Philosophy

We are concerned in these chapters with what we can know about other men by merely observing their behaviour. In this chapter, I propose to consider everything that would commonly be called “memory”, in so far as it can be made a matter of external observation. And perhaps it may be as well, at this point, to state my own view of the question of “behaviourism”. This philosophy, of which the chief protagonist is Dr. John B. Watson, holds that everything that can be known about man is discoverable by the method of external observation, i.e. that none of our knowledge depends, essentially and necessarily, upon data in which the observer and the observed are the same person. I do not fundamentally agree with this view, but I think it contains much more truth than most people suppose, and I regard it as desirable to develop the behaviourist method to the fullest possible extent. I believe that the knowledge to be obtained by this method, so long as we take physics for granted, is self-contained, and need not, at any point, appeal to data derived from introspection, i.e. from observations which a man can make upon himself but not upon any one else. Nevertheless, I hold that there are such observations and that there is knowledge which depends upon introspection. What is more, I hold that data of this kind are required for a critical exposition of physics, which behaviourism takes for granted. I shall, therefore, after setting forth the behaviourist view of man, proceed to a scrutiny of our knowledge of physics, returning thence to man, but now as viewed from within. Then, finally, I shall attempt to draw conclusions as to what we know of the universe in general.

The word “memory” or “remembering” is commonly used in a number of different senses, which it is important to distinguish. More especially, there is a broad sense, in which the word applies to the power of repeating any habitual act previously learnt, and a narrow sense, in which it applies only to recollection of past events. It is in the broad sense that people speak of a dog remembering his master or his name, and that Sir Francis Darwin spoke of memory in plants. Samuel Butler used to attribute the sort of behaviour that would usually be called instinctive to memory of ancestral experience, and evidently he was using the word “memory” in its widest possible sense. Bergson, on the contrary, dismisses “habit-memory” as not true memory at all. True memory, for him, is confined to the recollection of a past occurrence, which, he maintains, cannot be a habit, since the event remembered only occurred once. The behaviourist maintains that this contention is mistaken, and that all memory consists in the retention of a habit. For him, therefore, memory is not something requiring special study, but is merged into the study of habit. Dr. Watson says: “The behaviourist never uses the term ‘memory’. He believes that it has no place in an objective psychology.” He proceeds to give instances, beginning with a white rat in a maze. On the first occasion, he says, it took this rat forty minutes to get out of the maze, but after thirty-five trials he learnt to get out in six seconds, without taking any wrong turnings. He was then kept away from the maze for six months, and on being put in it again he got out in two minutes, with six mistakes. He was just as good as he had been before at the twentieth trial. We have here a measure of the extent to which the habit of the maze had been retained. A similar experiment with a monkey showed even more retentiveness. He was put into a problem box which at first took him twenty minutes to open, but at the twentieth trial he opened it in two seconds. He was then kept away from it for six months, and on being put back in it he opened it in four seconds.

With human beings, we know that many of the habits we learn are retained through long periods of disuse—skating, bicycling, swimming, golf, etc., are familiar instances. Perhaps Dr. Watson goes a trifle too far when he says: “If a poor shot or an inexpert golfer tells you that he was good five years ago but that lack of practice has made him poor, don’t believe him; he never was good!” At any rate, this is not the belief of violinists and pianists, who consider it essential to practise every day. But even if it be somewhat of an exaggeration, it is certainly true that we retain bodily habits pretty well. Some, such as swimming, seem to be more completely retained than others. The power of talking a foreign language, for example, is one which is greatly impaired by disuse. The whole matter is quantitative, and easily tested by experiment.

But memory in the sense of recollection of past events, if it can be explained as a habit, will have, one might suppose, to be a verbal habit. As to this, Dr. Watson says:

“What the man on the street ordinarily means by an exhibition of memory is what occurs in some such situation as this: An old friend comes to see him, after many years’ absence. The moment he sees this friend, he says: ‘Upon my life! Addison Sims of Seattle! I haven’t seen you since the World’s Fair in Chicago. Do you remember the gay parties we used to have in the Wilderness Hotel? Do you remember the Midway? Do you remember ... etc.,’ ad infinitum. The psychology of this process is so simple that it seems almost an insult to your intelligence to discuss it, and yet a good many of the behaviourists’ kindly critics have said that behaviourism cannot adequately explain memory. Let us see if this is a fact.”

