Continuity/discontinuity in the evolutionary thinking of the Chicago functionalists.

Tolman, C.W. (1990). Continuity/discontinuity in the evolutionary thinking of the Chicago functionalists. Storia Della Psicologia, 2, 64-72.

Continuity/discontinuity in the evolutionary thinking of the Chicago functionalists.

Charles W. Tolman
University of Victoria, Canada

I do not believe that comparative psychology "fell" to quite the extent that Lockard announced in 1971, but it certainly was experiencing difficulties and a distinct decline in popularity. At least one reason for this was that many psychologists could no longer see the sense of running rats through mazes -and the ethologists were right (e.g. Lorenz, 1950): that was about all that comparative psychology had come to amount to. As a result it shed little light on animal behaviour as such, which surely had more to do with adaptation to natural environments than with learning mazes and lever pressing. At the same time an increasing interest in a previously taboo topic, cognition, made the rat or pigeon seemingly irrelevant as models. What, then, was left for comparative psychology? The choice seemed to be either to join the ethologists or get "cannibalized" by the sociobiologists. A distinctly "comparative psychological" project appeared to have gone up in smoke.

But the project at issue in the 1970s was an impoverished and vulnerable one to begin with. Ironically, it had replaced a more promising project developed by the founders of comparative psychology in the last half of the 19th century. This transition is reflected in the history of Chicago functionalism and is the focus of the present paper.

The two projects can be distinguished by the way in which they conceptualize evolutionary continuity and discontinuity. The biologists of the 18th century, notably Buffon, Linneaus, and Erasmus Darwin, succeeded only by their failures to define the problem that Charles Darwin was to solve. Their efforts, according to Ernst Mayr (1982), made it clear that: "To reconcile continuity and discontinuity... [was]... one of the great challenges of evolutionary biology" (p. 341). Charles Darwin's solution was a scientific theory of development, transmutation of kind, which focussed on natural variation and selection. Continuity and discontinuity could be seen, over evolutionary time, as existing only relative to one another. [p. 65]

But the philosophical bugbear was still dualism, an absolutization of discontinuity. For many, the only effective defence appeared to be the absolutization of continuity. This failure to grasp the dialectical nature of Darwin's thinking led to a one-sided and reductionist understanding of evolution which sought a uniform set of principles governing the functioning of all species. This was ironic because it implied the same essentialism and uniformitarianism that, intellectually, Darwinism had sought to replace.

The practical implications are reflected in how psychology views its project. A psychology based upon the dialectical understanding of continuity and discontinuity will be preoccupied with questions of how uniquely human psychic capacities (e.g., cognition, consciousness, societal organization) evolved from qualitatively less developed adaptive capacities (e.g., tropism, reflex, instinct), or how that which is distinctly psychological evolved from something purely biological. A psychology based upon absolutized continuity and reductionism will be concerned with discovering the universal principles (e.g. learning) that account for all specific levels of behavioural organization.

As historical examples, Romanes, Morgan, and Hobhouse exemplified the first project in their comparative psychologies, while Thorndike, Loeb, and Watson typified reductionism (Tolman, 1987). Romanes, for instance, wanted to show how instinct evolved from reflex and intellect evolved from instinct. He recognized, furthermore, that with the evolution of intellect the evolutionary process itself changed qualitatively:

"...man inherits mentally, if not physically, the effects of culture for ages past, and this in whatever direction he may choose to profit therefrom. Moreover... in this unique department of purely intellectual transmission, a kind of non-physical natural selection is perpetually engaged in producing the best results" (Romanes, 1916, p. 31).

In contrast to the proposal that new principles are required for the human species (or that principles themselves evolve), Watson is well known for his claim that:

"No new principle is needed in passing from the unicellular to man. As we pass from the responses of the simple organisms to the more complex one of the higher animals we find (1) a greater number of units, and (2) more complex forms of combinations of these units" (Watson, 1914, p. 328).

Watson's conception of evolution was reductionist. It absolutized continuity and denied qualitative change by reducing it to purely quantitative terms (greater number, more complex).

