The Ghost in the Machine Read Free Page A

essentially the same. The next few pages are intended to
demonstrate this -- regardless of what the members of the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Dead Horses say.
     
     
Watson's book Behaviourism , in which he rejected the concepts of
consciousness and mind, was published in 1913. Half a century later,
Professor Skinner of Harvard University, who is probably the most
influential contemporary academic psychologist, proclaims the same
views in even more extreme form. In his standard work Science and Human
Behaviour the hopeful student of psychology is firmly told from the very
outset that 'mind' and 'ideas' are non-existent entities, 'invented for
the sole purpose of providing spurious explanations. . . . Since mental
or psychic events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science,
we have an additional reason for rejecting them'. [5] By the same logic,
the physicist may, of course, reject the existence of radio waves,
becanse they are propagated through a so-called 'field' which lacks the
properties of ordinary physical media. In fact, few of the theories
and concepts of modern physics would survive an ideological purge on
Behaviourist principles -- for the simple reason that the scientific
outlook of Behaviourism is modelled on the mechanistic physics of the
nineteenth century.
     
     
The 'cynical onlooker' might now ask: if mental events are to be excluded
from the study of psychology -- what is there left for the psychologist
to study? The short answer is: rats. For the last fifty years the main
preoccupation of the Behaviourist school has been the study of certain
measurable aspects of the behaviour of rats, and the bulk of Behaviourist
literature is devoted to that study. THs development, odd as it seems,
was in fact an unavoidable consequence of the Behaviourist's definition
of scientific method (the 'fourth pillar' mentioned above). According
to his self-imposed limitations, the Behaviourist is only permitted to
study objective, measurable aspects of behaviour. However, there are few
relevant aspects of human behaviour which lend themselves to quantitative
measurement under laboratory conditions, and which the experimenter can
investigate without relying on introspective statements about private
events experienced by the subject. Thus, if he wanted to remain faithful
to his principles, the Behaviourist had to choose as objects of his study
animals in preference to humans, and among animals rats and pigeons in
preference to monkeys or chimpanzees, because the behaviour of primates
is still too complex.
     
     
Rats and pigeons, on the other hand, can, under appropriately
designed experimental conditions, be made to behave as if they were
indeed conditioned reflex automata, or almost so. There is hardly a
self-respecting psychological faculty in the Western world without some
white albino rats disporting themselves in so-called Skinner boxes,
invented by that eminent Harvard authority. The box is equipped with a
food tray, an electric bulb, and a bar which can he pushed down like the
lever of a slot machine, whereupon a food pellet drops into the tray. When
a rat is placed into the box, it will sooner or later press the lever
down with its paw, and will be automatically rewarded by a pellet; and it
will soon learn that to get food it must press the bar. This experimental
procedure is called 'operant conditioning' because the rat 'operates' on
the environment (as distinct from Pavlovian 'classical' or 'respondant'
conditioning, where it does not). Pressing the bar is called 'emitting an
operant response'; the food pellet is called a 'reinforcing stimulus' or
'reinforcer'; withholding the food pellet is a 'negative reinforcer'; the
alternation of the two procedures is 'intermittent reinforcement'. The
rat's 'rate of response' -- i.e., the number of times it presses the
bar in a given period of time -- is automatically recorded, plotted on
charts, and regarded as a measure of 'operant strength'.* The