's Tractatus
did with its ladder metaphor), have asserted that we must be skeptical about
all ontological and metaphysical claims (Hume), or have been driven by
atomism's inconsistencies to eventually reject it, (essentially all of the
logical positivists). However, for those that presuppose a philosophy rather
than actively formulate one, atomism has always had a strong appeal. Indeed,
the crudest forms of atomism are merely semiverbalized hostility towards
philosophy itself, which are made explicit only to justify spending as little
time thinking about philosophical issues as possible. This hostility makes it
extremely difficult for an atomist to see what sort of problems his ontology is
causing him, because it is only by explicitly formulating an ontology that one
can conceive of alternatives to it.
Many
researchers in the physical sciences can do their job without having to think
about ontology at all (although high level theoretical physics frequently has
to discuss specific ontological claims). For this reason, psychologists are
often uncomfortable discussing ontology and other philosophical issues. It
reminds them of their differences from the physical sciences, and seems to
imply a regression to the days of Wundt and James, when psychology was
considered to be a branch of philosophy and not a "real" science. But
now that philosophers have again been admitted into the psychological
discussion with the creation of the cognitive science community, hopefully
there will be less denial when ontological crises arise, and less likelihood of
their festering into stalemates.
Admittedly,
once one does seriously attempt the ontological enterprise, it is hard not to
sympathize with the atomist's skepticism towards the whole project. The use of
ponderous Teutonic neologisms never successfully hides the fact that all
ontologies are a ragtag collection of poetry and hunches. And most of the time
differences in ontological assumptions are purely academic in the worst sense,
utterly lacking in what James called cash value. And even when consistent
adherence to certain ontological principles can be genuinely pernicious, it is
often possible for practicing scientists to avoid these dangers simply by being
inconsistent.
There
are, however, times in the history of science when certain stalemates can be
best understood by articulating the ontologies of the researchers. If the following analysis is even
partially correct, atomistic ontology has been a great source of trouble for
psychology, and consequently any hopeful alternative deserves serious
consideration.
The Introspectionists and the
Myth of the Given
If
one denies the existence of some kind of a priori
knowledge[2], there is only one way we can ever build our
theories on a foundation of certainty. The "this" which confronts us
in any given moment must be present to us in its entirety, distinct and
independent from each other "this" we confront in the past and
future. Thus 'tabula rasa" epistemologies like Locke's must claim that our
experience is divided up into discrete and independent sense data, and if we
believe our knowledge reflects the world, we must believe that the world is
similarly divided. This further implies that our innate ignorance of the world
can be laboriously overcome by carefully observing these directly observed
moments, and then piecing them together like parts of a jigsaw puzzle. If this
were the nature of things, the introspective psychology founded by Edward
Titchener and Oswald Külpe in the early twentieth century would have been
the most likely candidate to discover and categorize those directly observed
moments.
Titchener
and Külpe considered their work to be built on the principles and
laboratory techniques of the great German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. In fact, the term
"introspectionist", which was coined by the behaviorists to give a
label to what they were rebelling against, is usually considered to be applied
primarily to Wundt, with Titchener and Külpe being seen as Wundt's
disciples. But Wundt, like Marx and Jesus, had disciples who often violated his
principles while speaking in his name.
Wundt himself, being trained in the philosophy of Kant, did not accept
the atomistic picture developed by his disciples, and in fact denounced this
aspect of their work in print. The atomism of Titchener and Külpe was
created by quoting Wundt out of context on those few points where he expressed
some agreement with the fashionable postivism of the time, and ignoring or
contradicting him on almost everything else. Nevertheless, there were elements
of atomism in Wundt's approach that make it difficult to completely untangle
his ideas from the more simplistic atomism of his two most influential
followers.
Wundt
believed that experience was shot through and through with structure and
interrelationships, and that many of those structures were conditioned by what
he called affective components. "Affect" was Wundt's generic term for the emotional aspects of
experience, which derived their significance and impact from the volitions and
projects of the self as a whole. (see Blumenthal 1975 p. 1085) Wundt called our
awareness of this aspect of experience apperception, which like Kant's use of the same term, implied
that there was a unified sense of self underlying the individual sensations.
(although unlike Kant, Wundt stressed Schopenhauer's point that the unifying
force that constituted the self was the will.)
Wundt did feel that certain individual
sensations presented themselves directly to us, but because of the influence of
the affective components of the apperceptive self, they rarely (if ever)
presented themselves in their true guise. When we notice one idea following
another in ordinary experience, we are not, according to Wundt, experiencing
the process of two atomic thought elements associating with each other.
According to Blumenthal, the term that Wundt used for the ideas that we
encounter in ordinary experience is gebilde, which in other contexts is often translated as
"structure" "formation" or "creation." Wundt goes to great lengths to
argue that the laws of association described by the British empiricists cannot
fully explain how gebilde come into being and interrelate. (Wundt
1897 pp. 224-228). In fact, Wundt did not believe that experimental laboratory
methods would be able to explain these higher level associations at all. He
dealt with them in a more descriptive and anthropological manner in his ten
volume Volkerpsychologie,
which described the effects on consciousness of such cultural factors as myth,
religion, law, and art.
Wundt did believe that gebilden were
made up of what he called elementary associations, and accepted the
"necessity of elementary associations as antecedents to all complex
combinations" (Wundt 1897 p.202). But he also said that "Psychological
elements as isolated persisting entities have no other reality than as products
of our conceptual abstraction which for reasons of research we may wish to
think of as elemental qualities" (quoted in Blumenthal 1979). Because both
Baars (1986 p.31) and Danziger[3] (1979 p. 221 ) admit that Wundt did sometimes use
introspection to study simple sensations, I think that Wundt was ambivalent on
this point and/or changed his mind later in life. But there is no question that
Wundt always believed that most of psychology's subject matter would be ignored
if it concerned itself only with analyzing experience into discrete
sensations. And unfortunately this was how future historians (especially
Titchener's student Boring) ended
up describing Wundt's research goals.
"Complex combinations" in the first quote above is almost
certainly a translation of some form of "gebilde" (according to Blumenthal 1975, the most
common translation of gebilde in Wundt texts is "compound"). But the
fact that this choice of translation stresses the analyzability of gebilden, rather than their uniqueness and wholeness,
shows how Wundt's English speaking disciples misinterpreted his work. For them,
Wundt's Volkerpsychologie was not the capstone of his psychology,
but a change of subject.
