Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude

by John Dewey; Boyd Henry Bode; Harold Chapman Brown; Horace Meyer Kallen; George H. Mead; Addison Webster Moore; Henry Waldgrave Stuart; James Hayden Tu

That the principle of selection is, in the end, the ability to modify behavior through the anticipation of possible consequences, appears from the fact that the category of stimulus and response is otherwise found to be unworkable. It is true that in the simpler forms of behavior stimulus and response may be correlated without practical difficulty. But when we deal with what has been called "delayed overt response," the matter becomes more complicated and the theoretical difficulty becomes more prominent. The behaviorist would not seriously undertake to record everything that happens between stimulus and response. He proceeds selectively, taking the relation of stimulus and response as his clue. He is properly interested in the movements which result from the application of the stimulus only in so far as they constitute response. Otherwise his study is not a study of behavior, but a study of movements. But when does a movement constitute a response? Do we label as stimulus the spoken word which results in overt action a week later, or the visual perception which sets a complicated and long-drawn-out problem, for no other reason than that it appears somewhere as an antecedent in the causal chain of events? If so, there is no obvious reason why the event which occurred just before or immediately after the soi-disant stimulus should not be regarded as the true stimulus. Unless a satisfactory reason is forthcoming, it would seem better to substitute cause and effect for stimulus and response and to drop the term behavior from our vocabulary. Psychology then becomes a study of certain causal relationships, but is still without a principle for the selection of those causal events which are supposed to constitute its peculiar subject-matter.

Even if we manage to become reconciled to this situation, however, our troubles are not yet at an end. There still remains the difficulty in certain cases of showing that the event which is selected as stimulus or cause bears any significant relationship to the event which figures in our scheme as the response. The stimulus is supposed to have a causal connection with the response, but how are we to know that this is the fact? How are we to know that the engineer who solves a problem for me at my request might not have done so anyway? No behaviorist can possibly show that the air waves set in motion by my vocalization were an indispensable stimulus. We doubtless believe that the spoken word was in fact the spark which lit the fuse and finally exploded the mine, but this belief involves a complication of causes which it is wholly beyond our power to control or to verify.

It is true, of course, that we are able, as a matter of fact, to correlate stimulus and response. I know that it was the spoken word which caused the commission to be executed, for the expert reminds me of the fact and presents a bill. But neither of us makes any pretense that his belief is derived from a scrutiny of the causal sequence. Memory furnishes us with a shortcut to the result. While our present acts are doubtless connected with the past through causation, we do not regard them as simply the effects of antecedent causes. They are rather responses to present stimuli. The expert presents his bill, being moved thereto by a stimulus which may be indicated by saying that it is the spoken-word-constituting-a-commission-now-completed-and-entitling-me-to-compensation. That is, the stimulus cannot be pushed back and anchored at a fixed point in the past, but is a present factor at the moment of response and is operative by virtue of its anticipation of future events.

If, then, psychology is to be regarded as a study of behavior, it is plainly necessary to reinterpret the category of behavior. For example, a purely mechanical response to a light-stimulus may properly be viewed as response to the ether-vibration or wave-length upon which it follows in temporal sequence. But if this stimulation results in what is commonly called consciousness, a different kind of response ensues. The light-stimulus becomes a cause or occasion for the act of looking. But why look, unless it be to secure a new stimulus for further response? We stop to look, precisely because the first stimulus does not run smoothly off the reel. The response will not go forward, but is halted and expends itself in the effort to secure a further stimulus. This is the moment of attention, in which the stimulus undergoes a process of transformation, concomitantly with the process of reorganization in the motor responses, and in the direction of ends or results that are foreshadowed in it. This change in the stimulus takes place under certain specifiable conditions, and the study of these conditions is a study of such processes as perceiving, attending, remembering, and deliberating, which are distinctively psychological in their nature. Processes of this kind, if taken as changes in stimuli, find an objective criterion in the adaptive behavior for the sake of which they occur, and they provide psychology with a distinctive task and subject-matter.

