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chapter, entitled 'Learning, Retention and
Motivation', is concerned, in the author's own words, with 'salivation
and bar-pressing'.
     
     
Reading this dialogue one has the vision of two cute automatic
slot-machines facing each other on the college campus, feeding each other
with stimulus coins and popping out pre-packaged verbal responses. Yet
this inane exchange between He and She is not a random improvisation
by the author -- he adapted it reverently from another textbook, Keller
and Schoenfeld's Principles of Psychology , and other writers have done
the same, as if it were a classic example of human conversation.
     
     
The diagram represents the application to language of the Behaviourist
credo: that all human activities can be reduced to a linear chain
of S-R units. At a first glance, the diagram might impress one as a
simplified but plausible schematisation -- until one takes a closer look
at it. It is based on Skinner's book Verbal Behaviour -- the first
large-scale attempt to tackle human language in terms of Behaviourist
theory. According to Skinner, speech sounds are emitted as any other 'bits
of behaviour'; and the process of conditioning which determines verbal
behaviour (including thinking) is essentially the same as the conditioning
of rats and pigeons; the methods of these experiments, Skinner claims,
'can be extended to human behaviour without serious modification'. [3]
Thus when our author speaks of the psychologist's preference for
studying 'simpler responses', he means the responses of salivation and
bar-pressing, as the context shows. But what on earth have the S-R symbols
in the diagram in common with bar-pressing? What justification is there
to call 'Don't mention it -- What about lunch?' a 'conditioned response
unit'? A conditioned response is a response controlled by the stimulus;
and a 'unit' in experimental science must have definable properties. Are
we to believe that He was conditioned to answer each 'Don't mention it'
with a lunch invitation? And in what conceivable sense are we to call
'Don't mention it -- What about lunch?' a unit of behaviour?
     
     
I seem to be labouring points which are obvious to the non-psychologist,
but the purpose will soon become apparent. Obviously, then, the phrase
'Don't mention it' might also produce the response 'Well, goodbye' or
'You have got a ladder in your stocking' or a number of alternative
'bits of verbal behaviour', according to whether She uttered the phrase
lingeringly with a sexy smile, or as a brisk brush-off, or hovering
between the two; and further depending on whether or not He finds her
attractive, whether He is free for lunch, and if so whether He has the
cash to pay for it. The simple S-R unit is neither simple nor a unit. It
is difficult for the layman to believe that the textbook author is not
aware of the complex, multi-levelled mental processes which go on in the
two people's heads during and in between the emission of sounds. Surely
these 'private processes' must be implied, taken for granted, in what the
author is saying? Perhaps they are; but by denying that private events
have a place in psychology, he has denied himself the possibility,
and even the vocabulary to discuss them. The Behaviourist's way to
get around this difficulty is to lump all these unmentionable private
processes together in the nondescript term 'intervening variables'
(or 'hypothetical mechanisms') which 'mediate between stimulus and
response'.* These terms are then used as a kind of garbage bin for the
disposal of all embarrassing questions about the intentions, desires,
thoughts and dreams of the organisms called He and She. An occasional
reference to 'intervening variables' serves as a face-saving device, since
everything that goes on in a person's mind is covered by it, and need not
be discussed. Yet in the absence of any discussion of the mental events
behind the dialogue, the comments of our textbook author are reduced to
utter triviality, and the neat