Both
Titchener and Wundt agreed that it was impossible to study the higher level gebilden in
the laboratory. The difference between the two was that Wundt concluded from
this that laboratory science must be supplemented by the more humanistic and
historical Volkerpsychologie ,
and Titchener concluded that the higher level functionings could be ignored. In
order for Titchener to justify his methods, he had to conclude that the higher
mental functions could be analyzed without remainder into the lower level
functions. This was why Titchener usually translated "gebilde" with
words like "compound" or "aggregate". These words implied an analogy with an
atomistic interpretation of the concepts of chemistry, an analogy which,
according to Blumenthal, Wundt had considered but ultimately rejected. This
analogy with chemistry was unacceptable to Wundt for two reasons. First of all,
it ignored the emergent nature of conscious experience by seeing gebilde as
mere aggregates or compounds of elementary sensations. And secondly, it implied
that experience was the passive byproduct of the interactions of its parts.
Wundt believed that "Volition is the paradigm psychological
phenomenon" (quoted in Blumenthal
1979) which meant that the primary organizing principle for consciousness was
"purpose, values, anticipations of the future" (ibid). Even the most
apparently immediate experience consisted not only of sensations (which Wundt
apparently did think of as being something like psychological atoms) but also
feelings. Feelings were the fundamental components of emotions, and were always
constituted by their relationship to the affective component of experience i.e.
to the volitions of the unified self given in apperception.
simple feelings depend on the
relations in which each single feeling stands to the whole succession of
psychical processes. (Wundt 1897 p.84)
despite
the fact that Wundt did believe that in some sense there were such things as
simple feelings, he did not mean to imply by this that they could be understood
without reference to a subject that felt them.
Titchener
was able to see himself as following in Wundt's footsteps only by
de-emphasizing certain aspects of Wundt's thought, and rejecting others
outright. Anderson 1975 points out that Titchener doubted that Wundt considered
the Volkerpsychologie to be all that important, and that
Titchener only translated volume one of Wundt's Grundzüge der
Physiologischen Psychologie (foundations of physiological
psychology), because it was relevant to the task of analyzing experience into
its elementary associations. This meant that Titchener's introspectionism was
influenced by only one third of the Grundzüge, and also ignored the dozens of other volumes
written by Wundt on the more complex aspects of human experience. Titchener
also took exception to Wundt's theory of feeling and discarded his concept of
apperception. (Anderson 1975 p.383). Titchener eventually concluded that the
purposive elements which were the essential source of Wundt's psychic causality
actually interfered with scientific research. Titchener thought that the goal
of psychology was to study the "existential experience" that was left
when 'purpose , value, social utility, in short, meaning, have all been
removed." (Danziger 1979 p. 223) What was left, of course, was nothing but
naked sense data. He thus turned Wundt's
perspective, which was originally heavily influenced by Kant and
Schopenhauer, into something like Humean atomism. The goal of Titchener's
laboratory psychology became to construct what Güzeldere 1995 calls
"an atomic table of the human mind." (p.38) Titchener believed that he could discover these elementary
psychological atoms with disciplined introspective techniques he saw as being
similar to those developed by Wundt. And then, Titchener hoped, we could find
laws of aggregation and combination that would explain (without positing
emergent properties) how these elementary associations could give rise to more
complex psychological properties.
This
seemed like a reasonable goal to those who accepted the positivism of Mach and Avenarius, which was very much in
the air at the time. Their
assumption that the immediately given was describable by observation sentences
required an atomism that enabled those sentences to stand on their own feet
without any support from higher level theories. And that level of epistemic
independence would only be possible if there were somewhere in the flux of our
experiences moments that brought us into direct contact with the world. Many of
Wundt's students, especially Külpe and Titchener, considered themselves to
be positivists. Wundt himself, however, was at best ambivalent towards
positivism. He did agree with the positivists that metaphysics and science
should be separated, and saw his goal as the "exclusion of all metaphysics
from psychology" (Wundt 1897).
But unlike the positivists, he did not think that the observation
sentences of the natural sciences were independent of theories.
Natural science seeks to discover
the nature of objects without reference to the subject. The knowledge that it
produces is therefore mediate or conceptual. . . . This abstraction makes it
necessary continually to supplement reality with hypothetical elements. . .
.Science makes up for this lack of direct contact with the objective processes,
by forming supplementary hypothetical concepts of the objective properties of
matter. (ibid.)
He
did, however, think that the subject matter of psychology, unlike that of the
other sciences, was immediately given to each of us.
The knowledge thus gained in psychology is, therefore,
immediate and perceptual, -- perceptual in the broad sense of the term in
which, not only sense-perceptions, but all concrete reality is distinguished
from all that is abstract and conceptual in thought. Psychology can exhibit the
interconnection of the contents of experience, as these interconnections are
actually presented to the subject, only by avoiding entirely the abstractions
and supplementary concepts of natural science (ibid.)
Here,
it seems to me, Wundt is trying to have it both ways. He acknowledges that the
other sciences must relate their observations to things beyond immediate
experience, and thus their knowledge is necessarily abstract. He also
acknowledges that psychology does not study individual atoms of experiences,
but the interconnections between experiences as well. And yet because the
interconnections studied in psychology are between other experiences, he wants
to claim that these connections are not abstract in the way that the concepts
that connect entities in the other sciences are abstract. This idea that
connections between experiences are every bit as present to us as the
experiences themselves may have been an inspiration for James' radical
empiricism, and Dewey's theory of experience. But Dewey, at least, was aware
that this kind of unified experience was changed by the act of inquiring into
it, and that inquiry required abstract theories which separated us from this
immediacy. He did not think, as Wundt appears to have thought, that the
structures in our experience could be both expressible in theories and
immediate.
In
fact, there are also passages in Wundt's writings that indicate he sometimes
thought that it was impossible for the elementary sensations to ever be
directly given in experience. Psychological atoms were, in some strange way, as
abstract and theoretical as the atoms of physics.
. . .psychical elements, or the
absolutely simple and irreducible components of psychical phenomena, can not be
found by analysis alone, but only with the aid of abstraction. This abstraction
is rendered possible by the fact that the elements are in reality united in
different ways. If the element a is connected in one case with the elements b,
c, d . . ., in another with b', c', d' . . ., it is possible to abstract it
from all the other elements. because [sic] none of them is always united with
it.
If this were the case, in what sense
could psychology be seen as dealing with immediate, rather than abstract
knowledge? This equivocation between the experienced and the abstract was
ultimately the same inconsistency that destroyed positivism, despite Wundt's
valiant attempt to separate himself from it.
