4. E. R. Guthrie.
Hull had been content to state
empirical laws at the molar level in
terms of actions
such as “biting the floor-bars” and
“leaping the barrier”
on the assumption that laws at
this level of description
could eventually be deduced from physiological
postu-
lates. E. R. Guthrie, on the other
hand, a contemporary
of Hull, eschewed physiological speculation and at-
tempted to reduce behavior at the molar
level to
movements such as muscle contractions and glandular
secretions, between which correlations could be stated.
He claimed that all
such correlations were derivable
from the old associationist law of
contiguity namely
that stimuli acting at the time of a response tend
on
their recurrence to evoke that response. He was an
S-R theorist par
excellence.
Guthrie was one of the few behaviorists to stress the
difference between
acts and movements. An act, he
claimed quite rightly, is a movement, or a
series of
movements, that brings about an end and acts are
classified
in terms of the ends which they bring about.
Learning, he argued, deals
with movements, not with
acts. Thorndike's law of effect concerns acts,
not
movements. It does not therefore deal with the basic
laws of
learning which state correlations between
movements—e.g.,
between the stimulation of a sense
organ and a muscular contraction. In a
famous experi-
ment which he did with Horton
(Guthrie and Horton,
1946) he placed a cat in a box, release from
which
was obtained by touching a pole in the middle of the
floor. It
was demonstrated that the cat tended to repeat
the posture in which it
first touched the pole and
obtained release. This experiment at least
showed that
contiguity is an important principle of learning; it did
not establish that it is the only principle and later
experiments (e.g., by
Seward) showed that improve-
ment in
learning was brought about by providing an
additional reward. Whether
Guthrie's experiment
showed anything about the wider issue of the impor-
tance of movements in learning as
distinct from acts
is quite another question. It is significant that Guthrie
had
to go to extreme lengths in constructing a situation
where no intelligence
was required to escape from the
box, in order to make his reduction look in
the least
plausible. Nevertheless Guthrie was an important figure
in
the history of behaviorism because he at least saw
the importance of the
distinction between movements
and acts, and because he saw it as an
obstacle in the
path of any reductionist program.
