Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 17 Mind Approached Through Behavior -- Can Its Study Be Made Scientific?
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WHEN the scientific method we have been describing was brought into the problems of psychology, it was recognized that association could not be maintained as the fundamental principle in terms of which they might be solved. We speak naturally of certain elements as associated with each other. Why are certain experiences associated rather than an indefinite number of others? When we come back to account for their strong association, we find we come back to attention, to interest. We are interested in certain connections, and these get fixed in our minds. We give our attention to certain elements in experience, and that fixes them in the order in which they occur. But association is itself something that needs to be explained. Why is there selection in experience? Consciousness is selective; we see what we are looking for. There is a character of conduct about experience that determines what the relations are to be, or at least determines between what elements the relations are going to lie. This recognition of the importance of conduct as determining what the connections shall be within experience itself is the characteristic of the latter psychology. It has gone under various names.
The older psychology was structural. That is, it took experience as we find it to pieces and found certain relations between the various elements of it. These it explained through association. The latter psychology is functional rather than structural. It recognizes certain functions of conduct. We get experiences of distant objects, and their import for us lies in what we are going to do about them. We are hungry, and we set about getting food. We have become stifled with the air in the room,
(387) and we get out-of-doors. We are acting, and in our actions we determine what the relations are going to be between the various elements in experience. The structure of the act is the important character of conduct. This psychology also is called motor psychology, as over against the older psychology of sensation; voluntary psychology, as over against the mere association of ideas with each other. Finally, the development of these different phases got expression in behavioristic psychology, which gives itself to the study of this conduct to which I have referred. It undertakes to approach the mind from the point of view of the action of the individual. As a psychology, behaviorism has turned away, then, from the category of consciousness as such. Accounts of consciousness had been largely static in character. There were certain states of consciousness, certain impressions -the imagery men had in a spiritual substance that was impressed from without by certain experiences. The senses were the organs through which impressions were made on a substantial entity called "consciousness," and they were made in a certain way, in a spatial, temporal order. Consciousness was dealt with as a sort of substance which received impressions. Following upon this came the fruitful statement of Professor James.
For James, consciousness is not to be regarded as a static substance receiving impressions from without. It is rather a stream that flows on. And this stream has various characteristics, those that we express by its substantive and transitive character. It gathers about a certain experience and then passes on from that to another. Another analogy that James used was of the bird that alights on one branch and then flies to another, continually moving from one point to another point. The transitive phases of experience are those answering to relations; the substantives are those that answer to what we call the 11 things we perceive." If one is speaking, relating something, and says "and" and then stops at that point, we have the feeling of being ready to go on to something else. The feeling is just as definite an experience as that of yellow or red, of hot or cold; it
(388) is an experience of "and," one that is transitive, that is moving on. And these experiences are qualitatively different from each other. If, instead of saying "and," the speaker said "but," we should have an entirely different attitude toward what is to follow. In fact, our whole grasp of what we are hearing or reading depends upon the feelings we have for these different relating articles. If we come upon a thought with a "though" in it, we have one attitude toward what is to come; if "also," a different attitude. We are ready for a certain sort of content. We have a definite sort of experience answering to these relations which appear immediately in experience.
There is also another very important phase of experience which Professor James emphasizes, that which is represented by the spotlight of our attention as over against the fringe of the experience. If one gives his attention to something immediately before him, there lies about this experience a fringe which is very important in the recognition, in the value of that to which one gives attention. For example, when we are reading, we often have the experience of a world which is not immediately before us. The eye in moving over the page has caught a word several lines below. We have to hunt for it to find out what it was. It lies there in the fringe of our immediate experience, and we are ready for it when it appears. But still more, these different attitudes which are connected with the different particles, the "and," "but," "though," "also," also represent the fringe. We are immediately considering something, but we are already going on to something else. And the beginnings of that something else to which we are going on are already forming in the realization of our experience. They are taking place, and they represent the fringe of experience which comes in to interpret that to which we are giving attention.