Titchener,
in contrast, was apparently so under the spell of positivism that he could
specifically state positivism's central inconsistency without noticing that
there was any problem.[4] He
claimed that the atoms of subjective experience were the same atoms described
in the observation sentences of physics, only under a different context.[5] Boring 1950 describes Titchener's position
thusly.
Both psychology and physics work
immediately with experience, but they regard it in different ways; physics
takes the "point of view" of experience "regarded as independent
of the experiencing individual", psychology the "point of view"
of experience "regarded as dependent upon the experiencing
individual". (p. 417)
To
claim, as Wundt did, that one science yields direct knowledge while all others
rely on abstractions is at worst a unjustified form of special pleading. But it
is (from a modern perspective, at least) self-evidently contradictory to claim,
as Titchener did, that experience can be both immediate and mediated by two
different points of view.
Nevertheless,
if one ignores the inherent contradictions of atomism, (as so many people of
that time did), it is plausible to assume that if elementary sensations
existed, the techniques of the introspectionists would discover them. After all, musicians
learn how to hear elements in sound sensations that are unnoticeable to people
who do not have their specialized training. Why shouldn't psychologists with
special introspective training eventually be able to recognize the fundamental
elements of all sensations? But alas, it was not to be. Titchener's laboratory
in Cornell discovered 44,435 "fundamental" sensations and
Külpe's laboratory in Leipzig discovered only around 12,000, with very
little overlap between the two. (quoted in Güzeldere 1995 p. 39 from
Boring 1942). The idea of 44,000 fundamental anythings is clearly a
contradiction in terms, and the fact that two different laboratories got such
different results made it impossible to take either set of data seriously.
Something was clearly wrong here, but what?
Part
of the problem was the apparent impossibility of mediating between two
conflicting introspective reports. (see Güzeldere 1995 and Baars 1986
pp.32-33). I think, however, that the failure of Titchener's and Külpe's
laboratories to find any elemental sensations can also be interpreted
positively. The fact that no one was able to find these elemental sensations
after so much hard and careful work is, I believe, pretty good evidence that
there aren't any. The results they got were just the sort of results one would
expect if perceptual experience was a process all the way down.[6] If elementary associations had been directly
accessible to immediate experience, those associations would probably have revealed themselves
to the methods of the introspectionist school. But if consciousness is
fundamentally a continuous process without discrete parts, in which each moment
is shaped by the context in which it occurs, then any attempt to study it by
performing distinct acts of observation will almost certainly create an
artifactual "atom" with each observation. It's rather like trying to
slice up water with a knife. You will succeed in dividing up the water if you
run a knife through it, but it will flow back together again after you've
stopped cutting. And the next time you cut it, it will flow differently.
A
more effective metaphor would be a liquid that flows more slowly and thus gives
an illusion of concreteness. Let us suppose we are trying to find the
fundamental components of a sauce pan full of oatmeal by throwing it against
the wall. If we assumed that throwing was an experimental process guaranteed to
reveal the true constituents of the oatmeal, we would measure each of the
shapes that cohered against the wall, and then classify them. The next time we
threw the oatmeal against the wall, we would get a completely different set of
shapes, which, if we maintained our faith in this process, we would again
measure and classify. If we became suspicious of the large number of different
shapes we were getting, with no repetition of patterns, we might train
ourselves to throw the oatmeal against the wall in exactly the same way every
time, which would probably decrease the number of possible shapes down to a few
thousand. We would also be greatly annoyed when we discovered that someone else
was throwing oatmeal against a wall using a different wrist action, and getting
a completely different set of fundamental components.
This
is a rather cruel caricature of what happened to the introspectionist
psychologists, but it does give some sense of why the introspectionist
laboratories could sometimes get consistent results "in house" which
nevertheless conflicted with the results of other laboratories. In no sense,
however, should my willingness to ridicule be taken as a lack of respect. Without
the evidence provided by the introspectionist's heroic failures, the claim that
experience is fundamentally a process would only be a philosopher's
speculation. In fact, when William James claimed that experience was an
absolute process in his Essays in Radical Empiricism, it was dismissed
by most psychologists as a philosopher's speculation. The only way to determine
the relative merits of atomistic versus process theories of sensation was to do
what the introspectionists did: Choose an alternative and spend thousands of
hours doing experiments to test it. We must not forget that if we consider
falsifiability to be a scientific virtue, it should be to a scientist's credit
when his theory is decisively falsified.
There
were two different and opposite reactions to the failure of atomistic
introspectionism.
1) Many European psychologists decided
to keep introspection and reject atomism. They started a movement called
gestalt psychology which, in the words of one of its founders, "objected
to this premise, the thesis that the psychologist's thinking must begin with a
consideration of such elements. . . it may be tempting to assume that all
perceptual situations consist of independent, very small components. . . {but}
Are we allowed to impose on perception an extreme simplicity which,
objectively, it may not possess?" (Köhler 1959 p.727). Note, however, that even in 1959, when gestalt psychology had
been around for decades, that Köhler was only willing to be agnostic about
elemental sensations, and could not quite bring himself to deny their existence
altogether. The most the Gestalt psychologists were willing to claim was that
there are lots of important perceptual properties that elementary sensations
could not explain. Figure-ground distinctions, for example, were reversible
depending upon expectations and context, and they seemed to be essential to
almost all of the experiences of discreteness that we encounter in normal
perception. But in spite of these and many other important discoveries, the Gestalt
psychologists apparently did not feel they could dispense with the concept of
elementary sensation and claim that all sensations were emergent gestalts, even
though they felt most of the interesting ones were. Their fundamental position
was thus not that different from Wundt's, although the widespread
misinterpretation of Wundt by Titchener and Boring made it difficult to see
this. (Green 1922 helps to perpetuate this myth when he says that "The aim
of {Gestalt Psychologist Max Wertheimer's} criticism was the atomistic
psychologys of Wundt. . . and other European psychologists of the time." )
Both Wundt and the gestalt psychologists believed that most of the experiential
qualities that are most obviously present to us are emergent and cannot be reduced
to their parts. The only difference between Wundt and the gestalt psychologists
on this issue was that the latter wanted to study emergent properties in the
laboratory, and Wundt studied many of the most important emergent properties
outside of the laboratory.
2)American
psychology, in contrast to gestalt psychology, concluded that the cause of the problem was the use of
introspection, which was one reason why American behaviorism demanded that
psychology should no longer concern itself with mental states at all. The
behaviorists did not reject the atomist ideal of science, however. As Danziger
1979 puts it:
A
later generation was to attribute the weakness of Titchener's foundations to
his reliance on introspective experience. . . The behaviorist revolt did not question Titchener's
positivist ideals. On the contrary, it adopted them with enthusiasm; it simply
considered that the wrong path had been chosed to reach them. . .the switch from Titchenerian introspectionism
to behaviorism must be characterized, not as a revolution, but as a reformation
within the broader movement of positivist psychology. (p.219)
The
behaviorist's devotion to this ideal, however, eventually caused them to
experience a crisis of their own.
