Bead Theory and the Problem of Consciousness - Highlights for Holt's writing

E.B. Holt 1915 book continues to be central to my scholarship. Appended to the book are two articles Holt had published the prior year, on "Response and Cognition." There is much overlap between the works, but in a few places I think the articles add significantly. One is in discussion of explanations that Holt disparagingly calls "Bead Theories", characterized by description of a series of events with no reference to the fact that a larger thing is happening. He begins by describing the how other sciences used to be in the same "unstable" state as psychology, and 100 years later, psychology seems to me not to have improved. Remember that a book published in 1915 must have been started quite a bit before Watson's Manifesto, and that this book was influential in the professional development of J.J. Gibson, B.F. Skinner, and J. Jastrow, along with most others who trained at Harvard in the teens or Princeton in the '30s. Indeed many core aspects of Gibson's Ecological Psychology, and Skinner's attempt to separate of "Psychological" questions from "Neurological" questions can be seen here decades earlier:

Before proceeding … we shall probably find useful an illustration from another science, which was once in the same unstable state of transition as psychology is now. In physics a theory of causation once prevailed, which tried to describe causal process in terms of successive ‘states,’ the ‘state’ of a body at one moment being the cause of its ‘state’ and position at the next. Thus the course of a falling body was described as a series of states (a, b, c, d, etc.), each one of which was the effect of the state preceding, and cause of the one next following. This may be designated as the ‘bead theory ' of causation. In asmuch, however, … [the states] gave no clue toward explaining the course or even the continuance of the process, an unobservable impetus (vis viva, Anstoss, ‘force') was postulated. This hidden impetus was said to be the ultimate secret of physical causation. But, alas, a secret! For it remained, just as the ‘consciousness’ of one's fellow-man remains today in psychology, utterly refractory to further investigation.

How to Explain Behaviorism: We are Reflections of our World

This is the second in my ongoing series of articles trying to provide basic lead ins to behaviorist theory. The first is here.

How to Explain Behaviorism, version 2: 

We are Reflections of our World

A friend of mine asked for advice online. She is a teacher, working with a 9 year old girl who is "Bossy, has to be right, have things her own way. Failing is not an option, so she lies about failing at anything." The inquiry generated many suggestions, all good. Someone suggested that maybe the daughter is afraid of admitting failure, because she covets approval. Another suggested that maybe sibling dynamics might be at play, especially if there is an older sibling who is very successful. Had the daughter been taught that everyone makes mistakes and that it is ok to admit them? When it was mentioned that the girl is choleric, someone suggested that spending times with other cholerics might help. (By the way, fascinating that the Waldorf Schools still uses those terms!) Maybe playing sports would help if, she could find a coach who rewards efforts and teamwork. Etc., etc., etc. So many suggestions were offered, but... not a single person proposed either a more detailed study of the behavior in question or a systematic study of the child's environment.

What would I like to know, before I began an intervention? Things like: Which particular types of situations is she bossy in? To whom is she bossy? What, exactly, does that "bossiness" look like? How do those around her respond? In particular, how often does she get what she wants? Is the thing she wants --- the thing that stops an instance of bossiness --- what she is ostensibly asking for or is it something else? 

Even if I thought like my friend's other advisers, I would still want to know these things, because I like to have a good understanding of the problem I am trying to solve before I try to solve it. But I don't think like the other respondents, I think like a behaviorist. In this context, one important implication of being a behaviorist is that I think my types of investigations might well tell us everything we need to know. That is, we might well learn everything we need to know about the daughter's "bossiness" if we know what the behaviors looks like (its "topology") and the circumstances under which they occur (the aspects of the world that the behavior is a function of).

This is because, behaviorists view behavior as a reflection of the world. If you live in a world where being obstinate works, you will be obstinate. If you live in a world where being unobtrusive works, you will be unobtrusive. If you sometimes live in a world where it works to be obstinate and you sometimes live in a world where it works to unobtrusive, and there is a way to tell which world you are in at any given time, then you will adaptively switch between being obstinate and unobtrusive. Etc., etc., etc. Of course, you cannot make these adjustments instantly, so there is a heavy developmental component. So what I really mean is that at any given time you are changing to better fit the world you exist in, and if your world stays stable long enough, you will come to reflect it very well. 