These conceptions of James's which were so fruitful for the psychological consideration of experience do represent definitely a process which gets its whole statement in our conduct. We are going on to something besides that which is before us. And the structure of the experience itself depends on what we are
(389) going on to do. If we see something, we have at least aroused in the organism a tendency to meet it, or to avoid it. And it is this experience of what the contact will be that comes in to give the meaning to that which we actually see. We are continually interpreting what we see by the something that is represented by possible future conduct. So, to understand what is appearing in experience, we must take into account not only the immediate stimulus as such but also the response. The response is there partly in the actual tendency toward the object and also in our memory images, the experiences that we have had in the past. And this relationship of the response to the stimulus is one of very great importance in the analysis of our perception.
Professor Dewey brought out that fact in a memorable article on the stimulus-response concept. He pointed out that the very attitude of being acted upon by a stimulus is continually affected by the response. We start to do something, and the process of doing it is continually affecting the very stimulus we have received. A familiar illustration is that of the carpenter who is sawing on a line. The response of the organism to the stimulation of the line is there to determine what he will look for. He will keep his eye on the line because he is continually sawing. The process of listening is a process in which we turn the head in such a way that we will be able to catch what we are hearing-the listening is essential to the hearing. The process of responding is always present, determining the way in which we shall receive our so-called "impressions." That is, the organism is not simply a something that is receiving impressions and then answering to them. It is not a sensitive protoplasm that is simply receiving these stimuli from without and then responding to them. The organism is doing something. It is primarily seeking for certain stimuli. When we are hungry, we are sensitive to the odors of food. When we are looking for a book, we have a memory image of the back of the book. Whatever we are doing determines the sort of a stimulus which will set free certain responses which are there ready for expression, and it is the attitude of action which determines for us what the stimulus
(390) will be. Then, in the process of acting we are continually selecting just what elements in the field of stimulation will set the response successfully free. We have to carry out our act so that the response as it goes on is continually acting back upon the organism, selecting for us just those stimuli which will enable us to do what we started to do.
Out of this stimulus-response concept has developed behavioristic psychology. Now, there are two ways of elaborating the general point of view belonging to behaviorism. One is to consider the process itself in an external way, or, as the psychologists would say, in an objective fashion; just consider the act itself and forget about consciousness. Watson is the representative of that type of behaviorism. The behaviorist of this type is interested simply in the act. He is particularly interested in the act as it can be observed from the outside. Watson is representative of the so-called "scientific psychologist" who is observing that which can be observed by other scientists. It is a type of psychology which was developed first of all in the study of animals. There you are necessarily shut off from any so-called "field of consciousness." You cannot deal with the consciousness of the animal; you have to study his actions, his conduct. And these psychologists carried over the method of animal psychology into human psychology. They carried over from the study of animal psychology a new and, what seemed to be, a very fruitful conception, that of the reflex which could be, in their terminology, conditioned-the idea of the conditioned reflex.
This goes back, as most of you know, to Pavlov's dog. Pavlov was an objective psychologist who was studying the conduct of animals and endeavoring to make a complete statement of that conduct without bringing in the element Of consciousness, that is, without having to refer to what was called "introspection" to understand the act. He took a dog and, by putting food in its mouth, collected the saliva that was secreted. If a piece of meat was brought within the vision and the sense of odor of the dog, then saliva was secreted. The dog was all
(391) ready to eat the meat, and the glands in the mouth were preparing for the process of mastication. Now, taking the dog in that way and bringing the meat, he was able to determine just what the effect of this stimulus was in the production of saliva. Then, when he brought the meat to the dog, he also rang a bell. He kept this up long enough so that the two experiences would be associated. He did not speak of it as the consciousness of the dog but in terms of the process of the nervous system; and then he found that, if he rang the bell without presenting meat, the same effect was produced, that is, the excess of saliva was secreted without actual sight or odor of the meat. This particular reflex, then, the secretion of saliva, was conditioned by the association of the sound of the bell with the smell of meat, so that, when the meat was not presented, the sound of the bell actually acted as a stimulus in place of the smell of the meat itself.