The Reflex as the Unit of
Behaviorist Atomism
That
Titchener considered an atomistic analysis to be the only possible way of
scientifically studying anything is evident from the following quotation
James' chapter on The Stream of
Thought, which has already become a classic upon the anti-atomistic side,
posits the fact that "thinking of some sort goes on." Its author then
proceeds: "How does it go on? We notice immediately five important
characters in the process." And this discrimination of characters is obviously an instance of that mode of
analysis which James later terms 'the process of abstraction.
There is no doubt, then, that a
descriptive psychology must be analytical. (Titchener 1912 p. 496]
Thus,
for Titchener, to say anything at
all about a subject was to analyze it, and to analyze something was to break it
down into fundamental atoms. This conflation was also accepted by the
behaviorists, but because the behaviorists blamed all of the failures of
introspective psychology on its acceptance of subjective experience, they could
no longer base their analysis on elementary sensations or sense data. At the
same time, they wanted to have an atom which was unique to psychology, which
could provide a foundation for a
science that could be distinct from physics. They thought they had found such a
foundation with Pavlov's concept of the reflex..[7]
Pavlov
originally thought of his concept as being genuinely neurological, but the
American behaviorists rightly concluded that his references to neurology were
purely speculative. They decided, under the influence of the logical
positivists, that one could directly observe behavior within the context of an
operationalist science of behavior, and each observation revealed a single
reflex. When these reflexes were chained together, they could supposedly
account for all of the behavior of organisms. The problems that eventually led
to behaviorism's demise are too numerous to fully discuss here. But I maintain
that at least some of them were caused by the same ontological commitment to
atomism that destroyed Titchener's introspectionism. In the next sections of
this paper, I will discuss two areas of behaviorist psychology where atomism
caused problems, and the solutions that have been proposed to deal with those
problems. One of these solutions, often called functionalism, is now the
dominant ontology in cognitive science but suffers from a commitment to
something like the atomism that plagued both introspectionism and behaviorism.
The other solution, called either contextualism or ecological psychology, is, I
believe, the best available alternative to atomism, but it requires us to
recognize that psychology may be much harder to do than we feared. Many
psychologists may find this conclusion disturbing, but if it is the closest
thing we have to the truth, the only scientific choice is to accept it.
The Fall of Verbal Behaviorism
In
order for atomism to maintain any semblance of coherence, it has to downplay
the significance of any properties that appear to emerge when the atoms are
combined in any way. The most effective way of doing this is to give the atoms
intrinsic properties that make it possible to predict what will happen when any
possible set of atoms is combined. The physical science that is most atomistic
is chemistry. It often operates at a level where it is possible to see the
chemical elements as different components in a kind of submicroscopic lego
set. Because atom "A"
has a certain number of electrons in its outer shell, and atom "B"
has the right number of holes, they will combine to form the molecule
"AB". Given the premises of chemistry, this follows with as much
necessity as any conceptual truth. (Whether the premises of chemistry are
themselves true is an empirical question, which is why chemistry is an
empirical science.) Like Lego sets, chemical elements can be combined to
produced properties that are not possessed by any of the individual elements.
H2O is wet, even though neither hydrogen nor oxygen is wet, , and Lego pieces
can be put together to resemble choo-choo trains, even though no individual
piece looks like a choo-choo train. Nevertheless, classical reductionism claims
that the wetness of the water, and the "choo-choo train"- hood of the
lego ensemble, are nothing but the sum of those particular parts. I will
probably win more enemies than friends for questioning that assumption, so I
won't. But fortunately for this paper I don't have to, because behaviorism had
a much tougher form of atomism, which made it impossible for it to grant the
mind even as much structure as a Lego choo-choo train.
The
reason it is possible to make things like choo-choo trains with a Lego set is
that there are more than two connectors on each Lego piece. This makes
it possible to have structures with a variety of shapes in three dimensions (like
choo-choo trains). The behaviorist reflex, however, has only two connectors: an
input for the stimulus and an output for the response. This makes possible only a one
dimensional structure, of which there are only two possible forms: the chain
and the loop (which is only a chain that connects back to itself.) This made it
impossible to have even the kind of innocently emergent structures that can be
made from Lego sets. This, however, was exactly the way the behaviorists wanted
it. Any attempt to say anything about the mind itself was considered to be
either a Cartesian superstition, or an unjustified speculation about neurology.
As long as they were only talking about individual reflexes, they felt that all
of their knowledge was based on direct observations of what subject X did at
time T, and no references to mental properties would be necessary. The behaviorists would admit, under
duress, that neurological structures of some sort had to be responsible for the
behavior of complex organisms. But they felt that the behavior itself could be
analyzed into discrete atomistic stimulus-response connections, and that one
could remain agnostic about what sort of neurology was responsible for those
connections.
There
is a grain of truth to this which was expressed quite well by behaviorist
Howard Rachlin in his interview in Baars 1986.
Take this analogy: You're Mario
Andretti, the greatest racing driver in the world. To what extent does Mario
Andretti know how a car is built? It may be useful to some extent, but there
are many people who know much more than he does. But he knows how to drive the
car. That is a different kind of knowledge. In psychology. . .we are treating
each other as cars and predicting and controlling each other's behavior. To
what extent does the knowledge of how the nervous system is built help you?
Maybe a little. . . Somebody who knows about the engines of racing cars may be
able to tell Mario Andretti not to drive the car that day because there is
something wrong with it. But that is a different level of knowledge than
Mario's expertise, which is how hard you push the accelerator on a certain
curved road, when to turn the wheel, and when not to turn the wheel. People at
Mario's level I consider to be behaviorists. The engine people are doing
physiological psychology. (p.95)
If
we follow out this analogy's implications, we can see both what is wrong and
right about the behaviorist view of psychological properties. It is true that
knowing how a system functions is a different kind of knowledge from knowing
its physiology, although physiology is frequently useful in understanding
function. But any attempt to codify Mario Andretti's knowledge in the atomistic
terms demanded by behaviorism simply wouldn't work. It might be that Mario's
knowledge is not stored in any sort of theoretical structure at all, but
actually in a series of vector transformations performed by connectionist nets.