He goes on to say that during the period, long ago, when the man on the street was seeing Mr. Sims, they formed verbal and manual habits towards one another, so that “finally, just the sight of man, even after months of absence, would call out not only the old verbal habits, but many other types of bodily and visceral responses.”

He sums up: “By ‘memory’, then, we mean nothing except the fact that when we meet a stimulus again after an absence, we do the old habitual thing (say the old words and show the old visceral—emotional—behaviour) that we learned to do when we were in the presence of that stimulus in the first place.”

This theory is preferable to ordinary psychological theories in many ways. In the first place, it is not an attempt to treat memory as some sort of mystical “faculty”, and does not suppose that we are always remembering everything that we should remember if a suitable stimulus were applied. It is concerned with the causation of specific acts of remembering, these acts being all externally observable. I do not see any good reason to question it. Bergson’s contention that the recollection of a unique occurrence cannot be explained by habit is clearly fallacious. There are many instances, both with animals and with human beings, of a habit becoming firmly established through one experience. It is, therefore, quite possible that a stimulus associated with a previous occurrence should set going a train of bodily events which, in turn, produce words describing that occurrence. There is here, however, a difficulty. The memory of a past occurrence cannot be a verbal habit, except when the occurrence has been frequently related. When Watson’s man on the street says “Do you remember the Midway”, he is not using words that have become habitual; very likely he never used these words before. He is using words which a verbal habit associates with an event that is now happening in him, and the event is called up by a habit associated with Mr. Sims. So at least we must suppose, if we accept Watson’s view. But this diminishes the plausibility and the verifiability of his view. It is not our actual language that can be regarded as habitual, but only what our words express. In repeating a poem we have learned by heart, the language is habitual, but not so when we recount a past incident in words we never used before. In this case, it is not the actual words that we repeat, but only their meaning. The habitual element, therefore, if it really accounts for the recollection, must not be sought in words.

This is something of a difficulty in the Watsonian theory of language. When a rat learns a maze, it learns certain definite bodily movements; so do we when we learn by heart. But I may say to one person, “I met Mr. Jones in the train to-day”, and to another “Joseph was in the 9.35 this morning.” With the exception of the words “in the”, these two sentences have nothing verbally in common, yet they may relate the same fact, and I may use either indifferently when I recall the fact. Thus my recollection is certainly not a definite verbal habit. Yet words are the only overt bodily movements by which I make known my recollections to other people. If the behaviourist tells me that my recollection is bodily habit, and begins by telling me that it is a verbal habit, he can be driven by such instances to the admission that it must be some other kind of habit. If he says this, he is abandoning the region of observable fact, and taking refuge in hypothetical bodily movements invoked to save a theory. But these are hardly any better than “thoughts.”

This question is more general than the problem of memory. Many different forms of words may be used to express the same “meaning”, and there seems no reason in mere habit to account for the fact that we sometimes use one form of words and sometimes another when we “think” of that which all the various forms of words express. The association seems to go, not direct from stimulus to words, but from stimulus to “meaning” and thence to words expressing the “meaning”. You may, for instance, be quite unable to recollect whether you were told “Jacob is older than Joseph”, or “Joseph is younger than Jacob”, though you may remember quite definitely that you were told the fact which both these forms of words express. Again, if you are learning, say, a proof of a mathematical theorem, you do not learn by heart what the book says, unless you are a very bad mathematician; you learn, as people say, to “understand” the proof, and then you can reproduce it in symbols quite different from those in the book. It is such facts, among others, that make it difficult to explain the mechanism of association, whether in memory or in “thought” in general, if we assume that words, or even sentences, are the terms associated.

Perhaps, however, the theory as to the “meaning” of words which we developed in an earlier chapter may help us out of the difficulty. We defined the “meaning” of a word by means of its associations; therefore, if two words are synonyms, they have the same associations; and any stimulus which calls up one may also call up the other. The question which of two synonyms we use will then depend upon some extraneous circumstance.