This conception of conditioned reflex is evidently one that can be carried over into all sorts of fields. I will refer to some of them by way of illustration. First, take the cry of a baby who, for example, is shown a white rat with which he has played before without any fear. If the rat was associated with a loud sound, the sound, especially if not seen, was a natural stimulus of fright. If the white rat was presented to the child when this sound was produced, the child became frightened; and afterward, when the rat was brought to the child and the sound not made, the child was still frightened of the rat. That is, this particular reflex of the fright of the child was conditioned by the sight and feel of the white rat. This can be carried over to a whole set of situations. Take another example from our conventions. We expect a person to act in a certain sort of way. We expect him to be dressed in a certain sort of way. This conduct goes along with a certain type of manners, and these manners go along with a certain type of individual. If we meet a person whose manners are not those we expect, we have an attitude toward this person as one who lacks those particular characteristics. We have conditioned our reflexes by
(392) these particular conventions, many of them entirely external and having nothing to do with the character of the man. We assume that certain manners represent courtesy. A great many of the manners have nothing to do with courtesy; but they have become so related to it that if we find a man who has rough manners, we perhaps do not expect courtesy of him. We can carry the conditioned reflex over into other fields, such as that of language, where we have a set of arbitrary symbols. Certain experiences call for certain responses. We can associate with each experience a certain arbitrary symbol, a sound, a written word, and we can become so conditioned that when we hear the sound, see the word, we get the attitude which goes with the original experience.
The conditioned reflex, then, was brought in and used by Watson in his attempt to analyze conduct. You see, this makes possible analysis without bringing in consciousness as such. You do not have to deal with introspection; you do not have to go back and ask the person what he thinks, or feels, what imagery arises before him. One studies simply his conduct and sees what the stimuli are that act upon him under certain conditions. And a sort of an analysis can be made of conduct from his standpoint. What is of importance in this method is that this type of analysis goes back to the conduct of the individual, goes back to his behavior, to what he is doing-not to what he is thinking and feeling, but what he is doing.
The other approach is that of Professor Dewey, also from the standpoint of the conduct itself, which carries with it the various values which we had associated with the term "consciousness." There arose at this time the question which James put so bluntly —Does consciousness exist? He wrote an article under that caption. Is there any such entity as consciousness in distinction from the world of our experience? Can we say that there is any such thing as consciousness which is a separate entity apart from the character of the world itself? The question, of course, is difficult to answer directly, because the term "consciousness" is an ambiguous one. We use it particularly for
(393) experiences which are represented, we will say, by going to sleep and waking up, going under and coming out of the anesthetic, in losing and regaining "consciousness." We think of it as something which is a sort of entity, which is there, which has been, under these conditions, submerged and then allowed to appear again. That use of consciousness is not essentially different from the shutting-off of any field of experience through the senses. If one, for example, turns out the lights in the room, he no longer experiences the sight of objects about him. We say he has lost consciousness of those objects. But you would not speak of him as having lost consciousness. He is simply unable to see what is there. If he gets farther and farther away from a sound, or the sound becomes fainter and fainter, he loses consciousness of that sound; but he does not lose consciousness in the other sense. If we closed up his eyes, shut off his nostrils, ears, mouth, shut him off from a whole series of different stimuli, even those coming to him from the surface of the body and from the visceral tract, he would probably lose consciousness, go to sleep. There, you see, the losing of consciousness does not mean the loss of a certain entity but merely the cutting-off of one's relations with experiences. Consciousness in that sense means merely a normal relationship between the organism and the outside objects. And what we refer to as consciousness as such is really the character of the object. That is, the object is a bright object. If now you close the eyes, there is no bright object there any longer. We would say that you have lost consciousness of it, or simply that the bright object is not there. When the eyes are open, you have access to it; when the eyes close, you have access to it no longer. You see, there are two ways of looking at this having consciousness of the object. You may regard consciousness as a something that exists, inside of the organism somewhere, upon which the influence of certain stimuli come to play. You may think of consciousness in terms of impressions made upon this spiritual substance in some unexplained fashion in the organism. Or you may think of it simply as a relationship between the organism and the object itself.