(a possibility that could not even be considered without the benefit of
concepts derived from physiology). But behaviorists cannot claim that their
knowledge is this kind of unverbalizable "knowing-how" behavior.
After all, they do write lab reports, and people read them, so the knowledge
they produce is verbalizable knowledge. And an atomistic laundry list of stimulus-response
connections could not explain all of the different reasons and ways Mario would
turn the wheel or step on the accelerator with the precision of a cognitive
science explanation that would posit an interacting system of functional
modules. Wheel, accelerator, brake,
visual input from the road etc. would all have to interact with each
other in ways that, as far as we know, can only be verbally expressed with some
kind of decision tree. A simple list of behaviors could not make any sense of
the factors that lead to his decision, and would probably be too long to be
stored in the human brain even if it were possible to construct such a list. Of
course, a lot of important things were learned about cognitive abilities using
behaviorist methods. But this may merely illustrate the point I made earlier
that scientists often adapt to bad ontologies by being inconsistent. Rachlin
himself, a few pages after describing the analogy quoted above, admits that he
uses the concept of value in his own research, which is not a directly
observable stimulus-response connection. But he claims "It' s probably a
mistake. . . I would assume that if my theory were perfectly developed, you
could get rid of value." (Baars 1986 p.98). Most other psychologists, however,
eventually lost faith in the usefulness of squeezing their results into the
atomistic stimulus-response mold.
Chomsky's
famous review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior was probably the single most
important document in discrediting behaviorism, and one of its most recurrent
themes was the inability of individual S-R connections to account for the
intricacies of language. Language learning could not be seen as learning how to
respond to particular stimuli with particular responses, because there are many
different appropriate ways to respond to any given stimulus, and many different
stimuli that can produce the same response. The only way to account for this
disparity is to posit some kind of structure more complicated than the
stimulus-response chain, which could weigh and compare a huge variety of
factors and make appropriate decisions based on those comparisons. According to
Chomsky, this structure would have
to be capable not just of selecting the appropriate behavior from a pre-set
repertoire, but also be able to
generate completely novel behavior. (hence the term "generative
grammar"). Linguistics prior to Chomsky had tried to reduce language to
the chain-like structure called Finite State Markov sources. (See Baars 1986
pp. 342-344) Once Chomsky had demonstrated that these chain-like structures
were inadequate to explain language, it became respectable for a variety of
psychological researchers to admit that their data was also too complex to be
comprehensible as a chain of ontologically independent S-R connections. And
this was what a made possible a shift from atomistic to functionalist
explanations.
The Differences between
Atomism and Functionalism
Behaviorism and functionalism agree upon
one crucial point: There are many things about the mind that cannot be learned
by dissecting brains. Functionalist psychology studies behavior, not
neurophysiology, and recognizes that its theories are to some degree distinct
from neurophysiology (at least in the short run). But unlike behaviorism,
functionalism admits that it posits its fundamental explanatory
entities. Behaviorism's operationalism required it to claim that it only observed
what it studied, and never posited anything. Even though behaviorism's
anti-mentalism forbid it to talk about things like sense data, the
operationalist claim that it is possible to observe without theorizing only
makes sense if we accept what Sellars called the myth of the given. In order
for a single entity, such as an S-R connection, to be immediately given to the
observations of the operationalist, it must be ontologically independent of
whatever might be observed later.
When
the functionalist divides the world up into comprehensible parts, however,
these parts are not ontologically independent. Each of the parts is what it is
because of its relationship to the other parts in some sort of systematic
structure. Each part must be distinct from the other parts, for it is only by
being distinct from the rest of the system that it can relate to it. But
without those relations, the part itself could not exist. The players in the
game of baseball, for example, are ontologically constituted by both their
relationship to and their distinctness from the players. Unless there were
distinct differences between what the pitcher does, what the batter does, and
what the third baseman does, there would be no game of baseball, only an
unseemly free-for-all. But that does not mean that before there was ever a game
of baseball, there were batters, pitchers and third basemen sitting out in the
universe, waiting for some bright
fellow to get the idea of putting them together into a game.[8]
Consequently,
Titchener was wrong when he claimed that analyses cannot be performed without
accepting atomism. It is only the myth of immediately given experience that
makes atomism seem even possible. Without it, whatever analysis we perform
binds the analysanda more tightly together, for every separation clarifies
their relationship to each other.
The functional analyses of cognitive psychology acknowledge that their
goal is to unify the data they discover, not simply observe it, and that this
unity can only be achieved by making inferences that go beyond the data that
inspired them. In some sense, the whole must be greater than, or possess
qualities not attributable to, the mere list of its parts. The dangerously
misleading assumption that "real scientists don't theorize, they just look
at the facts", has been abandoned, because a study of the history of
science has revealed that even physicist's observations are always shaped by
theories. Cognitive psychologists have thus ironically become more like the
physical sciences than behaviorism or introspectionism ever were, and it has
accomplished this by abandoning the atomism that positivism erroneously
attributed to the physical sciences.
Cognitive psychology is consequently a
radical break from the atomism of both the introspectionists and the
behaviorists. This means that it has now freed itself from a flaw in past
psychological methods that has impeded psychology's growth for almost a
century. A radical break from old methods that don't work is always grounds for
optimism, at least initially. But no paradigm can last forever without being
threatened by a revolution, and cognitive science may already be showing signs of tensions that point
towards its successor. In the next section, I am going to discuss certain
inconsistencies in the ontology of functionalist cognitive psychology that may
cause it problems in the future. I will then cite some texts that give some more
reasons to believe that those problems will actually manifest.
Atoms, Systems, and
Environments
The
problem I have in mind is this: The critiques of ontological independence that
make functionalism preferable to atomism can be turned back, with only slightly
weakened power, onto functionalism itself. If a single individual cannot stand
on its own, but must get its ontological status from the function it performs
in the context of a system, why should we assume that a system can stand alone
without reference to the environment within which it performs a
functional role? Isn't the relationship between a system and its environment
exactly the same as that between any other part and the whole of which it is a
part? Isn't the difference between seeing the forest and seeing the trees just
a matter of how far you step back before you take a look? Isn't every tree an
environment to the bugs that crawl across it, and every forest just a small
part of an even larger ecosystem? So why should we assume that we can study a
single functional system in isolation? Shouldn't such an attempt be at least
somewhat vulnerable to the problems that arose when the introspectionists tried
to isolate elementary sensations and the behaviorists tried to isolate S-R
connections?