Sometimes you can see this most clearly when things go wrong. For example, my wife and I became quite frustrated at our children's inability to be quite when instructed to do so. This is the type of skill that some kids (by dint of past experience) are good at, and other kids (by dint of past experience) are bad at, and our kids were showing no improvement towards the right behavior. After sitting back and observing for a bit, I pointed out that sometimes when we said "be quite" we meant "talk more quietly", but other times we meant "stop talking." Because the same signal was used in both cases, it was no wonder our kids were not matching their behavior to the situation! So we made a new rule, and we now distinguished between "be quiet" and "be silent." Once there was a reliable signal in the world that told our kids what to do, they began to reflect it almost instantly. They are still not perfect, but neither is our use of the terms. 

When you start to think this way, you get reflexive answers to many common questions (many of which you probably shouldn't say out loud).  "Why don't children pay better attention in class?" Because class is boring. "Why does Bobby keep kicking Linda?" Because good things happen when he does. "Why do my kids act so differently when I raised them the same?" Because you didn't. "Why does Jane act so confident, but Bob doesn't?" Probably because good things happen when Jane acts confident and bad things happen when Bob acts confident (or at least that has been the case in the past). 

But what about when people don't seem to reflect their environment well? There are several things that could be going on. I can't list them all, but a top 4 would probably be: 1) Their world might not contain any signals that their behavioral system can latch onto, or the signals are so weak they will need special training to attune to them. This often occurs when a novice enters a world full of experts, which is part of the natural state of childhood. 2) They could still be adjusting to the world. Adjustment may be very slow if the person used to be well attuned to life in a different world. Also, if the world changes faster than a person can adjust, that person might never attune very well. This could happen for example, if you have a job where the boss rapidly changes, and the bosses have wildly different styles. 3) The person could have a damaged adjustment system. Such effects could be transient (e.g., during a blood sugar crash), or relatively permanent (e.g., the fate of most professional boxers). If so, the person could be stuck in a state of partial attunement, where their behavior still reflects the environment, but never quite as well as you think it should. 4) The person could be attuned to aspects of the environment that you do not appreciate. Never neglect this possibility. This last part is so important, I will end with three examples, one young kid example, one teenage example, one adult example. 

Unexpected Attunement - Young Kid Example
Most kids like to play "birthday". This usually involves asserting, seemingly out of no where, that it is your birthday, or someone else's birthday, and then proceeding to do a rough reproduction of certain aspects of birthday activities. "How creative," the parents think, "what an imagination!" This is a great example of a situation in which people think that the behaviorist approach will fall apart. But the behaviorist begs you to examine the world of the child. From that perspective, the child is doing exactly what adults do. The way birthdays work is that someone walks into the room and says "Today is Grandma's birthday, lets give her a call" or "It is Merryn's birthday on Sunday, so we should invite people over." That is the initiation of the "birthday" game, from the perspective of the young child, who does not live in a world where there were any preceding steps. Thus randomly stating that it is someone's birthday is simply a part of a larger pattern of adult imitation, and should be displayed by kids who live in a world where imitating adults tends to create good outcomes. We need not hypothesize anything else behind the behavior.

"But," you object, "the child thinks it is his birthday." I'm really not sure what that objection means. Absent further evidence, I suspect the child is simply playing a game that involves the world birthday. Does the child really believe that today is the anniversary of the day of his birth on the Gregorian Calendar. Really? I don't know many 2 or 3 year olds who think that. "Well, no, I don't mean that he understands what a birthday is, I just mean that he thinks it is his birthday." Alright, I guess, but I think that just gets us back to my assertion that, for the child, "birthday" is a thing you get to say at fairly arbitrary times. and that if others agree with you then it initiates a particular type of game. 

Unexpected Attunement - Teenage Example
A frequent complaint from my friends with teenagers: "Why does he think the world revolves around him?" My most common response "He isn't wrong." The parent objects "Oh yes he is, he's gonna have a rude awakening one day." And the parent is right in a broad sense; the adult world does not revolve around their particular child. But the teenager is also right; the world the teen is in does revolve around them. Their school is focused on them, their friends are focused on them, their home life is focused on them, their TV and other media experiences are focused on them. Back in the day (a few hundred years ago) parents tried to move kids as quickly as possible to be part of the adult world, but now we have designed a world in which there is a buffer time, during which our teenagers and young adults are in a world that is revolving around them. Why does a kid who has more than enough complain when they don't have more? It is not because they "think" they don't have enough, in any grand sense, it is because in their world complaining works, and they are correctly attuned to that world.

