Ecological and Social Psychology - Is it Holt or Nothing?!?

My initial article connecting Holt and Ecological Psychology (see discussion here) generated two comments. The comments covered many points, but the most consistent thread was that Ecological Psychology had studied social behavior and had not needed to turn to Holt to do so. The journal (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, IPBS) invited me to respond. Taking the strongest tact I could, the title of the reply focused on the main bone of contention: "Ecological Psychology and Social Psychology: It is Holt,or Nothing!" (full text available here). While that might have been a bit extreme, seven years later I still believe that if it overstepped, it was not by much. The central problem is that Ecological Psychology is fundamentally a theory of perception, while Social Psychology is fundamentally about how congregations of things with minds are different than collections of things without minds; for Ecological Psychology to truly contribute to Social Psychology, the assertion must be made, at some level, that we can perceive the things that make the interactions of things with minds interesting... we must, at some level, be able to perceive minds. As I set up in the text:

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.

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).

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.

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:

Beyond the Brain: Anti-Anthropomorphism

As luck would have it, my semester is wrapping up, and my philosophy colleague just returned my copy of  Beyond the Brain. He agreed it was excellent and has ordered his own copy. I have two or three more topics I wanted to write about in my extended review of Louise Barrett's excellent book. The first two chapters of the book deal with the problem of anthropomorphizing the behavior of animals, and the topic reappears several times in the later chapters. Barrett is convincing that anthropomorphism causes serious trouble when we try to explain behavior (even human behavior) and she advocates a system in which anthropomorphic terms are acceptable when they refer to evolutionary processes rather than immediate happenings. This is all good, but I think psychology can push further, and use mental terms in a way that refers to immediate happenings, while still avoiding the pitfalls of naive anthropomorphism.

Beyond the Brain: Embodied Minds and Descriptive Mentalism

Continuing coverage of Beyond the Brain, by Loise Barrett.


William James and John Dewey claim that "things are what you experience when you experience those things". Pretty similarly, a basic way of explaining Charles Sanders Peirce's Pragmatism was that "things are what things do" (e.g., to be a 'vector' is to do what vectors do, to be a 'bigot' is to do what bigots do). Both of these ideas were alive and well during the berthing years of Behaviorism, and at least a few of the early behaviorists 'got it' (though notably not Watson). In more modern terms, you could call the resulting synthesis Descriptive Mentalism.The thirty-second version is: A descriptive mentalist asserts that mental terms are, first and foremost, descriptions of behavior, not explanations for behavior. For example, to say an animal intends to do X is to describe something about the way the animal is acting. To connect this approach more explicitly with W. James and Dewey (and Gibson)... If we can identify the things that we experience—the things that we are attuned to—when we experience an animal as "intending", then we have identified what "intention" is.  

While there will be several posts on this blog trying to explain descriptive mentalism better, here I hope to show how adopting such a view could have helped Barrett.  


Embodied Minds


As I mentioned previously, Barrett does not give the most hardline presentation of embodiment you can find, and overall that is a strength, making the book much more accessible. However, it is still worth noting a few places where Barrett struggles, and a more aggressive view on embodiment could help.

Tool Use in Fish = Good, Future Planning in Fish = Bad

As I was working on the next embodiment post, my attention was drawn to the recent report of tool use in fish (for example, this). As this report was exactly on topic with the issues Beyond the Brain is dealing with, it didn't seem a bad idea to take a minute to think about.

Basically, researchers found a fish that digs small clams out of sand, then swim around with the clam in their mouths until they find an 'appropriate' rock sticking up out of the sand. Then the fish hurl the clam at the rock to break it open and get to the yummy meat inside. My background is in animal behavior, so this all seemed very plausible and very cool. I had never heard of fish doing something exactly like this, but there are species fish do related things, like gathering stones to make 'nests'. So, the argument that fish 'use tools' seems strong, especially if we are willing to accept a graded notion of tool use, and are merely accepted that fish do something on the low end of that spectrum. However, the authors of the report also seem to believe that they have found evidence that the fish plan ahead. That last part seems problematic.

Ecological and Social Psychology - Minds as Perceivable

There is a great team working on a social psychology chapter for the incipient Eco-Psych (Perception-Action) Textbook: Reuben Baron, Bert Hodges, Kerry Marsh, and Ben Meagher. I was especially grateful to have others volunteer to write that section, because my views on the matter are too biased. The textbook should be focused on ideas that are, at least amongst ecological psychologists, not controversial. My views derive from E. B. Holt's attempt to create a behaviorism that could capture the full complexity of William James's work, which lead to an approach that might be labeled "Descriptive Mentalism." Holt was one of Gibson's key mentors in graduate school, Harry Heft and others have noted Holt's sustained influence on Gibson, and I suggested a few years ago that there is plenty more good stuff to be found in Holt.

This suggestion was made in Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, or IPBS. The journal was founded in 1965, and the 'P' stood for "Physiological" until Jaan Valsiner became editor about a decade ago. Jaan has been working (successfully) to revitalize the journal by encouraging ongoing dialog, including both comment-legnth and article-legnth responses. A few paragraphs in the initial IPBS article were about Holt's relevance to ecological psychologists interested in social psychology, and responses ensued. The initial attempt was superficial, as it was only one of many points in the paper. A more focused version of the argument (taken from here) is shown below. It is worth noting explicitly that the goal was to explore what an 'ideal' contribution to social psychology would look like: "The type that makes it crucially important that [the contributors] are ecological psychologists; the type of contribution that only someone acting as an ecological psychologist could make. That is, the type of contribution that would allow someone to claim that Ecological Psychology had contributed to Social Psychology, rather than merely claiming that the same people had done both ecological research and social research."