Chomsky's
project of isolating syntax from semantics assumes that language must be
comprehensible as a closed system, separable in principle from the world that
the language talks about. Fodor's classic essay "Methodological solipsism
as a research strategy in Psychology" argues at great length that
psychology must assume that organisms are comprehensible as completely isolated
systems in order for psychology to be a science. Even if Fodor's arguments are
sound, however, they don't prove that it actually is possible for
psychology to be a science. Perhaps psychology, by the very nature of its
subject matter, may not be capable of being comprehensible in the same way as
the subjects of the physical sciences. Some may find that depressing. But if we were able to understand
exactly why psychology is so much more difficult than physics, it would free
psychologists from the need to try to do what can't be done, and to concentrate
on what can.
The
following are brief commentaries on
some research and theorizing which question the assumption that a
functional system can be studied in isolation from its context. 1) J.J.
Jenkins' description of how he rejected behaviorist atomism as a viable theory
of memory, and why the alternative he proposed differs from Chomsky's and
Fodor's 2) Ulrich Neisser's ecological critique of cognitive psychology 3)
George Lakoff's critique of Chomsky's separation of syntax and semantics.
Jenkins Forgets the Old Theory
of Memory
J.J.
Jenkins began his research on memory with a paradigm derived from the work of
Clark Hull, which was both significantly different from, and significantly
similar to, Skinner's. (See Skinner 1944 for a description of some of the
differences). Like Skinner, Hull believed that the S-R connection was the fundamental
atom of behavior, and that the chain was the only acceptable form of structure
that could be made with those atoms. But unlike Skinner, Hull was willing to
posit the existence of unseen theoretical S-R connections to account for
more complicated mental processes. Because Hull had the courage to commit
himself to falsifiable theoretical posits, his theories were usually eventually
falsified. This was one of the main reasons that the allegedly theory-free
operationalism advocated by Skinner became so widely accepted. Jenkins,
however, did research which seem to confirm the existence of inner S-R
connections, and this research became the basis of what was called the mediation
theory of memory.
Jenkins
describes the principle of mediation thusly "If element A is associated
with element B, and element C is
associated with element B, then element A will acquire some association with
element C" (Jenkins 1963 p. 213.). Jenkins tested this principle by teaching
laboratory subjects a list that paired words with nonsense syllables (such as
zug/table). He then taught them another list that paired each nonsense syllable
with another word that was commonly associated with the first word. (such as
zug/chair). He found that his
subjects learned the second list much faster than they learned the first. This
seemed to imply that an associative chain had been established linking
"zug" to "chair" by means of the mediating association of
"table" to both "zug" and "chair". Further
research, however, was not as encouraging. For one thing, the attempt to link
four items together broke down completely, yielding only chance results. This
meant that even if Markov chains had been structurally sophisticated enough to
account for memory functions, it would still have been impossible for human minds to form the necessary
associations to hold those chains together. Also, it was discovered in research that " If a
stimulus elicits two responses, the responses will acquire a tendency to elicit
each other" (Jenkins and Palermo 1964 p.147) This is not terribly surprising to anyone who has ever
introspected, but it required a major change in the associationist ontology.
Connecting A to B, then B to C, creates a chain, which is supposed to be the
only possible structure for the associationists. But if connecting both B and C to A creates a connection
directly between B and C that is not mediated by A, we now have the possibility
of creating a variety of structures. We have, in another words, a lego set with
more than two connectors on it, and thus we can create things that have the
complexity of choo-choo trains and not the simplicity of a Markov series.
Jenkins
could have seen this as an opportunity to formulate theories of memory along
Chomskian cognitive lines, which would have posited functional systems divided
into flow charts and block diagrams. In fact, Jenkins acknowledges in Baars
1986 that he was strongly influenced by Chomsky, and Jenkins and Palermo 1964
begins with a quote from Chomsky. But Jenkins eventually took a very different
approach in his provocatively titled 1974 essay "Remember that old theory
of memory? Well, forget it." He begins by explicitly rejecting the
behaviorist ontology of fundamental units that can be connected only by chains.
But he also claimed that his own research implied that " Memory is not a
box in a flow diagram. . . it seems to demand an understanding of all of the
higher mental processes at once" (p.794). One couldn't divide memory off
from the rest of mental processes,
because every mental processes contributes to our ability to remember things in
some way or another. Even more difficult for a functionalist analysis is that
remembered events do not appear to remain distinct once they are
"stored". "Once the fusion of strands into events has occurred.
. . the subject cannot perform an analysis to recover the exact pattern of
input" (p.790).
Jenkins
calls his position contextualism, and says " it has its roots in
William James, C.S. Peirce, and John Dewey." (p. 786). (Remember that
Titchener considered James the foremost defender of anti-atomistic psychology.)
Like William James, Jenkins claimed that experience was fundamentally a process
made up of events, and that "the quality of the event is the resultant of
the interaction of the experiencer and the world". (ibid.). Jenkins also
recognized that once we admitted that we cannot study memory processes
independently from their context, "This means that being a psychologist is
going to be much more difficult than we used to think it would be." (p.787).
If
we take this position as seriously for other mental processes as well as for
memory, then we will see mentality as consisting of context-dependent
processes, rather than self-contained systems with stable interrelated
functions. This compromises many
of the goals of cognitive psychology, such as Chomsky's claim that syntax is a
self-contained system that can be separated from semantics and phonology. And
yet in Baars 1986, Jenkins doesn't see himself as being in conflict with
Chomsky, despite these differences. I think this partly because Jenkins'
greatest contributions have been the experiments he has developed, and he is
therefore by temperament not as interested in fine-honed ontological arguments.
His contextualism has served him well by keeping him from getting stuck in what
Baars calls "Methodolatry".
But by his own admission, there is something a bit unsettling about
rubbing one's nose in the sense of uncertainty implied by contextualism, and he
doesn't appear eager to dwell on the subject . To quote his interview in Baars
1986: " You just keep saying 'well, everything depends', and people get a
little tired of hearing that" (p.252)
Ulric Neisser and Ecological
Psychology
Ulric
Neisser wrote one of the first books to exploit the computer metaphor in
psychology, and its title, Cognitive Psychology, probably helped to name the movement.
Several years later, however, his book Cognition and Reality questioned
many of the presuppositions of cognitive psychology, for many of the same
reasons as Jenkins 1974. By Nesser's own admission. "the message I brought
in Cognition and Reality was not as popular as the one I brought in {Cognitive
Psychology}. . . now, I'm saying that what people want to do may not be
worth doing; maybe they should be doing something else. That's not such a
popular message. " (Baars 1986 p. 282).
Like
Jenkins, Nesser claims that it is impossible to study a system outside of its
context. The data in Jenkins 1974
mainly demonstrates that one mental function (i.e. memory) cannot be studied
independently from the rest of the mind.