Unexpected Attunement - Adult Example
My wife is fidgity, but not always fidgity. She has been for as long as she could remember: lots moving around, not much standing still. It was "just who she was", and there was no obvious cause of it, or the variation in it. She recently did a "tilt table test" where they strap you to a board an then repeatedly transition the board from standing you straight up and down, to lying you flat, to holding you almost completely upside down. It turns out she has postural orthostatic hypotension. Basically, her blood pressure drops dramatically when her orientation changes, and it also happens if she stays still for too long in a vertical position. When she has higher blood pressure (e.g. she has been drinking more water and eating more salt) it is not as bad, but if she has had even minor diuretics (e.g., coffee) it is worse. Her fidgiting, the behavior, was attuned to an aspect of the world that was very hard to observe, but it was attuned nonetheless. If you live in a world where being still makes you nauseous and dizzy, and moving makes you feel better, then you move.

Animal Drives: Some notes on Word Magic

Here I am, flipping through Holt's Animal Drives and the Learning Process: An Essay Towards Radical Empiricism (1931). The book is not at all perfect. Some parts are long-winded, overly concerned with then-emerging-arguments which might now seem dated, and the volume as a whole exudes Holt's frustration with his contemporaries and the direction in which they were moving psychology and philosophy. That said, the good parts still exude penetrating insight. The first chapter is about "Physiology Versus Verbal Magic" and the final chapter about "The Organism as a Whole." Here are some passages from the first chapter which, though antiquated in vocabulary, are still worth critiques of contemporary psychology:

All it takes to be a behaviorist... or... Manifesto, Take 2

There is much confusion over what it means to be a behaviorist. This is largely due to silly posturing by Big Names over the past 100 years ago. Rather than work to develop the theory and implications of behaviorism based on broad first principles, researchers developed their own niche specializations, and then each declared "Behaviorism" to be "What I do." I don't want to dwell on this history here, but rather present a sketch of how behaviorism should be understood.

Psychological Realism and Poker

During my post-doctoral years I played poker very seriously. For a while, my poker library grew much faster than my psychology library, and I became a profitable mid-level player. I have played very little since my post-doc ended, but I think the experience was valuable. For one thing, the mathematics of poker is fascinating, and I still nurture a hope of one day teaching a "Statistics of Poker" seminar. For another thing, I think poker provides an excellent context for thinking through theories of psychology. On the surface, poker seems like it is a game about cards, and on the surface it is. However, you don't need to get much below surface-level to see that poker is primarily a game about the behavior of the other players. The player on your right just put in a big bet: Does he have a big hand? Is he bluffing? What does he think you have, and how does he think you will respond? Given what he might have and what he thinks you might have, if you put in a huge re-reraise, how will he respond? The layers of analysis that can be applied to these situations is fun, but not really on topic for this post (though I talked a little about it here). Instead, I want to delve into a very typical poker situation from the point of view of a psychological realist vs. a dualist.

Note that this is a preliminary analysis that I hope to develop further, and I would love any feedback. 

Pragmatism and Behaviorism: "Hypotheses"

Below is a quote from psychologist E. C. Tolman. It shows the clear influence of Pragmatist thinking on Radical Behaviorism. (Personally, I think it could be done better without reference to something "within the organism", but that is a minor point.)

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(2) But let us turn, now, to a brief consideration of the second main subtype of cognitive behavior-readiness, what I called hypotheses; or intentions, expectations and attainments as to relations. Suppose a rat be run in a successive discrimination box. Such a box is an apparatus in which the animal has to choose one of two doors at each of four successive choice points. One of the two doors at each such point is lighted and one is dark. The lighted door may be either the one on the left or the one on the right in chance order. Thus at each such point the animal has the possibility of responding either on the basis of light-darkness or on that of right-leftness. Suppose, now further, that it be arranged by the experimenter that the correct choices shall in a day's series of 10 trials, or 40 choices in all, fall an equal number of times to the left and an equal number of times to the right, and suppose it also be arranged that the correct door be an equal number of times a dark door and an equal number of times a lighted door. Under these conditions it was found by Krechevsky, whose experiments it is I am reporting, that the rat will pick up one systematic way of behaving after another. In the first two or three days he may pick up, say, the propensity of choosing always the right hand doors. But then he will shift sooner or later to some new propensity, to that say, of choosing only the left hand doors; and then still later to that of choosing alternate right and left doors; or he may shift to choosing all the lighted doors, irrespective of side, or all the dark doors, or to choosing alternately light and dark; and so on. Each such systematic propensity will be adopted for a time and then dropped in favor of some other. And, following Krechevsky, we may now define each such intervening condition (or "I") in the organism, behind any one such systematic way of behaving, as an hypothesis. An hypothesis, behavioristically, in other words, is to be defined as nothing more nor less than a condition in the organism which, while it lasts, produces just such a systematic selectivity in behavior. Further, it appears that such an hypothesis or selectivity is equivalent to an intention or assertion of a specific relation as obtaining in the environment. In the above case these assertions are to the effect that it is such and such types of door which lead on and such and such other types which are closed. The rats assert-hypothesize-that it is the right hand doors, or the left hand doors, or alternate right and left doors or dark doors, or whatever, which, as such, lead on. And when any one such assertion proves incorrect, an animal sooner or later drops it for a new one.