This is all very well so far as single words are concerned; it would account satisfactorily, for instance, for the fact that I call a man sometimes by his surname and sometimes by his Christian name. But it is hardly so adequate when we come to the question of sentences. To revert to the illustration of a moment ago, in response to the stimulus “Did anything happen on your journey?” you may say either “I met Mr. Jones in the train to-day”, or “Joseph was in the 9.35 this morning”, or any one of an indefinite number of other sentences expressive of the same occurrence. Are we to suppose that, while you were in the train, you were rehearsing all these different sentences to yourself, so that each of them became firmly associated with the words “journey to-day”? Clearly such a supposition would be absurd. Yet all the separate words of your sentence have many other associations; it is only the sentence as a whole that is associated with your journey. You have met other people besides Mr. Jones; you have had other contacts with Mr. Jones besides meeting him this morning; “train” and “to-day” equally are appropriate to other occurrences that you might relate. Thus it has to be the whole sentence that is the associative unit, and yet the sentence may never have been in your head before. It seems clear that it is possible to state in words something that you remember, although you never put it into words before. Suppose I say “What did you have for breakfast to-day?” Probably you will be able to tell me, though it is very likely that you have not given names to the things you ate until this moment.

This whole matter is connected with the distinction between sentences and single words, which we found important when we were discussing language. But even when we confine ourselves to single words, there are difficulties in Dr. Watson’s view. Cases are alleged in which children, after learning to speak, can recall incidents which occurred before they could speak, and describe them in correct words. This would show that the memory had persisted in a non-verbal form throughout the period before they learned to speak, and had only subsequently found verbal expression. Such extreme incidents are rare and might be questioned, but in a less extreme form it ought not to be difficult to obtain examples of the same sort of thing. Suppose, for example, that a young child hurt his wrist badly before he knew the word “wrist”, and that some time afterwards he learnt it; I should not be surprised if he could relate that he had hurt his wrist. Such instances, however, would not refute the essence of Watson’s theory. He would allow “visceral” memory, for example, and the association with the word “wrist” might be grafted on to this. The real difficulty in Dr. Watson’s view, to my mind, is the fact that our sentence may vary verbally as much as it likes so long as it retains the same “meaning”, and that we clearly do not rehearse to ourselves beforehand all the possible sentences having the “meaning” in question.

It should be realised that behaviourism loses much of its attractiveness if it is compelled to postulate movements that no one can observe and that there is no other reason to assume. Dr. Broad, in his book on The Mind and its Place in Nature, distinguishes between “molar” and “molecular” behaviourism: the former assumes only such bodily movements as can be observed, while the latter allows and utilises hypothetical minute movements, more especially in the brain. Now here we must make a distinction. Physics believes in a large number of phenomena which are too minute to be observed even with the strongest microscope, and if physics is at all correct, there must be minute movements in all parts of a human body, of a sort which we can never hope to see. We cannot reasonably demand of the behaviourist that he should abstain from an hypothesis which physics asserts for very good reasons. And in the process which leads from stimulus to reaction there are bound to be small occurrences in the brain, which, though they cannot be observed, are essential to the physiological explanation of what occurs. But when the behaviourist assumes small occurrences for which there is no ground in physics, and which are needed solely in order to safeguard his theory, he is in a less strong position. Dr. Watson asserts, for instance, that whenever we “think” there are small movements in the larynx which are beginnings of the movements we should make as if we spoke words out loud. It may be that this is true; certainly I am not prepared to deny it. But I am not prepared to say that it must be true merely because, if it were not, behaviourism would be false. We do not know in advance that behaviourism is true; we have to find out whether it will explain observed facts. Whenever it has to postulate something unobserved merely in order to avoid a refutation, it weakens its case. And if it maintains, as, from Dr. Watson’s language, it seems to do, that we only remember an occurrence by forming a verbal habit in connection with it, then it is obliged to postulate much implicit use of words of which we have no evidence.

To sum up this discussion. While it is quite possible, by behaviourist methods, to ascertain whether a person remembers a past occurrence or not, unless he is deliberately obstructing the observer, and while much memory can be quite adequately explained as habit, there do seem to be great difficulties in the view that memory consists entirely of habit, at least in the case of the recollection of an event. These difficulties seem insuperable if we suppose memory to be essentially a verbal habit. They are not insuperable if we postulate sufficient minute unobservable bodily movements. We have not considered whether they can be overcome by introducing data derived from introspection, since we wish, for the present, to maintain a strictly objective attitude to human behaviour. The introspective discussion of memory will be taken up at a later stage.