Nesser 1976 similarly claims (especially in Chapter 5) that there is no
reason to assume that there is a single faculty of the mind that is responsible
for what we call attention. We have a variety of different skills, and
most of them require us to interact with the environment. But there is no
reason to assume that all of our skills must get their information from a
single centralized "attention
module", or that the different ways that each skill relates to the
world must all share certain principles in common. Nesser also criticizes the
idea that perception can be studied separately from the embodied
activity that it guides.
the motionless
observer with a fixed head who serves as a subject in so many perception
experiments is in an unusual and remarkably unfavorable situation. The motion
producing information that he lacks is crucial for normal vision (Nesser 1976
p.109)
Nesser
then steps back a bit and emphasizes another closely related point that Jenkins
only touches on: Even the entire
mental system cannot be understood outside of its environment. He claims this
is one of the main things wrong with cognitive science experiments. They create
an artificial environment in the laboratory, and then extrapolate, without any
real justification, that the laboratory behavior is somehow more fundamental
than the behavior performed in a natural environment. Although this assumption
is considered to be essential to both the possibility and the value of scientific
experiments, it is far from certain.
Lakoff's Cognitive
Linguistics: Recombining
Syntax and Semantics
Lakoff
1987 specifically criticizes Chomskian Linguistics[9] for many of the assumptions discussed above, and
proposes an alternative similar to the ones advocated by Jenkins and Neisser.
Lakoff points out, for example, that the following principles are essential to
what he calls objectivist semantics.
A) every concept is either a
primitive or built up out of primitives by fully productive principles of
semantic composition.
B) All internal conceptual
structure is the result of the application of fully productive principles of
semantic composition.
C) The concepts with no internal
structure are directly meaningful, and only those are.
(Lakoff 1987 p.279)
A)
is an explicit statement of what we have been calling atomism, and which Lakoff
also calls atomism in other parts of the book. B) is a way of saying that the
rules of semantic composition are
a self-contained system i.e. they are governed by "fully productive
principles" that would get the same results even if they were run
automatically on a computer. C) Makes an intriguing claims about the
presuppositions of a Chomskian system that perhaps Chomsky himself was not
aware of: that his rule governed theory of mentality must rest on a foundation
of directly evident atomistic particles, even though it cannot consist of
nothing but such particles.
Lakoff
spent many years trying to discover linguistic principles that both met these
criteria and explained the way real language actually works. He eventually
concluded that there was a great deal of linguistic behavior that could only be
explained by relaxing these criteria in certain key respects. Just as Jenkins
claimed that memory, and Nesser claimed that perception and attention, were not
self-contained faculties, so Lakoff claimed that syntax was not a
self-contained faculty. It cannot be separated from the semantic factors that
hook language up to the world. Lakoff states this most explicitly on page 466,
where he lists two sides of ten issues, saying that Chomsky's generative
approach assumes the first alternative, and that his newer approach provides
empirical evidence for the second alternative. Here are the dichotomies in this
list which relate to the issues we are discussing.
7) must all syntactic constraints
be accounted for only by rules of syntax that are oblivious to meaning, or can
a great many syntactic constraints be accounted for on semantic grounds?
8)
Is the meaning of every grammatical construction computable from its parts, or
are there constructions whose meaning is motivated by the meanings of its parts
but is not computable from them by general rules?
9)Is
there a strict dichotomy between grammar and lexicon, or is there a continuum
between the two?
10)
is grammar a separate "module", independent of other aspects of
cognition, or does it make use of other aspects of cognition such as prototype
categorization, cognitive models, and mental spaces. (Lakoff 1987 p.466)
Lakoff
calls a linguistics that accepts the second of each of these pairs of
alternatives cognitive linguistics. Given that the first of these
alternatives is usually accepted by what Nesser called cognitive psychology,
this label is a bit confusing. (I keep wanting to call Lakoff's work post-cognitive
linguistics). The name makes sense
within the context of Lakoff's work, however. For one thing, it refers to
Lakoff's claim that syntax cannot function independently of functions that tell
us about the world (i.e. cognitive functions). For another, Lakoff claims that
cognition is not purely a mental process in the traditional sense, but rather
rests on a fundamental base of embodied experience within the world. Even when
we are dealing with abstractions, we often make sense out of them by referring
to our existence as living bodies that interact with a world and move through
space. Lakoff gives so many
examples of so-called abstract thought that would make no sense to a
disembodied computer program (one small example: the fact that we say
"things are looking up" or "the stocks are down"). that he
makes a compelling case that we could not think the way we do except for the
fact that we have bodies that we know how to move through space and interact
with objects. Thus Lakoff, like Jenkins and Nesser, claims not only that mental
processes cannot be understood in isolation from each other, but also that they
cannot be understood in isolation from their environment.
Conclusion
The
history of psychology reveals that there is real Jamesian "cash
value" to the ontological arguments against both atomism and the more
subtle atomism that assumes it is possible to study a system in isolation from
its context. The successive failures of the introspectionists and the behaviorists
show that an atomism based on the myth of immediately given observables
ultimately leads to scientific crisis, regardless of whether it is explicit (as
it was for the introspectionists) or implicit (as it was for the operationalism
of the behaviorists). There now seem to be similar crises starting to brew
with what Fodor calls
"Methodological solipsism" in cognitive science, which assumes that
one can safely study a closed system and ignore its context. But admittedly, it
is not easy to imagine what the alternative would be. If attention, perception,
language, and memory are all actually parts of other faculties, what does
psychology do if there are no faculties which can be studied separately from
each other? And if the mind cannot
be separated from its environment, how can we study the mind at all? This is
similar to the problem Fodor raised in the Modularity of Mind, when he
said that cognitive science would be impossible if all cognitive processes were
what he called "isotropic", (i.e. if every fact we know is in
principle relevant to our understanding them) and "Quinean" (if our
theories must refer to emergent
characteristics of our entire system of knowledge.)
The
Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) approach to cognitive science avoids many of these
problems by treating processes, rather than particles, as fundamental, and by
its nature continually reminds us that there really is no such thing as a
closed system. (Although some researchers are better at remembering this than
others). When Dewey critiqued the concept of the reflex arc in 1896, he offered
an alternative style of explanation that sounds today like a prophecy of DST.
