The Ghost in the Machine Read Online Free PDF Page A

concepts of classical physics. Watson and his successors were quite
explicit about this; their efforts to carry out their programme became a
truly procrustean operation. But while that legendary malefactor merely
stretched, or cut off, the legs of his victim to make him fit his bed,
Behaviourism first cut off his head, then chopped him up into 'bits of
behaviour in terms of stimulus and response'. The theory is based on the
atomistic concepts of the last century, which have been abandoned in all
other branches of contemporary science. Its basic assumptions -- that all
activities of man, including language and thought, can be analysed into
elementary S-R units -- were originally founded on the physiological
concept of the reflex arc. The newborn organism came into the world
equipped with a number of simple, 'unconditioned' reflexes, and what it
learnt and did in its lifetime was acquired by Pavlovian conditioning. But
this simplicist schema soon went out of fashion among physiologists. The
greatest among them in his time, Sir Charles Sherrington, wrote already
in 1906: 'The simple reflex is probably a purely abstract conception,
because all parts of the nervous system are connected together and no
part of it is probably ever capable of reaction without affecting and
being affected by various other parts. . . . The simple reflex is a
convenient, if not a probable, fiction.' [22]
     
     
More recently, a leading neurologist, Judson Herrick, summed up the
situation:
     
During the past half-century an ambitious programme of reflexology
    was elaborated, notably by Pavlov and the American school of
    Behaviourism. The avowed objective was to reduce all animal and human
    behaviour to systems of interlocking reflexes of various grades of
    complexity. The conditioning of these reflexes by personal experience
    was invoked as the mechanism of learning. The simple reflex was
    regarded as the unit of behaviour, and all other kinds of behaviour
    were conceived as brought about by the linkage of these units in
    successively more complicated patterns.

    The simplicity of this scheme is attractive but illusory. In the
    first place, the simple reflex is a pure abstraction. There is no
    such thing in any living body. A more serious defect is that all the
    information we have about the embryology and phylogenetic development
    of behaviour shows clearly that local reflexes are not the primary
    units of behaviour. They are secondary acquisitions. [23]
     
With the decline of the reflex, the physiological foundations on which
S-R psychology was built, had ceased to exist. But that did not unduly
worry the Behaviourists. They shifted their terminology from conditioned
reflexes to conditioned responses, and kept manipulating their ambiguous
terms, in the manner we have seen, until responses became controlled by
stimuli still in the womb of the future, reinforcement turned into a kind
of phlogiston, and the atoms of behaviour evaporated in the psychologist's
hands even as the physicist's hard little lumps of matter had evaporated
long ago.
     
     
Historically, Behaviourism started as a reaction against the excesses
of introspective techniques, as practised particularly by German
psychologists of the so-called Würzburg school. At first its
intention was merely to exclude consciousness, images and other non-public
phenomena as objects of study from the field of psychology;
but later on this came to imply that the excluded phenomena did not
exist . A programme for a methodology, which had its arguable points,
became transformed into a philosophy which had no point at all. One
might as well tell a team of land surveyors that for the purpose of
mapping a limited area they could treat the earth as if it were flat --
and then subtly instil the dogma that the whole earth is flat.
     
     
Behaviourism is indeed a kind of flat-earth view of the mind. Or,
to change the metaphor: it has replaced the anthropomorphic fallacy
-- ascribing to animals human faculties