As against the introspectionist, then, the behaviorist is justified in his contention that psychological procedure must be objective and experimental in character. The danger to which he has exposed himself is the failure to differentiate his problem from that of physiology and physics. It is only by a proper recognition of both the objective and the distinctive character of conscious behavior that psychology can free itself of the reproach which is heaped upon it by members of its own household and take the place that rightfully belongs to it in the community of the sciences.

IV

According to the preceding exposition, the current psychological doctrine of focus and margin is an attempt to reduce the changes in the stimulus to terms of static entities denominated sensations and images. By abstracting from change we convert the new stimulus that is already on the way into inert sensory material, which lends itself to purely analytic treatment. In this way the suggested hardness of the rock becomes a "centrally aroused sensation" of a stubbed toe, the heat of the candle becomes an image of a burn, etc. As was said before, the sensations are not existences, but representatives or symbols of our nascent activities; they are the static equivalents of this foreshadowing or reference to the future. The explanation of experience that we find in James and Bergson approximates this view so closely in one respect and departs from it so widely in another as to warrant a brief discussion.

A prominent characteristic of the doctrine advocated by James and Bergson is the emphasis given to the foreshadowings or anticipations of the future. Experiences of conflict, such as the struggle to recall a name, take on their peculiar coloring, so these writers contend, from their relationship to a beyond, to something which is yet to be. If we are to understand experience as it really is, we must guard against the besetting temptation to translate everything into spatial equivalents. This forward reference is usually read off as a distinction and contrast between simultaneously existing components. Some constituent is first set apart as the nucleus or focus and is then enveloped with an elusive, intangible wraith of meaning, which is called the margin. We have been taught to think of the focus as made up of sensory material of some sort and silhouetted against a background lit up by the fitful, inconsequential heat-lightning of meaning. But this is a perversion of the facts. When we are engaged in a problem it is precisely these unformed meanings that are of interest and importance. They are in the focus of consciousness, in so far as we can speak of a focus at all. They absorb our attention and direct our energies. They inform us of a margin, not by refusing to compete for our attention with more important or more interesting facts, but by bodying forth the unfinished character of the situation. Hence this beckoning, this tingling with the sense of closeness, this sinking back when our efforts meet with defeat. Focus and margin, in short, have to do with movement, with transition, and not with a static field. These situations are felt as inherently unstable and in process of reconstruction. There is a peculiar sense of activity, of "something doing," of a future knocking on the door of the present. What is thus on its way to the present we can designate only in terms of the object as it is after it has arrived. To call it marginal is to immerse the object in this temporal flux, which embodies perfectly the characteristics of Bergsonian duration.

But this is only a first step. If we turn now to those experiences from which this inner diremption of fact and meaning is absent, we find a process that is essentially the same in kind. They likewise constitute a temporal flow, even though there be no sense of duration or of change as such. The different moments of these experiences are not mechanically juxtaposed, but blend together in much the same way as when the process is experienced as a process. In principle we have the same transition, the same becoming, the same growth from less to more, the same activity of continuous reconstruction. Conscious life, we find, is a continuous adjustment; each of its moments is a "transitive state." The more evenly flowing experiences are likewise endowed with a focus and margin, not in the form of static elements, but as a dynamic relationship of what is with what is to be.

Such an interpretation of experience, moreover, opens the way for a proper valuation of the psychologist's procedure. The concept of sensation is methodology pure and simple. Granted that focus and margin are such as was indicated a moment ago, how are they to be described, unless we resort to some Hilfsbegriff such as sensations? James's description of the effort to recall a forgotten name is not description at all in a scientific sense, since the "wraith of the name" that we are trying to recover is of too unearthly a fabric to be weighed and measured by accepted scientific standards. It makes us "tingle," it lets us "sink back," but such portrayal is literature rather than science. Our first step must be to resolve our material into components. These components we identify with genuine elements if we can, with pious fictions if we must; but until this is done there can be no exact description. There can be no precision in our statement of the facts and no formulation of the laws that govern their changes.