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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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2. E. C. Tolman. One of the most influential and
forceful converts to behaviorism was E. C. Tolman;
for he was calling himself a “purposive behaviorist”
as early as 1920, though his definitive work entitled
Purposive Behavior in Animals and Man did not appear
until 1932. He aligned himself with the behaviorists
because he accepted their central methodological doc-
trine about the sort of evidence on which a scientific
psychology should be based. He did not indulge, like
Watson and Weiss, in metaphysical assertions about the
sorts of entities which there are in the world; he ad-
mitted that, at a common-sense level, men introspect
and manage well enough with mentalistic terms. What
he doubted, however, was the adequacy of this termi-
nology for scientific purposes. “Raw feels” are scien-
tifically useless, and mentalistic terms can be translated
into the language of observable behavior. Tolman, in
other words, was a conceptual behaviorist rather than
a materialist, as well as being a behaviorist in his
explicitly stated methodology.

In the conceptual sphere Tolman made at least three
contributions, two of which were of permanent impor-
tance. Firstly he called himself a purposive behaviorist
because he maintained that the concept of purpose was
irreducible. As has been mentioned (sec. I, 2), he dis-
tinguished between the molecular and the molar level
of behavior, whose unity as segments of behavior is
provided by the ends towards which movements persist
and in the attainment of which they are docile. He
accused Watson of not distinguishing clearly between
the molecular and the molar levels of analysis and
maintained, against Hull, that behavior at the molar
level is an “emergent” which has descriptive and de-
fining properties of its own. Descriptions of it cannot
be reduced to or deduced from analyses at the molecu-
lar level.

Secondly Tolman made rather bizarre attempts to
translate mentalistic terms, which had application at
the molar level, into a behavioristic type of termi-
nology. “Consciousness” became “the performance of
a 'sampling' or 'running-back-and-forth' behavior.” He
even suggested that Freudian personality mechanisms
can be translated into this type of terminology.


224

Thirdly, Tolman introduced into psychological the-
ory the notion of intervening variables. Terms like
“instinct” had previously been used, e.g., by
McDougall, not simply to postulate that certain pur-
posive behavior patterns were unlearned; they also had
a metaphysical dimension to them—a suggestion of
Aristotelian entelechies, of dynamic mental atoms ac-
tivating behavior. Tolman argued that it was perfectly
legitimate for a behaviorist to use a term like “drive”
which did not denote an unobservable entity, but
which was a shorthand symbol for stating a correlation
between antecedent conditions, e.g., food-deprivation,
and variations in behavior, e.g., eating.

This conceptual clarification helped to set psychol-
ogy free to theorize without fear of metaphysics. It
led on to the use of hypothetical constructs, which did
commit theorists to postulates about unobservables
usually of a physiological sort. (For this distinction see
MacCorquodale and Meehl, 1948.) Tolman thus con-
tributed to ridding psychology of the inductivist myth,
shared by the early behaviorists, that scientists must
never go beyond what is observed. In fact, however,
the postulation of unobservables to explain the ob-
served has been one of the most potent sources of
scientific advance.

In the details of his psychological theory Tolman was
eclectic. He stressed the importance of both demand
variables and cognitive variables in behavior, and at-
tempted to state more precisely assumptions of the sort
which McDougall had incorporated in his theory of
instincts, i.e., of innate dispositions to pay attention
to and behave in specific ways towards objects of a
certain class.

In his account of the demand variables Tolman dis-
tinguished first-order drives, which are linked with
specific antecedent physiological conditions and con-
sequent states of physiological quiescence (e.g., food-
hunger, sex-hunger) from second-order drives (e.g.,
curiosity, constructiveness) which are not so obviously
linked. This distinction, which was later to become that
between biological and acquired drives, was important
in the history of behaviorism. On the cognitive side
Tolman postulated “means-end readinesses” for
“means-objects” which are innate but docile relative
to the success of the organism in attaining its goal.
Also in his account of “behavior supports” he tried
to escape the sensory atomism of stimulus-response
psychology. He also developed the concept of the
“sign-Gestalt expectation” to incorporate the findings
of Gestalt psychology into his assumptions about the
organism's perceptual field.

Although Tolman emphasized the importance of
innate appetites and aversions in behavior he was
equally emphatic on the importance of learning, in
which he stressed the role of cognitive variables. He
argued, also, that the evidence of latent learning was
inconsistent with Throndike's law of effect. In trial and
error learning a refinement of sign-Gestalts takes place.
A kind of cognitive map develops of the different
possibilities as the various alternatives are explored.

Motivational variables are, of course, important in
learning in that they determine which aspects of a
situation will be emphasized. But learning depends
primarily on the expectancy of achievement and on
confirmations of the expectancy. In learning animals
and men make predictions and the maps which they
use to do this are refined more and more as experience
confirms or falsifies them. As Tolman developed his
theory he became more and more interested in and
convinced of the importance of cognitive variables. It
is therefore understandable that behaviorists became
increasingly embarrassed by Tolman's claim that he
was one of them.