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James in his answer to, or his attempted answer to, the question, "Does consciousness exist?" lays stress on the relation between the experience which the individual has had, that which has gone before, and that which follows after. He took the illustration of a person going to a house and entering the first room. Now that room and its furniture is an experience. You can say that it enters his consciousness, if you like; and still you think of the room as something there with its pictures, furniture, whether he came in or not. If now, the house is burned up by a fire, this particular room with its walls and pictures and furniture has disappeared. The experience which the individual has had of the room, however, is not burned up. He remembers it, remembers how the pictures were hung upon the walls. This, says James, is a cross-section of two histories. And the cross-section is identical. The room belongs to the history of the house. It has been there since the house was built. It is in that particular history. When the person comes into the room, that particular room with its furnishings becomes a fact of his history. He had been elsewhere yesterday. He comes into that particular room, and that room is now a part of his experience; he goes out, and it is related to his former experiences. He had been in other houses, seen other furniture. He compares pictures. Each is related, you see, to his history. On the other hand, this room also belongs to the history of the house, of the architect, of the carpenter. Thus this question of consciousness, according to Professor James's statement, is a question in what history this particular entity, so-called consciousness, lies. From this point of view the consciousness a man has of the room is a cross-section of his history, while the room in the house regarded as a physical affair is a cross-section of the history of the house. Here we have a single cross-section answering to both of these series. Or there is a coincidence of cross-sections. In that case what we would say is that the consciousness of the man in regard to the room in the house is nothing but a statement of that room as it lies in relationship to the man's own history: taken in its relationship to the history of the
(395) house, it is physical; taken in its relationship to the history of the man, it is a conscious event.
These two are not the only Implications or meanings of consciousness. That which represents mental activities of one sort or another-of volition, of analytic and synthetic thought, of purpose and intention on the one side, and on the other side certain contents-has been stated in the past in associational psychology as states of consciousness. On the one hand, as we have seen, the active side can be stated in terms of conduct, while that which might be referred to as the passive definition of consciousness can be regarded as belonging to the object itself. So far as such a division of the spoils takes place, consciousness as a private affair seems largely to disappear. There are other phases of it, as I have said, which we will not refer to now; but these two phases, these two conceptions of consciousness, I wanted to bring out. One is an active, the other a passive, statement. And what I have said is that this active phase, that involved in the motor, volitional side, as well as in the process of analysis and discrimination, can at least be stated in terms of conduct, of the act; and this act can be stated in terms of the organism as such. What we refer to as the passive side, the content side, is found to lie in the object. It can be regarded, of course, in its relationship to the individual. It does belong to his history, though not simply to his history but to that of the object as well. When the man is in the room, the room is stated in terms of his experience. It is interpreted in terms of memory, of his own anticipation. But still it is a room. Without attempting to discuss the various philosophic implications of this, I am pointing out that on the one side you may speak of consciousness in its passive sense and at the same time be thinking of the object, the room itself.
In some fashion, if we turn to the active side we have impulse as perhaps the most fundamental phase of activity; and impulse certainly can be given a statement in terms not only of acts but also of the organism. There are various fundamental physiological impulses, that of attack and flight, those which gather
(396) about hunger and sex. These are lodged in the organism itself. James's celebrated theory of the emotions comes back to the reaction to the motor attitudes of the organism itself in conditions such as fear, hunger, love, joy. That is, fear represents our response to our tendency to run away; hatred represents our response to our tendency to attack. The emotions as such are responses of the organism itself to its own attitudes under certain conditions. These responses are expressed in more or less violent action.
What is further involved here, that which James did not bring out which Dewey does, is that there is always some inhibition of these actions. If one could actually run away before the terrifying object, if one could keep ahead of it, so to speak, give full expression to the tendency to run, one would not be terrified. If one could actually strike the very moment one had the impulse to strike, he would not be angry. It is the checking of the response that is responsible for the emotion, or is essential at least to the emotion. Even in the case of joy, if there were no hesitancy about the way in which one expressed his happiness, there would not be that emotion.