Watson's understanding prevailed from about 1920 onward and shaped the further development of comparative psychology. In the [p. 66] end, the Chicago functionalists accepted the Watsonian view, but they did not start out that way.

John Dewey

It is useful to recall that until the early 1890s, John Dewey openly identified himself as a disciple of Hegel. His Psychology of 1887 (Dewey, 1887/1975) was distinctly Hegelian in nature. Angell, who claims to have "cut his teeth" on this text, described it as follows:

"...Taking the three fundamental categories of thinking, feeling, and willing, the author had developed a rather subtle and extremely intriguing dialectic which suggested, if it did not actually derive from, Hegel's Logic" (Angell, 1930/1961, p. 21).

While Dewey soon rejected Hegel in favour of Darwin and James, there is ample evidence that Hegel's logic, if nothing else of the Hegelian system, retained a profound influence on Dewey's thought to the end. It should therefore come as no surprise that he recognized the dialectical character of Darwin's evolutionary thinking -which he spoke of, significantly, as the "Darwinian logic" (Dewey, 1909/1977, p. 20) -and preserved it in his own. He had no difficulty with the unity of continuity and discontinuity:

"...evolution means continuity of change... Significant stages in change are found not in access of fixity of attainment but in those crises in which a seeming fixity of habits gives way to a release of capacities that have not previously functioned: in times that is of readjustment and redirection" (Dewey, 1922, p. 284, emphasis added).

And in another place, speaking of the old ways of thinking:

"Development, evolution, never means, as in modern science, origin of new forms, a mutation from an old species, but only the monotonous traversing of a previously plotted cycle of change" (Dewey, 1920, p. 58).

One implication for Dewey was that human beings, though continuously descended from lower animals, were qualitatively different from them. Bernstein summarized this view in the following way:

"We are not... creatures who must wait for the fortuitous circumstances in which nature brings about the goods that we directly prize and the disappearance of the conditions that we find objectionable. We may inquire and deliberate; we may formulate ends-in-view-ends that are chosen for resolving the conflicts of specific situations and will bring into existence states of affairs that are judged desirable" (Bernstein, 1967, p. 118). [p. 67]

A second implication was that such intelligent and moral beings were perfectible (though hardly in any absolute sense). The progressive education movement, according to Curti (1964, p. 549), was a direct reflection of Dewey's belief in the possibility of evolution, the production of new and more adaptive qualities, within the individual lifetime. These were to be encouraged by controlling their "specific conditions of generation" (Dewey, 1909/1961, p. 16).

A third implication was methodological. Dewey expressed this in one place by a quote -surprisingly- from Descartes:

"A state of things characterizing an outcome is regarded as a true description of the events which led up to this outcome; when, as a matter of fact, if this outcome had already been in existence, there would have been no necessity for the process" (Dewey, 1896, p. 367).

More simply put: a thing is only properly understood when we know how it became what it is.

James Rowland Angell

The character of functionalism changed with Angell. He had studied with Dewey as both an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Michigan. His first exposure to psychology was Dewey's text of 1887. He also studies "ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and Hegel's logic under John Dewey" (Angell, 1930/1961, p. 5). He was most inspired, however, by James's Principles, which he read in a seminar with Dewey. While he admitted his indebtedness to Dewey for his "intellectual awakening", he appears to have appropriated only most superficial aspects of Dewey's thinking. It is significant, for example, that where Dewey understood the critical concept of "function" positively (as "part played" or moment within a coordination "with reference to reaching or maintaining an end" -Dewey, 1896, p. 365) and as an internal (essential) relation, Angell tended to understand it negatively (it disclaimed "any dogmatic teaching about the ultimate nature and relation of mind and matter..." -Angell, 1930/1961, p. 23) and/or externally or contingently (adaptation or utility -cf. Angell, 1907). Further comparison of the thinking of the two men confirms a [p. 68] reversion of varying degrees by Angell to a more traditional, mechanistic mode of thought. This can be seen in what he had to say about evolution.

His well-known APA presidential address on "the province of functional psychology" (Angell, 1907) presents a mildly contradictory picture of mental evolution. On the one hand, in the Deweyian tradition, Angell resisted overt reductionism:

"...the purpose of the functional psychologist has never been, so far as I am aware, to scuttle the psychological craft for the benefit of biology" (Angell, 1907, p. 73).

