Book reviews

This book is bold and broad in its aims. Its tone is well captured by the postscript comparing cognitive psychology to alchemy. Could it really be that in seeking to directly explore the mind some psychologists are indulging in a quest as doomed and as premature as the attempt to turn lead into gold? The author clearly thinks so. The chapters themselves group into three loose sections: The first, a history of behaviourism as developing from Watson in the early 20th century; the second, a critical exposition and evaluation of Skinner’s radical behaviourism in terms of his scientific achievements, philosophical problems, and, in the author’s view, premature application to society; the third, a presentation of “theoretical behaviourism”, a position aimed between the Scylla of Skinner’s radical approach and the Charybdis of cognitivism. With only three chapters devoted to the eponymous new behaviourism, one might be tempted to call for truth in advertising, but this would ignore the fact that Staddon seeks to develop a framework that is informed by the philosophical and scientific successes and failures covered in the previous overview. Accepting the premise that one can learn about an organism only through its behaviour, Staddon then rejects the contention of Watson and Skinner that only stimuli and responses need be considered by psychology. He argues that it is not possible to account for behaviour without reference to internal states of an organism. However, as cognitive psychology has already been subjected to round criticism, it is emphasized that these internal states are not presumed to be mental in any way. Nor are they directly physiological. Instead, Staddon utilizes the idea that these states reflect the past history of an organism, and that each state is defined by a set of equivalent histories (i.e., that set of past experience that would produce the same behaviour from an organism when exposed to a given situation). While it would be logically possible to specify/discover these states by simply combining the results of a set of experiments, Staddon acknowledges that this would require an impossibly large set of experiments. To overcome this problem, he suggests that equivalent histories are best specified in terms of a theory that defines how experience will change the internal state of an organism. The interest here is in “mechanism”, where mechanism is whatever works to account for behaviour. Staddon offers a “ruthless parsimony” as the best guide to what sort of theory is most likely to give such an account. But Occam’s razor is a tool best suited to paring away surplus speculation, and Staddon does not seem to appreciate that it cannot help with the production of new ideas. Without a positive principle from which to generate new ideas, the sort of theory Staddon has in mind could only be illustrated by example. However, only one detailed example—habituation as a cascade of memory systems decaying at different rates—is presented. What else would fit the bill? Rescorla and Wagner’s (1972) error correction rule had previously been mentioned as demonstrating the importance of competition in conditioning, but although the mention seemed to be approving, it is not clear whether or not this was considered a mechanism in Staddon’s sense. If it, and others such as Mackintosh’s (1975) or Pearce’s (1987), are models in Staddon’s sense, then there seems to be less novelty in his approach than appears on the surface. If not, then a clear argument as to why seems to be needed.