We can approach the emotion, then, from the point of view of our own responses to the attitudes of the organism. Here the James-Lange theory recognizes the visceral, as well as the motor, responses involved in the act. We spoke of the emotion as our effective experience of these attitudes. The impulse is something that can be stated at least in terms of the response of the organism itself. It is, of course, out of the impulse that desires, intentions, arise. What is added to the impulse and desire is the image of what we intend. And here we seem to find ourselves in what might be regarded in an unassailable field of consciousness. as such. By its very definition imagery would be not the object, but some copy of the object; not the past event, but some memory of the past event; not future conduct, but a picture of future conduct. If you ask, now, where this image is, you would be at a loss to locate it. The easiest thing is to say that it is in consciousness, whether you put that consciousness in
(397) your head or say that you cannot locate it spatially. In any case, it is a relationship to something in your head. At least, the assumption of our physiological psychology is that an image answers to the excitement of certain nerve elements which have been excited in past experience. A cruder form of physiological psychology assumed that pictures of what had happened, were lodged, so to speak, in nerve cells, and, if the organism pressed a button, these pictures would come out. But further study revealed the fact that the nerve cells were no more than paths and junctions of paths. They should not be regarded as cubbyholes in which memory images or any other images are stored away. Just where the image is, is, I say, questionable. But you cannot say that the image is not in the objective world, for many of them are.
Here again I am not discussing the various philosophical implications of this analysis, but merely referring to the fact that every book you read has on every page of it your own memory images of words you have read before. Your own eye touches a line of print perhaps only twice. You take in only a relatively small portion of the actual printed line on the page, and the rest of it comes from memory images. I have referred to the attitudes represented by particles, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, the "ands," "buts," and "thoughs," which put us in certain attitudes of anticipation of a certain sort of word that is expected. The context we have gone over gives us a pretty definite anticipation of what is going to be there, so that our mind fills in from past experience. We have not time enough to read each word by itself. There are people, children particularly, whose eyes are bound to the page. They have to read word by word; and if they cannot be freed from it, they are slow readers ind can -accomplish little in this medium, What we have to do is to make most of what we read a contribution of our own. We fill out what we see. That, of course, is evident not only at the time. You suddenly find yourself in a snarl. You see something which is not there. The proofreader has trained himself to notice the words and letters and not the sense.
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Well, that is true not only of the printed page. The faces of our acquaintances are largely filled in by our memories of them. We notice very little in the outlines of a face with which we are familiar. The rest of it comes from memory images. If we are seeing a person for the first time, we regard the features in detail, look at the whole face; but even then what we see in each case is in some sense a sort of type. You could not tell what the types of the human face are that you recognize. Yet, there is something about every human face that is in some sense typical, and you fill in there. A considerable part of our perceptual world, the world existing "out there," as we say, is made up out of mental images, the same stuff that comes before us in revery, only in that case we are looking at it from the point of view of imagination. These images actually go to make up objects we see and feel.
The imagery cannot all be put into a consciousness that is distinct from the world about us. It goes back, as I say, to James's question as to whether consciousness as such exists. We have again a type of experience which from one point of view belongs to the external world and from another point of view to the history of the particular individual. Without attempting to discuss the question further, I simply want to emphasize the fact that the former is the passive side of our experience, which we ordinarily term "consciousness," but which under various conditions we do not consider as consciousness but as the object. If you should take away the so-called "imagery" from what you say you immediately see, from that which answers to what falls on the retina, to the sounds you actually hear, you would find that you have bare skeletal elements; most of the flesh and blood, of the content of the world about you, would have been taken out. What you call the "meaning" of it will go also. The distinction you make between what we call "consciousness" and what we call the "world" is really a functional distinction. It is not a static one. You cannot, then, cut off any particular field of content in our ordinary experience of the world and say, "This is my consciousness as
(399) such. This is a certain stuff which belongs inside of my head and not to the world." There are times at which it is inaccessible. But the printed page you see you hand to your friend, who reads it also. A large part of what he reads is his mental image, and what you read is your mental image; and yet you say you are reading the same page.
If one approaches the problem of psychology simply from the standpoint of trying to find out what takes place in the experience of the individual as an individual, you get a surer clue if you take the man's action than if you take certain static contents and say these are the consciousness of the man and that these have to be approached by introspection to be reached. If you want to find out what the man is doing, what he is, you will get it a good deal better if you will get into his conduct, into his action. And you come back there to certain of his impulses, those impulses which become desires, plus his mental images, which from one standpoint are his own but from another standpoint represent certain of his past experiences, or part of his future experience. So-called "objective" or "behavioristic" psychology undertakes to examine the acts of the man from outside without trying to get them by introspection as such, although introspection, as I shall show, has a certain definite meaning even for behavioristic psychology.