He went on to suggest that there was something peculiarly human in the product of evolution:

"The sensory-algedonic-motor phenomena represent the immediate short circuit unreflective forms of selective response. Whereas the ideational-algedonic-motor series at its several levels represents the long circuit response under the influence of the mediating effects of previous experience. This experience serves either to inhibit the propulsive power intrinsic to the stimulus, or to reinforce this power by adding to its own dynamic tendencies. This last variety of action is the peculiarly human form of mediated control" (Angell, 1907, p. 74, emphasis added).

While seemingly unequivocal regarding anti-reductionism, the language is at the same time blatantly mechanistic in a way that is more often associated with reductionism and clearly offends against Dewey's conception of action (Dewey, 1896).

Angell's mechanistic language persisted, and somewhat later in his career his thinking became more plainly reductionistic. In 1922, now as president of Yale University, he took part in a series of lectures on "the evolution of man." His contribution was on "the evolution of intelligence." He was as convinced as ever of the reality of evolution:

"...there is no question whatever regarding the wide variety of the present modes of behavior extending from the reflex and tropistic type up to the variable intelligent type, and, on the basis of the evolutionary conception of organic structures, there can be no question that these differences in behavior represent historic evolution of the more complex out of the simpler" (Angell, 1923, p. 112).

The last sentence suggests that the types may differ only quantitatively. This is confirmed elsewhere. For example:

"Instincts shade off into reflex and tropistic reactions by gradations, which makes it difficult without being arbitrary to draw any hard and fast lines; but they are in the higher organisms much less rigid and fixed than the tropisms [p. 69] and reflexes and they are more complicated than the latter because they involve a series of muscular movements, instead of the single movement to which we apply the term reflex" (Angell, 1923, p. 106).

Over and again he emphasized that the essential differences, marked though they may be at times between humans and animals, are ones of degree of plasticity and complexity.

"It will be convenient to distinguish... between the development of intelligence in animals and the corresponding development in man. This distinction is not for a moment intended to postulate any fundamental difference between human and animal intelligence..." (Angell, 1923, p. 103).

Harvey A. Carr

Harvey Carr's first year as a graduate student at Chicago was Dewey's last at that institution. Carr wrote that "like all graduate students... [he was]... greatly impressed with Dewey's ability, his kindliness, and his unassuming modesty" (Carr, 1930/1961, p. 77), but he was "irritated" by those who considered themselves his "disciples". A young instructor named John Watson appears, however, to have made a more profound impression:

"I admired his tremendous energy and enthusiasm in both work and play, his irrepressible spirits, his intellectual candor and honesty, and his scorn of verbal camouflage and intellectual pussy-footing... Watson influenced me in many intangible ways, and his subsequent loss to psychology was a matter of personal regret" (Carr, 1930/1961, p. 76).

It is significant that Carr worked with Watson on sensory cues used by rats in learning mazes, and then took over running the animal laboratory at Chicago when Watson left (Boakes, 1984, pp. 146, 156). Carr did relatively little research of his own; he was occupied mainly with supervising thesis research. Carr's comments on this period are interesting:

"...interest in animal work rapidly waned after the first outburst of enthusiasm, and it was freely predicted that its possibilities would soon be exhausted. Many of our students expressed an aversion to choosing a thesis topic in this field for fear that they would become known as comparative psychologists, and that this label would be detrimental to their professional placement and advancement" (Carr, 1930/1961, p. 79).

This state of affairs may well have reflected Carr's own uninspired understanding of animal research. He wrote, for example:

"Any thoroughgoing and extensive control of human activity is a difficult matter. The difficulty of eliciting a genuine fear reaction in a laboratory situation [p. 70] may be mentioned... Psychologists have turned to animals for the same reason as did physiologists -the inability to experiment with man" (Carr, 1930/1961, p. 79-80).

Such a motivation for psychological interest in animals is completely devoid of evolutionary concern for origins.

