The Meaning of Behaviour

J.R. Maze

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429639791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1983, this title is a determined attack on personality theories current at the time. It critically examines their basic motivational constructs and rejects any that invoke goal-seeking as being inescapably teleological and therefore unacceptable as natural science. Dr Maze argues the necessity for an unqualified determinism in psychology, yet one that incorporates the role of cognitive processes in the formation of behaviour. However, action theories which profess to offer a causal account of apparently goal-seeking or voluntarist behaviour by reference to the internal states of desire for a goal and a belief about how to get it are also dismissed. For the concept of belief as an internal state is argued to be a relativistic one, defined as being intrinsically related to its object. This is an incoherent notion and one which cannot specify anything acceptable as a causal state.

The one motivational theory in dynamic psychology which offered a solution to these problems was Sigmund Freud's formulation of his instinctual drive concept, defined as an innate physiological driving mechanism with preformed consummatory behaviours: his 'specific actions'. But his hydraulic models have been patronisingly dismissed by modern neurologists, arguing that there are no 'flush-toilets' in the central nervous system. This book argues that such a glib dismissal is shallow minded, and that a reformulation of Freud's concept in terms of modern neuroscience is readily available, though the problem of identifying the relevant structures remains formidable.

The book is of immediate interest to all those seriously concerned with the springs and meanings of human behaviour, whether they be psychologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers or those generally interested in social and ethical theory.

1

Introduction

During the latter part of the 1970s academic psychology underwent a rather ragged paradigm shift. It is clear enough what the shift was away from; it was away from behaviourism. It was away from stimulus–response (S–R) psychology, away from S–R learning theory, away from ‘conditioning’, away from every stance, whether it called itself ‘merely methodological’ or outrightly ‘metaphysical’ behaviourism, that tacitly or overtly treated mental processes as non-existent by assuming that they play no part in the determination of behaviour. It can be called a paradigm shift because non-cognitive behaviourism had not been nor could have been proven wrong; it protected itself in the classical manner of Kuhnian paradigms by declaring that any data that conflicted with its presuppositions were illegitimate or imaginary. Mental processes were unobservable, thus not data; introspective reports were just vocal-motor habits; no evidential connections could be posited between observable movements and unobservable mental processes, and so no disconfirming evidence could be brought against behaviourism’s founding premise (repeatedly repudiated yet always there, since it was the only thing that gave behaviourism any pretence to substance as a theory) that there are no mental processes. Admittedly, during the 1970s many clever experiments were developed in the operant learning tradition (e.g. Hearst & Peterson 1973) that made S–R explanations look strained, and the observation of reliable unreinforced changes in behaviour (‘autoshaping’, ‘sign-tracking’, etc.) in modern Pavlovian conditioning (cf. Morgan 1979a) seemed also to fit more kindly into some sort of cognitive learning view, but there has probably been nothing that an inventive S–R theorist of the old school, a Clark Hull, could not have accommodated within his non-cognitive principles, conjuring with constructs such as ‘pure stimulus act’, ‘stimulus-generalisation’, ‘response-generalisation’, and so on. These manoeuvres could continue to be used successfully while the principle that cognitive processes could not be the object of empirical observation was accepted, and indeed to a large extent it still is widely accepted. Instead of that principle being subjected to critical scrutiny, attempts have been made to find indirect ways around it, by treating cognitive processes as theoretical constructs, perhaps, or by trying to dispute the whole concept of objective empirical science. Thus, the paradigm shift was the consequence of some obscure change in sympathies, rather than of formal disconfirmation of S–R psychology.

But the paradigm that is to replace behaviourism is as yet not at all clearly formulated. There is wide agreement that it is to deal with cognitive functioning and the intentionality of behaviour, but the basic conceptual parameters of these content areas still call for clarification, and pose many problems of a logical, not merely empirical nature. Unfortunately, professional psychologists, because of the strongly praxis-oriented nature of the discipline, are in large measure uninformed and amateurish in their approach to these matters, and bravely hurl themselves into venerable philosophic blunders, believing that their new doctrines are the logical opposite of the principles of behaviourism and so are rendered victorious by its collapse. Thus, in the revulsion against behaviourism’s ‘objectivism’ we find in the study of cognitive processes the postulation of every variety of subjectivist epistemology, with givens ranging from the sensa of information-processing theory to the visual images and propositional tokens of information-retrieval models and the total world-designs of phenomenology; all this without the smallest recognition of the intractable problems that have been pointed out in representationism and correspondence truth theories throughout the entire history of philosophy.

