Discussions of perception that are in some respects fuller than the present chapter can be found in C. H. Judd's Psychology, General Introduction, 2nd edition, 1917, pp. 162-194; in Titchener's Textbook of Psychology, 1909, pp. 303-373; and in Warren's Human Psychology, 1919, pp. 232-269.
CHAPTER XVIII
REASONING
THE PROCESS OF MENTAL, AS DISTINGUISHED FROM MOTOR EXPLORATION
We are still on the general topic of "discovery". Indeed, we are still on the topic of perception; we come now to that form of perception which is different from sense perception. The reasoner is an explorer, and the culmination of his explorations is the perception of some fact previously unknown to him.
Reasoning might be described as mental exploration, and distinguished from purely motor exploration of the trial and error variety. Suppose you need the hammer, and go to the place where it is kept, only to find it gone. Now if you simply proceed to look here and there, ransacking the house without any plan, that would be motor exploration. But if, finding this trial and error procedure to be laborious and almost hopeless, you sit down and think, "Where can that hammer be? Probably where I used it last!" you may recall using it for a certain purpose, in a certain place, go there and find it. You have substituted mental exploration of the situation for purely motor exploration, and saved time and effort. Such instances show the use of reasoning, and the part it plays in behavior.
The process of reasoning is also illustrated very well in these simple cases. It is an exploratory process, a searching for facts. In a way, it is a trial and error process. If you don't ransack the house, at least you ransack your memory, in search for facts that will assist you. You recall this fact [{463}] and that, you turn this way and that, mentally, till some fact is recalled that serves your need. No more in reasoning than in motor exploration can you hope to go straight to the desired goal.
Animal and Human Exploration
Is man the only reasoning animal? The experimental work on animal learning, reviewed in one of our earlier chapters, was begun with this question in mind. Previous evidence on this point had been limited to anecdotes, such as that of the dog that was found opening a gate by lifting the latch with his nose, and was supposed to have seen men open the gate in this way, and to have reasoned that if a man could do that, why not a dog? The objection to this sort of evidence is that the dog's manner of acquiring the trick was not observed. Perhaps he reasoned it out, and perhaps he got it by accident--you cannot tell without watching the process of learning. You must experiment, by taking a dog that does not know the trick, and perhaps first "showing him" how to open the gate by lifting the latch; but it was found that dogs and cats, and even monkeys, could not learn the trick in this way. If, however, you placed a dog in a cage, the door of which could be opened by lifting a latch, and motivated the dog strongly by having him hungry and placing food just outside, then the dog went to work by trial and error, and lifted the latch in the course of his varied reactions; and if he were placed back in the cage time after time, his unsuccessful reactions were gradually eliminated and the successful reaction was firmly attached to the situation of being in that cage, so that he would finally lift the latch without any hesitation.
The behavior of the animal does not look like reasoning. For one thing, it is too impulsive and motor. The typical [{464}] attitudes of the reasoner, whether "lost in thought" or "studying over things", do not appear in the dog, or even in the monkey, though traces of them may perhaps be seen in the chimpanzee and other manlike apes. Further, the animal's learning curve fails to show sudden improvements such as in human learning curves follow "seeing into" the problem. In short, there is nothing to indicate that the animal recalls facts previously observed or sees their bearing on the problem in hand. He works by motor exploration, instead of mental. He does not search for "considerations" that may furnish a clue.