In the physical process, as physical, there is nothing
which can be set off as stimulus, nothing which reacts, nothing which is
response. There is just a change in the system of tensions (Dewey 1896 p.365)
Because
DST is a branch of physics, and
can call on some sophisticated math to measure the changes in a system of
tensions, it is being taken much more seriously now than was Dewey's evocative
proposal a century ago. But as Andy Clark points out, DST is limited by the
fact that it cannot analyze its subject matter into parts, even though it
can describe a whole system with
relative precision (insofar as it is possible to isolate that system.) There
will always be a place for analysis, of course. But because methods like DST
acknowledge the existence of functionally distinct (and therefore in some sense
emergent) properties of wholes, we will need to study both parts and wholes
from now on, rather than assuming that the study of either one can ever tell
the whole story.
It
is hard not to be tempted by the widely held belief that analysis can in
principle deliver certainty once it reduces its subject to either fundamental
atomistic particles or the enduring functions of a closed system. But just because this kind of analysis
is possible in principle does not mean that it is possible in fact. Certainty
has never been more than an unrealized dream for psychology, and if we have
good reason to believe that certainty is not obtainable in psychology, this is
an important discovery. And even if the abandonment of the quest for this kind
of certainty is cause for disappointment, it need not be cause for despair. Psychologists do have a scientific
obligation to find out exactly how much certainty is possible in their subject
matter, and to come as close to that level of certainty as their skills and
budgets permit. But no one has a scientific obligation to give their subject a level
of certainty it is incapable of having.
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http://www.yorku.ca/dept/psych/classics/index.htm
Wundt,
W. (1907) Lerctures on Human and Animal Psychology The Macmillan Co. New York
[1]this quote from the Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" probably says it best:
1.2 The world divides into facts
1.21 Anyone can be the case or not be the case, and everything else remains the same
[2] a priori does not always mean the sense in which Kant used the term i.e. necessary and universal for all time. In order for our knowledge to be certain, we must be able to rely unconditionally on either observations or universal a priori principles. But Charles Peirce spoke of an a priori which could change over time, even though it provided a structure that could condition individual moments of experience. This is similar to a common interpretation of Thomas Kuhn, who sometimes appears to be saying that paradigms provide an a priori structure which changes only when there is a 'paradigm shift". This concept is an alternative to the extremes of both Kant (who claimed that a priori knowledge never changes) and the British empiricists (who claimed there was no a priori knowledge at all). However, both Kuhn and pragmatists like Peirce acknowledge that this kind of a priori requires us to admit that all of our knowledge is in principle fallible.
[3] Danziger's point was that for Wundt the analysis of elementary sensations was "a limited, preliminary, and subsidary task". This statement implies that the the analysis of sensations was nowhere near as important for Wundt as is widely believed, but it also unambiguously implies that he did such analyses.
[4]Danzinger 1979 quotes Boring as saying " The teaching of Mach and Avenarius seems to have been ingrained even into Titchener's everyday thinking" (p. 215)
[5] Note that the atomic sentences are different from the physical atoms whose behavior they might be obliquely describing. An observation sentence might be described as an epistemic atom, for it is supposedly a piece of knowledge that stands on its own and provides a foundation upon which to base our knowledge of other more theoretical entities--like the atoms posited by physicists. Which is more fundamentally real, the observational atoms, or the theoretical atoms? Positivist philosopher/physicist Ernst Mach comes down firmly on the side of the observational atoms when he says " Thus perceptions, presentations, volitions, and emotions, in short the whole inner and outer world, are put together in combinations of varying evanescence and permanence, out of a small number of homogeneous elements. Usually, these elements are called sensations" (quoted in Danziger 1979 italics added). Given that everything in the list preceding the words in italics is usually consigned to the inner world, rather than the outer, this description probably didn't sit well with many of Mach's fellow physicists, who no doubt thought that their beloved electrons were a lot realer than sensations. The debate between those who side with Mach and those who want to grant higher ontological status to the electrons continues to this day under the name of realism vs. instrumentalism. The fact that such metaphysical debates are unavoidable, even among postivists, was one of the reasons that positivism was eventually acknowledged to be incoherent.
[6]When I say "all the way down", I don't mean to take any position on the question of physical atomism. What I am saying is that there is no reason to assert, and good reason to deny, that the organic processes that give rise to consciousness operate by the interaction of psychological atoms. One can explain the flow of water by means of fluid dynamics without making reference to H20 molecules. There is no reason that psychological processes couldn't be explicable only by laws that posit processes, and if so, there would be no such things as elementary sensations.
[7] Skinner did make an important supplement to Pavlov's concept by discovering operant conditioning, which differs from Pavlovian conditioning in that the stimulus comes after the desired response. Sometimes the word "reflex" is used in psychological texts to refer only to Pavlovian conditioning, but I am using it here to refer to operant conditioning as well. Both kinds of reflexes are claimed to be independent atoms, so the difference between the two is not relevant here.
I use the term "reflex" to refer to functional S-R connections, not to neurological ones, because Skinner used the word that way in his article "Two types of conditioned reflex and a pseudo type". (Journal of General Psychology, 12, 66-77. ) Skinner's behaviorism was atomistic, even though it wasn't reductionistic, because he believed that his observations were genuinely theory-free--i.e. each observation could stand on it's own epistemicly. What he claimed was that S-R connections were functionally atomistic, because they could be studied independently of the atoms that were the subject matter of physics. His operationalism was based on the assumption that as long as he didn't posit any mental entities that were responsible for behavior, he wasn't committing himself to any theory. But of course he was commiting himself to the theory that each observation was independent of all of the others- i.e. atomism. All of the logical Positivists-Carnap, Schlick, Russell-- eventually rejected operationalism for precisely this reason. Operationalism is self-contradictory because it cannot work unless observations are theory-independent, and the claim that observations are theory-independent is itself a theoretical claim.
[8] There were, of course, people sitting out in the universe before baseball was invented. But none of those people were pitchers or first basemen until they started playing baseball. I cannot see any way that any of those people can have any characteristics that are not functionally dependent on their relationships to other conceptual structures of some sort, and can make no sense out of the concept of "bare particulars."
[9] Lakoff rarely mentions Chomsky by name, but that is because Chomsky's methods and assumptions are so widely accepted that they have become virtually synonymous with modern linguistics. Lakoff rightly concludes that most of the problems he has discovered with Chomskian linguistics stems from Chomsky' s reliance on principles that are accepted by almost everyone in modern science. Consequently he usually aims most of his criticisms at a set of principles he calls objectivism, rather than at Chomsky in particular. An interesting aside is that objectivism was also the name that Ayn Rand gave to her philosophy, and although Lakoff is clearly unaware of this, most of the principles that he critiques under this name are the same principles that Rand feels should be defended at all costs.