614
ROBERT CLAIBORNE
former are in some sense pleasant or satisfying, while the latter are unpleas–
ant or painful. Skinner, however, rejects such "mentalistic" notions. Thus, he
declares, to say that the human animal "is powerfully reinforced by sugar, salt
and sexual contact is very different from saying that these things reinforce
because
they taste or feel good." But if the subjective aspect of reinforcing
consequences is, as Skinner claims, "incidental," then what-"objectively"-is
reinforcement? Elsewhere, Skinner has defined it as any "contingency" that
makes the action it follows more (or less) likely
to
recur. Substituting this
definition, his Law of Reinforcement then reads: An action is more likely to
recur ifit is followed by any consequence that makes it more likely to recur. A
rose is a rose is a rose.
The same essential tautology crops up in different forms throughout the
book. Thus "When in recalling a name we find a wrong name too powerful it
is ...
because
it is repeatedly emitted to the exclusion of the name we are
recalling." Which translates as: "We find the wrong name too powerful be–
cause it is more powerful than the name we are recalling."
Insofar as Skinner's reinforcement theory is meaningful at all, it is at best
a half truth, in that an animal's actions can be shown to
be
determined, not
merely by their consequences, but by other, non-reinforcing events
preceding
them. If a monkey watches another monkey solve-or fail to solve-a prob–
lem, the probability that it will itself be able
to
solve the problem increases;
similar "observation learning" has been demonstrated in, e.g., cats. And any–
one who has ever dealt with children knows that they tend to imitate adults
and their fellows; in Behaviorist terms, if a child observes an action being
performed, that in itself increases the probability that it will perform the
action. Yet in none of these cases has the child or animal been
"reinforced"-because it has not yet done anything that
can
be reinforced.
But to concede the existence-let alone the probable evolutionary
importance-of observation learning would inevitably open the door to such
"mentalistic" concepts as information storage in the brain, which Skinner
explicitly rejects-so he simply ignores the subject.
Skinner's propensity for dodging thorny psychological problems shows
up most clearly in his brief references to creativity. This phenomenon
-obviously central to an understanding, not merely of art and science but
to
such universal human activities as the acquisition and use of language-is
brushed off in less than two pages, by likening it
to
a biological mutation.
Which of course explains nothing whatever. The closely allied phenomenon
of "insight learning," in which an animal
suddenly
performs a complex action
or series of actions it has never done or seen before, is not even mentioned
-though it was described by Kl>hler as early as 1917 and more rigorously
defined and studied by, e.g., the late Herbert Birch more than 10 years ago.