The other half of the problem, intentionality or goal-directedness, is virtually an unopened book for psychology; non-behaviourists have never recognised it as the problem it is at all. Psychological behaviourism, with the sole exception of E. C. Tolman’s (1932) ‘purposive behaviourism’, has been steadfastly opposed to purposivism, interpreting the goal-directedness of behaviour as the causal consequence of past contingencies of reinforcement rather than the anticipation of future consummations, because it saw that psychology must be deterministic, and held (rightly as I shall argue) that purposivism was incompatible with determinism. But outside behaviourism goal-directedness has hardly ever been identified as a problem for science. In abnormal psychology, for example, although there have been some more or less explicit attempts to trace the multiplicity of behaviour back to a small number of basic drives, nevertheless the ability of the person to direct his or her own behaviour towards the gratification of those drives, by whatever well or ill judged means, is accepted without demur, indeed without reflection. Similarly, most social psychology is permeated with some variant of utilitarianism, assuming that its actors cast up the costs and benefits of the various options available to them and elect the course that maximises satisfaction. Yet, as I shall try to show, entities that can direct themselves towards a certain outcome, entities that generate their own behaviour for a purpose, simply cannot be dealt with in the categories of the natural sciences.

Well, then, it may be asked, is that not so much the worse for the natural science approach? Why should psychology be confined within that arbitrary strait-jacket? There is no lack of psychologists who call for some more liberal mode of apprehension, especially from within the movements of both humanism and existentialism. Both schools reject as unnecessary and indeed unfulfillable for psychology the requirement that the scientific explanation of an event depends on the discovery of its cause; if scientific explanation is of that kind, then it is inappropriate for psychological events since they have no cause, it is said. Again, the authority of Thomas Kuhn is invoked, with a freehand interpretation of his concepts, to support the contention that determinism may be a suitable ‘paradigm’ for some disciplines and not for others, or that determinism in general is only a subjective world-view which is already under stress from accumulating anomalies (here an invocation of quantum mechanics) and is about to be replaced by a more accommodating paradigm. An examination of the great range of arguments that have been brought forward under the heading of determinism versus indeterminism is too large a project for this book; what I shall do, however, is to examine in detail some proposed alternatives to psychological determinism to see whether they can even in principle enlarge our understanding of organismic behaviour. Though they may reject the label ‘science’ for psychology, and though they may reject explanation in favour of understanding through empathy or openness-to-experience – i.e. in favour of intuiting what it is that a person is trying to get at–nevertheless, existentialists and humanists plainly feel that they have a great deal of useful information to impart about the vicissitudes of human life, information that can be generalised and applied to the care of families, friends, or patients. The question will be to discover the conditions of that usefulness, and to examine whether, in so far as their psychological assertions are useful and informative, they do not contravene the authors’ distinctive commitment to the concept of individual spontaneity, or of ‘choosing one’s being’.

In philosophy proper also, amongst philosophers of mind, a movement has developed of dissent from the philosophical-behaviourist way of dealing with mental events; that is, from the line of thought most commonly associated with the names of Ryle and Wittgenstein, which seeks to treat the names of mental events as referring only to dispositions towards certain kinds of behaviour. In particular, the behaviourist analysis of teleological processes, of those sequences of behaviour which at first glance we unreflectingly interpret as occurring in order to bring about predictable outcomes – an analysis that for decades has been pretty well established orthodoxy for the biological sciences (Russell, Braithwaite, and latterly Charles Taylor being the leading proponents) – has been subjected to detailed and forceful criticism in recent years, most notably in Woodfield’s Teleology (1976)’. In my next chapter I shall be commenting in some detail on that book and on some later contributions to the same stream of thought. Woodfield contends that any list of externally observable features of behaviour – lists whose contents have become fairly familiar by now, harking back to McDougall’s ‘marks of behaviour’ (1936), typically including persistence with variation, or plasticity of means in arriving at an allegedly identifiable terminus – cannot give an adequate account of what is ordinarily meant by ‘purposive behaviour’, perhaps because it will turn out to be applicable also to the behaviour of certain inanimate systems that we would not ordinarily accept as having purposes, and again because we will believe some behaviour to be purposeful that does not come up to those criteria – that does not ever arrive at its apparent ‘goal’, for example. Woodfield believes that in order to capture the meaning of ‘purposive’ and cognate terms we must recognise the determining role of processes internal to the organism – specifically, its desire for a certain condition and its beliefs about how to arrive at it. Woodfield himself disclaims any originality in the content of this conclusion, claiming that virtue only for his method of analysis, as revealing what is essentially involved in the concept of teleology and what is inevitably lacking in any ‘externalist’ account. Indeed, a number of other philosophers and philosophical psychologists on both sides of the Atlantic have advanced roughly similar ‘internalist’ (belief plus desire) accounts, with varying accents, in recent years: for example, Davidson (1963, 1973), Audi (1979), and Dennett (1979) in the United States, and in Britain, Gauld and Shotter (1977), Pettit (1978, 1979), McGinn (1979), and Wilson (1979).