I have already referred to accessibility. There are certain very genuine experiences which belong to physical objects and yet which are accessible only to the individual himself, notably, a toothache. There is an aching tooth, no question about it; and yet, though others can see the tooth and the dentist can tap it, it aches only for the individual in whose head it is located, and much as he would like to he cannot transfer that ache to somebody else, There are, of course, a whole series of experiences of which that is typical, which are accessible alone to the person having them. What I want to point out is that you have no question about the aching tooth, no question about the members of your body. Your hands have certain definite characteristics for you. They can be seen by others, but you have
(400) the only inside approach to them. And that feeling is one which is just as genuinely a feeling of an object as is that of a table. You feel the table, and you feel your hand. Your hand is softer and warmer than the table. Your hand is not as large as the table. All sorts of distinctions can be made. You are feeling your hand as a physical object, but one having a peculiar character, and that character which it has is one which is accessible only to yourself. Nobody else can get that feel of your hand which you have, and yet that does not make you regard it as less genuinely there. You do not put the feel of your hand in your brain. You may assume that that feel is dependent on what is in your brain, but what the hand is involves the actual character that it itself has. Well now, if anybody else comes up and feels the table, he has a sense of the same table; but this approach to the feeling is peculiar to the individual. The mere fact of the accessibility to the experience you have of parts of your own body does not lodge them, so to speak, in a consciousness which is located in the brain or somewhere else. It simply means certain objects are accessible to you which are not accessible to anybody else.
There are various phases of nature which lie betwixt and between. Take the beauty of a landscape as an instance. From one point of view it is the response of the individual himself and seems to be accessible only to him, but the painter and the poet succeed seemingly in making it accessible to those who enjoy the picture and the poem. This is more or less debatable. All I want to insist on is that mere accessibility is not in itself evidence of something that belongs to a consciousness. It is much safer, even in such fields as these, to come back to the conduct of the individual if you are going to study him than to come back to something he reports to you- by mean-, of introspection.
Without discussing the various logical and metaphysical snarls involved, we will say that the space about us is public. We are all living in the same spatial world and have experiences of the same world. When it comes to a question of color, the thing seems to be dubious, for one man does not see certain
(401) colors which another man does see. We seem to have a case there where the color is private while the space is public. And yet, you cannot possibly separate the space from the color. And, while you may say that the space which one person perceives has a different degree of brightness from another, we would not hesitate to call those spaces public. But there is also something definitely private' Take a man's intentions, for example. We do not know what he is going to do. He has an advantage over us on that account. This is notable in the case of warfare, or in the case of a man who is making a feint when he is boxing. The intent which the person has is not evident to the other person. He may make a guess at it, but it is only the person who is going to strike who knows definitely what he intends to do. This is also true of intent not simply in such a situation but in all our intercourse with other people. We have a pretty genuine idea, as a rule, of what we are going to say when we are talking; but the person to whom we are talking probably does not. He may guess from past experience; but, as a rule, what a person is going to say would in some sense present a problem to the other person while it would be present in the mind of the one who is going to say it. It is not public property.
That is also true in very large degree of certain types of mental imagery. There is a field, a sort of an inner forum, in which we are the only spectators and the only actors. In that field each one of us confers with himself. We carry on something of a drama. If a person retires to a secluded spot and sits down to think, he talks to himself. He asks and answers questions. He develops his ideas and arranges and organizes those ideas as he might do in conversation with somebody else. He may prefer talking to himself to talking to somebody else. He is a more appreciative audience, perhaps. The process is not essentially different in these two cases, that is, of thinking and of talking to somebody else. It is essentially the same sort of a process. But the activity, such as it is, is not of the same sort. When you do talk to yourself, you do not ordinarily do it out loud. Sometimes you do talk out loud, and somebody else hears you. But,
(402) as a rule, when you talk to yourself, you depend on subtle motor and muscular methods of articulation. Supposing that conversation which takes place by such imagery as that is only accessible to the man carrying it on. He takes different roles. He asks questions and meets them; presents arguments and refutes them. He does it himself, and it lies inside of the man himself. It has not yet become public. But it is a part of the act which does become public. We will say he is thinking out what he is going to say in an important situation, an argument which he is going to present in court, a speech in the legislature. That process which goes on inside of him is only the beginning of the process which is finally carried on in an assembly. It is just a part of the whole thing, and the fact that he talks to himself rather than to the assembly is simply an indication of the beginning of a process which is carried on outside.