In the experiment as thus far described, the problem given to the animals was actually insoluble. The correct doors were, that is, determined by chance. And no hypotheses--none of the systematic selectivities in the behaviors of the animals-could prove successful. This meant that during the entire duration of the experiment the rats kept shifting from one hypothesis to another. In other experiments, however, the situation was different. Thus in one case it was arranged that after a rat had once adopted some hypothesis with a given degree of consistency the experimenter then made that hypothesis correct. Under these conditions the animals persisted in their now correct hypothesis throughout the entire remainder of the investigation. Or, again in still another set-up, a certain hypothesis was made correct from the very beginning. In such a case the rats might begin with various wrong hypotheses. But they always ended sooner or later with the single correct one. So much for rats, let us turn now to human beings….

Defending John Watson - Asshole Behaviorist

Mike Samsa had a post a few weeks ago explaining common misunderstandings about behaviorism. There were some good points. Among them was discussion of Watson's claim regarding his ability to manipulate children:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors... (1930, p.82)

Now, I don't really like Watson. I think he derailed what was supposed to be a brilliant next step in the development of American Philosophy, and turned into something trite and hollow. Also, he was clearly an asshole, both as a member of the profession and as a human being.

That said, I am certainly willing to defend this claim. I think, when it is examined carefully, that it is quite reasonable, and that history has proved him right.

You don't know what you want!

Sometimes discussion on other people's blog get so big, it is time to move at least part to another location. Neuroskeptic had a great post about the trap of extreme scientism, which combines the ideas that A) science can solve all problems and that B) one should not act except based on scientific evidence. The post is "My Breakfast With Scientism", and it starts with a man trying to determine which of two cereals he wants to eat. He realizes he needs some scientific evidence to determine which he should eat.... and things get much, much worse from there. Because an over-worship of science involves significant skepticism of normally routine claims and decisions, you end up in a very similar place to Descartes's over-worship of rationalism. You know:

Hey Descartes! You claim you are doubting everything.... but how can you be sure? }:- P

The comments on Neuro's post got into some really interesting ground that seems more appropriate for this blog... so I'm moving it over here. In particular, a commenter named "DS" asserted that "what he wants" is a scientifically admissible fact of the highest caliber. It isn't. But explaining why is can be difficult....

A behaviorist (and radical empiricist) theory of emotion

Behavior and Philosophy is an odd, but important journal. It has, for four decades now, provided a venue for papers about the philosophy of behaviorism and the relationship between behaviorism and related disciplines. The table of contents for the recent volumes, and more information about the journal, can be found here. Alas, being run by a small group of generous academics, they aren't always on top of the little things you would like a journal to do... like notifying you when your article comes out. Thus, it wasn't until fairly recently that I found out about last year's printing of:

A Behaviorist Account of Emotions and Feelings: Making Sense of James D. Laird's Feelings: The Perception of the Self, by Charles, Bybee, & Thompson

As the title implies, we present a system for explaining the phenomenon of emotions and feelings within a behaviorist tradition. The discussion is set off by the consideration of ideas presented in Jim's book, which build's upon William James's approach to emotion. The short version goes something like this:

The myth of knowledge... and ethics

Lee Rudolph, a topologist I have collaborate with on emotion perception, emailed an inquiry relevant to discussion my blog's continued discussion of the myth of knowledge... in this case knowledge regarding ethics. Recall that they myth of knowledge holds that there is a tight connection between "having learned about", "being able to articulate", "demonstrating capacity for doing", and "doing in the moment". I'm modifying what is below from an email Lee wrote to the K-group (or Kitchen group), an large international research group which centers... for the moment... around activities at Clark University. It is about a good, old-fashioned financial scandal (though it has the scent of some of psychology's recent scandals).

Mind-Body Dualism is Bad for your Health!