But, in my opinion, none of these thinkers has committed himself sufficiently firmly (if at all) to a programme of psychological determinism, to be able to see just what large questions are raised and what great lacunae are left by these contributions. They really constitute nothing but a clearing of the ground before a start is made, the merest prolegomena. If one is to make good the rescue of ‘belief,’ ‘desire’, and ‘intention’ from the merely dispositional status to which they had been consigned by philosophical behaviourism, then one must give some indication, in however general or schematic terms, of what kind of thing the substantive basis of the behavioural dispositions might be – that is, what kind of intrinsic property, process, or state these internal entities ‘belief’, ‘intention’, and ‘desire’ might turn out to be. It is no use, it seems to me, just to declare oneself to have a ‘realist’ conception of dispositions, because that leaves open the move – which has been actively advocated by Armstrong (1973), for example – of saying that the disposition itself is the ‘real’ term, the causal property, which (in the requisite external conditions) produces the behaviour. This, I shall argue, is merely tautological, and it seems to me an odd direction for Armstrong to take, in view of the immense contribution that he has made to the systematisation and clarification of central state materialism (Armstrong 1968). Central state materialism, or the mind–brain identity thesis, which has been given a rather more technical treatment by Wilson (1979), seems to me the only scientifically viable view now possible of the ontological status of ‘mental entities’, yet it is remarkable how many philosophers who nominally embrace the identity thesis still allow themselves to use such terms as ‘mind’, ‘thought’, ‘wish’, ‘sensation’, ‘intention’, and so on, as nouns, as if they were the names of mental rather than physiological entities mediating the various mental functions. It is a quite inadequate shift to say that they are using those terms only until the brain states to which they really refer have been identified – the details of these being safely left to the physiologist – because what is distinctive of these mentalistic concepts and quite alien to brain states is their intentionality, i.e. their supposed intrinsic relatedness to intended objects. The concept of intentionality enables the ‘provisional’ identity theorist to slide away from thorny problems concerning the causes of behaviour, problems that present themselves in the most immediate way when we take seriously the proposal that it is non-intentional brain processes which are at work. I shall try to show that intentionality as currently conceived (cf. Searle 1979b, for example) is not a coherently formulated notion, and must be radically revised.

Not only can there be no mental entities with relations intrinsic to them, but the arguments supporting the mind–brain identity thesis, properly understood, entail that there cannot be any intrinsic, non-relational mental properties whatever, and it is a salutary exercise to try to discuss mental processes without using any of those traditional mind-type nouns. One is compelled to realise what a profound reorganisation of psychological theory is required before one can tentatively identify, or even imagine, the kinds of brain structure that might subserve and integrate the related functions of knowing the environment, carrying out various programs of action on the known objects, and modifying those programs in the light of past experience so as to be more effective, all in such a way as to give a believable, deterministic account of a partly rational, partly irrational, conflict-prone yet remarkably adaptive human being.

Intimately wrapped up with this failure to sketch in a conceivable physiological realisation of ‘intention’ in particular is an hiatus in the causal sequence from material antecedents, external and internal, to behaviour. Even those thinkers who, like Davidson, insist that reasons can be causes, that is, that these internal psychological processes play a part in the efficient causation of behaviour, have been reluctant firmly to grasp the implications of saying that those internal events are themselves caused. If there is an unbroken causal sequence, if we are thrown into these internal states, motivational and informational, and, being in them, have our behaviour produced in us by external stimulation, then that must cause a radical reappraisal of what can be meant, if anything, by ‘acting intentionally’. Almost without exception these authors avoid the crunch of this hard confrontation by retaining, as if nothing can or need be done about it, the concept of agency. Typically, lip-service is paid to the causal principle by agreeing that I can be caused to act, but never that my action (i.e. my behaviour) is caused. I call that lip-service because what is retained inviolate, preserved from criticism, is precisely the concept that whatever brought it about, I act, that is, I generate my behaviour in pursuit of my goals (and the origin of those goals remains shrouded in mystery, the mystery of ‘human nature’). But this is to undercut what is absolutely the most central concern of psychology, the answer to the question ‘Why did he do that?’ In the natural sciences such questions – ‘Why did this litmus turn red?’ ‘Why does this flower close its petals in the evening?’ – are answered by finding the internal structures and the external cause, but if we accept that human beings simply are able to direct their own behaviour towards whatever goals they choose, then the answer to the ‘Why?’ question will invariably be, after perhaps a number of clauses specifying interim goals, beliefs about ways and means, and so on, simply ‘Because he chose’, and that will be that. Such an answer is final, unchallengeable, and totally inscrutable. If there were such a realm of events, there could not be a science of it.