That lack of concern for evolutionary origins appears to be fully confirmed by is Psychology of 1925. The word "evolution" does not appear in the index. Allusions to evolution, when they occur in the text, emphasize continuity and quantity. For example, in speaking of the neural basis of intelligence, Carr refers only to the apparent correlation between increasing intelligence and "...a general increase in the size of the centres, the relative amount of correlational tissue, and... the extent to which fibres are branched and arborized" (Carr, 1925, p. 38).

When it comes to concepts that are commonly associated with the distinctness of the human species, he offers definitions that deftly bypass qualitative difference. For example, he defines "self" in terms of "reactive possibilities": "what any individual can and can not do, his characteristic ways of doing things, his abilities and attainments, and his possibilities for further development constitute the very essence of his being or self" (Carr, 1925, p. 338), a definition that could equally apply to lower animals. His treatment of volition is suggestive, but its analysis in terms of association and antagonistic reactions fails, again, to acknowledge qualitative species differences. Indeed, it is in this connection that Carr becomes most explicit about his mechanistic leanings. He is adamant in warning that psychology's interest in volition cannot be taken to mean an acceptance of "free will." On the contrary:

"Psychology as a science must necessarily proceed upon the assumption that all phases of mental life can be reduced to mechanistic terms, while any psychologist ceases to be a scientist in so far as he admits that any of his data are not amenable to a causal treatment" (Carr, 1925, p. 327).

As might therefore be expected, Carr's reductionism is amply in evidence. The distinction between psychology and physiology, for instance, does not represent different levels of evolutionary development, but merely a division of labour:

"According to our conception, psychology can not be differentiated from physiology in terms of the metaphysical character of its subject matter. Both psychology and physiology are concerned with the study of the functional activities of organisms. Psychology is concerned with all those processes that are directly involved in the adjustment of the organism to its environment, while physiology is engaged in the study of the vital activities such as circulation, digestion, and metabolism that are primarily [p. 71] concerned with the maintenance of the structural integrity of the organism. Psychology and physiology are thus concerned with two mutually related and interactive groups of organic processes..." (Carr, 1925, pp. 6-7).

There appears to be no evidence for any conclusion other than that Carr shared Watson's reductive, continuist conception of evolution.

Conclusion

I am not suggesting that the impoverishment of 20th century comparative psychology's conception of evolution -and consequently also of its "project"- was directly caused by these changes in Chicago functionalism. The underlying dynamics of this historical transition were complex and must be sought elsewhere (as in, for example, the inordinate influence of Herbert Spencer on American evolutionary thought). It is clear, however, that the Chicago school of functionalists, despite its self-proclaimed, unwavering allegiance to the evolutionary principle and its widely-acknowledged reputation for such, was far from monolithic on the subject of evolution (and many other concepts as well, including "function") and that the succession from Dewey through Angell to Carr reflected a dramatic shift from a dialectical conception of continuity and discontinuity in evolution to a reductive one that emphasized continuity. [FN-1] Chicago functionalism surely bore some responsibility for the impoverished project that became comparative psychology's in the middle half of this century.

References

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Angell, J. R. (1923). The evolution of intelligence. In G. A. Baitsell, (Ed.). The evolution of man (pp. 103-125). New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Lorenz, K. (1950). The comparative method in studying innate behaviour patterns. In Physiological mechanisms in animal behaviour (pp. 221-268). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mayr, E. (1982). The growth of biological thought. Cambridge: Belknap/ Harvard University Press.

Romanes, G.J. (1916). Darwin and after Darwin. (Vol. 2, 4th ed.). Chicago: Open Court.

Tolman, C.W. (1987). Theories of Mental Evolution in Comparative Psychology: Darwin to Watson. (pp. 15-23). In E. Tobach (Ed.). Historical Perspectives and the International Status of Comparative Psychology. Hillsdale: LEA.

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[FN-1] It is useful to note that while psychologists tended to identify "functional" with "evolutionary", as if somehow the former exhausted the possibilities of the latter, biologists divided their discipline between the functional and the evolutionary (Mayr, 1982, pp. 68ff), acknowledging that questions of function left those of evolution unasked.