Hey, you know all that pop-psych BS coming out of positive psychology and similar movements? Things like: "Try forgiveness, your cholesterol level will thank you!"*

Thanks to the good people at Psychological Science, I finally found a result I can support! October's issue brought us: "The mind is willing, but the flesh is week": The effects of mind-body dualism on health behavior by Forstmann, Burgmer, & Mussweiler from the University of Cologne. This clever little study found out that being a mind-body dualist is actually bad for your health. This is great! No more bothering with logical arguments or historic discussions, no more focus on incoherence, no more two part posts. You should all stop being dualist because it will make you gain weight and die young. Problem solved. And this isn't a all a joke, their methods were pretty clever, and the results pretty clear. The researchers start with a simple hypothesis:

Specifically, we hypothesized that the more people perceive their minds and bodies to be distinct entities, the less they engage in behaviors that protect their bodies.

In testing this hypothesis, they present six studies, with a few hundred participants between them. It all went something like this:

Tautology Part 1: Cognitive psychology and going to hell

One of the many problems with cognitive psychology, as practiced, is the frequent use of tautological explanations - a 'tautology' occurs when a thing is used to explain itself, and it is often called a 'circular definition'. The problem was mentioned in the comments section on this other blog, and Mike Samsa said:

For example, positing that the impulsivity in ADHD is caused by an impaired executive function - this doesn't really tell us anything useful when we define the executive function as something which governs self-control and the ability to resist impulsive urges.

This is a great example! In class, however, I have a really hard time getting my students to understand the problem. Alas, no matter how many examples I provide from psychology, about half the class still thinks the tautological claims seem reasonable. However, I have come up with an example that seems to work for all the students. I live in a somewhat religious area, but I suspect this would work just about anywhere.

Embodied Cognition and the Direction of Inquiry in Psychology

One aspect of the embodied cognition argument regards the direction in which psychology should proceed. My impression (from sparse readings of works from Plato through the middle ages) is that once upon a time you could start psychology at any point, by wondering about any interesting phenomenon, and proceeding from there however you wanted.

Sometime around Descartes, I’m not sure if he started it or just popularized it, everyone decided that you had to start by figuring out so-called higher mental functions. The idea was that if you got a handle on how that stuff worked, you would automatically understanding how lower mental functions. In those days, hierarchies of being were all the rage, so the higher vs. lower metaphor worked. The modern “offline” vs. “online” distinction, taken from the cog-psych computer metaphor, is basically the same thing. This was not a bad hypothesis, but it really hasn’t worked out. It is not clear that all of our studies of thinking, reasoning, planning, imagining, etc., over the past centuries have told us much about how behavior works and, worse, it is also unclear how much it has told us about thinking, reasoning, planning, and imagining.

What is wrong with Infant Looking Research

In a brief diversion from the ecological psychology stuff, a few people have asked me to comment on the recent popular press pieces regarding Elizabeth Spelke, and her amazing claims about infants.

Spelke and Susan Carey at Harvard, Renée Baillargeon at Illinois, and Karen Wynn at Yale are the matriarchs of the large literature using looking time to study cognition in infancy. Including their students, and others, many researchers are now active in this field, and my dissertation used looking time as its dependent variable. Other common labels in the literature include gaze duration, preferential looking time, orientation, ocular fixation, visual fixation, and attention. The history of this literature is fascinating, and the flaws in the current methods are deep. Looking time measures have a long history, but have only recently come to be used to assess infant’s insights into events. Thus, in an unusual twist, most of the criticisms of  this literature are based on long traditions of empirical work that existed before the criticized work started, and more recent research supports the criticisms.

Verbal Behavior, the Weather Man, and the Fundamental Lie of Professional Poker

I am reading Skinner's Verbal Behavior for the first time with my undergraduate class. It is amazingly good. The only criticism I would make thus far is that it is tinted throughout with the quirkiness of Skinner's particular brand of behaviorism, which is to be expected. Anyone who is trying to do language in an embodied or ecological context, who hasn't read this book and picked out the important points, should do so post haste. The next time I go through the book, a blog book-club will definitely be in order.

One question that my students raised early on struck at a fundamentally important point in modern intellectual development. What, they asked, does Skinner mean by:

Our basic datum is not the occurrence of a given response as such, but the probability that it will occur at a given time.

The idea that science is interested in probability, and not certainty, is still foreign to most people. However, it is a crucial idea, that permeates our modern world. Two great examples are found in the attitude of the professional weatherman and the professional poker player, both of which are poorly understood.