Complacency about the problems of determinism in psychology is made easier by the unchallenged currency of the term ‘behaviour’. The ‘behavioural scientist’ of today is one who is aggressively confident of the observability of his subject-matter – none of those fairy-tales about ‘the science of mental life’ for him – and the plain matter-of-factness and unproblematic status of behaviour as data is widely accepted. Yet the question of what we can see a person doing raises the most awkward epistemological and ontological issues. To say that we can see a person crossing the street or waiting for a bus or signing a contract or indeed doing anything whatever is a quite different kind of claim from saying that we can see a metal ball rolling down an inclined plane. All that we can actually see in the literal-minded sense of the behavioural scientist is the person’s movements. We may see, for example, that a woman’s hand is holding a pen which is being driven across the bottom of a printed sheet of paper, leaving a pattern of marks that other observations may persuade us is characteristic of her in similar situations. But, of course, to say that she is signing a contract entails a great deal more than that. It entails that she is moving the pen in that way in order to produce a recognisable signature which she agrees will constitute prima-facie evidence that she has willingly made herself legally obliged to carry out the commitments specified in the print above, which we assume she has read and understood, and so on – things that certainly cannot be ‘seen’ in the positivist, behaviourist sense, yet we claim, to others or to ourselves, to be able to make such observations scores of times every day, and could not begin to function socially if we did not believe we could make them. Every name of a behavioural act one can think of, however simple, can be interpreted in this way, that the person is making certain movements because he or she believes they will bring about a certain result (‘hewing wood’, ‘drawing water’, ‘answering the telephone’); thus, the behavioural scientist, along with the rest of us, since he cannot avoid using such terms if he is to say what someone is doing, commits himself at every moment to the premise that he can see what that person thinks he or she is doing. This poses a staggering problem for any psychologist, even one who recognises a determining role for cognitive processes, in trying to give (as I claim must be done in the name of explanation) a deterministic account of behaviour. Not only do these behaviour-names implicitly attribute thought-processes to persons, but they seem also to assume that those persons can direct their own movements towards the result in question. The problem is to explain deterministically not only how a particular action comes about but why on successive performances it is likely to be done more and more effectively. One necessary preliminary to opening up such problems will be to disentangle the various confusions and illegitimate conflations concealed in the everyday and the professional usage of the term ‘behaviour’ itself.

But to convince the reader of the necessity of this task requires in the first place to show what is essentially involved in all ‘teleological explanations’ and why a science even of human behaviour cannot accept them as valid, nor, by the same token, accept ‘purposive’ or ‘goal-seeking’ as scientifically meaningful terms. As I suggested above, even the analysis of teleological explanations into the actor’s desire for something and belief in how to get it does not go far enough towards an acceptable causal theory, because for that the concept of desire must be turned round from ‘striving towards’ something to ‘being driven by’ something else, and the nature and number of these driving engines be discovered, if we are to avoid that instantly available and completely trivial form of pseudo-explanation, ‘Because he wanted to’.

Behaviourism, for quite ill founded reasons, has taken it that any theory of primary drives is just the invention of imaginary forces, comparable to the demons with which primitive man explained the workings of nature (Morgan 1979b). Along with every other postulated internal state of the organism, drives were to be emptied of all content other than the contingency of behavioural changes on manipulations of the environment – on deprivation of food, for example, and its availability on the performance of certain behaviours. But as we shall see in more detail later, behaviourists’ practice contradicts their theory; they have always operated as if they had an implicit understanding of at least some primary drives, of what activated the drives and what sorts of behaviour they might be expected to give rise to, if only in that they deprive animals of food or water, for example, and then expect that eating or drinking will function as a reinforcer. Their reluctance to acknowledge the reality of these internal driving processes arose from their conviction that the notion of them was inescapably teleological, that they were forces directed towards a certain goal, seeking it out. But although the history of motivation theories and instinct psychologies is indeed littered with useless concepts of that kind – ‘the acquisitive instinct’, ‘will to power’, ‘need for achievement’, ‘need for self-actualisation’, and an endless list of others – nevertheless, it need not always be so. The concept of a set of ‘biological engines’ that drive the behaviour of a human being is no more metaphysically suspect (though it is a great deal more complicated) than that of the motors that drive the mechanical monsters in Disneyland. What makes human beings and many other species of organism different from mechanical monsters is that the operation of their motors is modified by that special form of feedback known as cognition, by which I simply mean their recognition of relevant facts, but, despite the explicit arguments of such authors as Gauld and Shotter (1977) and the unexamined presupposition of others (Rychlak 1975), to say that organismic behaviour is guided by cognition does not entail that it is not caused in every detail, nor that it exhibits some privileged kind of self-generated ‘causality’ not enjoyed by the ordinary objects of nature....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Teleological and causal explanations
• 3 Analysis of ‘Agency’
• 4 Cognition and determinism
• 5 The constitution of the ‘self’
• 6 Drives and consummatory actions
• 7 Higher activities and their basic meanings
• Bibliography
• Author index
• Subject index