Well now, that process of talking to one's self-of thinking, as we say-is a process which we speak of as involving discrimination, analysis. Analysis may be a very physical affair. We can smash up an object by means of a hammer and analyze it. We can take it into the laboratory and use more subtle methods of disintegration. But we are analyzing the object either way. We may analyze a thing for somebody else. He wants to find something in it which he cannot see, and we point it out. We point at the particular part of the object he is to take hold of. Now, that pointing is a process of analyzing the object. For him it is the selection of some part of the object to the neglect of other parts, so that he can get hold of it. Indicating by the finger is just as much analysis as breaking up by a hammer or by chemical reagents. There are various ways of pointing at things. There are people among certain native tribes who can point at things by their own features, their lips, eyes, the way in which they turn their head. I have seen people carry on rather elaborate conversations that way. The ordinary way in which we do our pointing is by means of vocal gestures. Pointing of the finger is a physical gesture.
Words are gestures by means of which we indicate things;
(403) and, just in so far as we indicate things by means of our gestures, we are analyzing just as really as if we put them into a test tube of acid or as if we took our hammer and smashed the thing up to find out its different elements. It is a process of analyzing some element by means of our conduct. Thinking, as such, can at least be stated. I am finding all sorts of problems which can be brought up. Even the most recondite Intellectual processes come back to the things we do; and, of course, for an intelligent human being his thinking is the most important part of what he does and the larger part of that thinking is a process of the analysis of situations, finding out just what it is that ought to be attacked, what has to be avoided. We have to take the situation to pieces, think it out; and that process may be a process of pointing or of vocal gestures which indicate certain elements in it. Those vocal gestures are the indication of the elements which will lead to certain responses. One of the principal differences between a dog and a man is that, as a rule, we cannot point out to a dog what we want him to give attention to. If you can find out what the dog's interests are, you may be able to point something out to him; but if you want to have the dog tell time, you can never get him to look at a watch and notice where the hands of the watch are. Even if a person does not know what a watch is, you can indicate to a human individual the face of the watch and get him to see the meaning of it. That part of our thinking process, the power of analysis by means of gestures, is the most important part; and we can say, if you like, that we carry that on inside of our heads. The sense in which we do that is to use these pointers, these vocal gestures, the words which we utilize, to point out certain features in a situation; but we do that inside of ourselves. Occasionally, people (in hear us. We talk out loud. But as a rule they do not hear us, and we reply to the gestures that we make with other gestures; and in that fashion we get our plan of action made for ourselves.
Well, that is the way in which behavioristic psychology, if carried out consistently enough, can cover the field of psy-
(404) - chology without bringing in the dubious conception of consciousness. There are matters which are accessible only to the individual, but even these cannot be identified with consciousness as such because we find we are continually utilizing them as making up our world. What you can do is to get at the organism as something that you can study. Now it is true that you cannot tell what a man is thinking about unless he chooses to tell. If he tells, you have access to that as well as he has; and you know what he is going to do, and it can enter into your own conduct. You can get at your own conduct and at the conduct of other people by considering that conduct in an objective sort of fashion. That is what behavioristic psychology is trying to do, trying to avoid the ambiguity of the term "consciousness." And what is of importance about this psychology is that it carries us back, as I have said, to the act as such. It considers the organism as active. It is out of the interest in the act itself and the relationship of thought to the act itself that the last phase of more recent philosophy dealt with above, that is, pragmatism, arises. Out of the type of psychology which you may call "behavioristic" came a large part of the stimulus for a pragmatic philosophy. There were several sources, of course; but that is one of the principal ones.