Briefer Course, Revised (Part 2)

Given that Holt is known to be the most philosophically sophisticated of the early behaviorists, it may seem sacrilegious that he was considered to revise one of James's texts.  James is widely revered, where he is revered, for his deep and dynamic descriptions of experience, such as his discussions of the stream of consciousness; he is also well known for the James-Lang theory of emotion; and behaviorists are supposed to be ill-equipped to deal with "experience" and "emotion". Given that Holt's goal was to create a book that connected with James's later, and lesser known, works, however, the situation might not be as grim as it initially seems. As I have argued elsewhere, James's work can be seen as a proto-behaviorism, with the implications mostly hidden in his early textbooks. What modifications would Holt have made to the premier textbook of the time? What framework would the students of the next two decades have been presented with?

More on a better behaivorism

There have been many attempts to define Radical Behaviorism. Most attempts are in terms of inclusion and exclusion, i.e. what radical behaviorists talk about, and what they do not talk about. More often definitions focus on solely on exclusion, providing a negative definition in which behaviorists are defined based on what they don’t do, rather than on what they do. However, this minimizes the profoundness of the approach. A simple, positive definition is: Radical behaviorists claim that all questions about psychology are questions about behavior. One is tempted to say something like “all interesting questions about psychology”, but that is unnecessary, as the converse of the above claim is also made: All questions that are not about behavior are not about psychology. These claims are historic and inclusive; the behaviorist is not trying to redefine psychology, rather to point out what psychology has always been. Thus, behaviorists are not, as is commonly believed, trying to deny the existence of phenomenon typically handled by psychology. Quite to the contrary, they are trying to argue the traditional questions can only be answered through careful observation and analysis of behavior.

Notes towards a better Radical Behaviorism

I have some notes, and some small sections in several published papers, about better ways to think about radical behaviorism. This material came together for the first time in the introduction to my 'theory of mind' talk at WCALB. I will probably put together a shortened version of that talk for the International Journal of Comparative Psychology, which often publishes focus sessions from the conference. However, I would like to develop the introduction more elaboratly for one of the general psychology outlets, such as American Psychologist, or Perspectives on Psychological Science. Trying to invoke something like the "hard problem" of consciousness (see here, or here), in comparison to the many "easy problems", I claim there is a virtually unknown "strong challenge" of behaviorism, in contrast to the "weak challenges" with which we are all familiar.

The strong challenge, to be explained below, is what originally made behaviorism interesting as an approach, but the field of psychology has almost completely avoided it for the past 100 years. Further, the strong challenge points directly to the long-missing piece of the puzzle in creating a naturalistic, non-dualistic, scientific, psychology. It is for lack of dealing with the strong challenge of behaviorism that cognitive neuroscience is moving (albeit slowly) towards a state of crisis. Here is the gist:

Theory of Mind and Radical Behaviorism

"Theory of Mind" has been one of the hottest topics in philosophical psychology and developmental psychology for the last 25 years. There are occasional ripples of interest in research at the intersection of ToM and comparative psychology, including a recent ripple generated by the release of a documentary "Project Nim". The documentary covers the story of Nim Chimpsky, who was part of a multi-decade study lead by Herb Terrace, intended to illuminate chimpanzee's linguistic abilities. The documentary focuses on ethical issues and on the narrative story arc of Nim's life. Herb has complained that the documentary under-emphasizes the scientific side of Nim's story --- which they the director interviewed him about extensively, then cut --- and has been attempting to remind people about the scientific importance of the study, emphasizing:

Nim’s inability to learn a language deepened our understanding of the basic difference between human and ape minds. Most important, apes lack a “theory of mind” – the ability to perceive what another ape is thinking.

"But what about the brain?"

I received an email inquiry a few days ago from Eric Haaland, who has studied with John Shook. We met during the neuropragmatism conference in DC last summer, and he is hoping to be a kinesiology grad student next semester with Tom Stoffregen at the University of Minnesota. He gave me permission to post his email, lightly edited, to the blog along with a reply. He said....


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I have been reading as much Holt and Skinner as I can find recently as well, and I knew that you were one I could get useful information from.  I know that they both insisted that the [mind] is not 'internal' to the organism, that there is no 'internal' - there is only organism as a process over time.  But I'm failing to put their interpretations of education into descriptive terms.  As animals, we are obviously learning beings, beings that have an innate understanding of our sensorimotor repertoire and how to manipulate the world around us to achieve goals (i.e. affordance perception); but this still seems to fall into the neural network, brain-activation paradigm, which I don't think is the case.