'CONCEPTUAL' THINKING REALLY A FALLACY

'CONCEPTUAL' THINKING REALLY A FALLACY

Mr. Bartlett and Miss Smith have, I fear, harkened too much to the logician in their treatment of so-called general relations. They find fault with my simple illustration of building a bridle path; The statement they object to is as follows: 'if the grade is too steep I build my road around the side of the hill.' I quote their criticism: 'But the real fact of the case is concealed in that statement. In so far as the response is a thought response it is definitely a response to steepness; not merely [p. 102] to a particular set of visual reactions, because that would not lead on, of itself, to the further set of muscular and other reactions involved in making the path round the hill; not merely to the steepness of this hill, because that also would not take me round it; but especially to steepness as a quality common to this and to other situations and independent of any particular context.' From the whole history of the way responses grow up I cannot yield this point, and yet it probably would be assented to by most psychologists. Mr. Thomson I think has come to my rescue upon this, and I believe he would assent to my further elaboration. One of the first stumbling blocks I had in structural psychology was its treatment of concepts and general ideas. Long before behaviourism took me in tow, I came to the conclusion that such things were mere nonsense; that all of our responses are to definite and particular things. I never saw anyone reacting to tables in general but always to some particular representative. When I began to watch how a child learns to react to words denoting (from the standpoint of logic) a class, the process became clear. When he had his arms full of toys and the stimulus for depositing them was present, his mother would say, 'Put them on the table,' whether the table was one-legged, an extension table, a library or dining table. The word thus becomes conditioned. The word table (any class or abstract word such as animal, justice, mercy, infinity has the same history) becomes thereafter a single individual object, a part of his world of objects, ready to call out a single definite response (appropriate to the situation he is in) when he speaks it himself, thinks it or hears it spoken.

In a similar way the definite reaction to the word 'steepness' grows up. The lad takes a walk with his mother over stretches where there are no paths. When he goes up a hill he pants and blows and sweats. His mother says, 'Steep, isn't it?' Steep becomes substitutable for panting and blowing and sweating. They come to another hill. The mother says 'Steep, isn't it? You are tired; let's go round.' He learns by trial and error that the word steep is followed by sweating, hard work and tired limbs and that this exertion can be avoided by turning to the right or left and circling instead of keeping straight on. When, interested in constructing a bridle path after reaching adult life, he comes to a hill, his whole organization is such that the hill itself (the situation) calls out the word steep (conditioned) and steep in turn calls out 'turn right or left and circle.' I can see nothing in his reactions not explainable by conditioned word responses and simple trial-and-error learning.

As Mr. Thomson points out, after reaction to such situations has [p. 103] become habitual, merely being in a situation where he is confronted by a hill leads him to the correct response, namely, circling up its side. Thinking in the sense of implicit word processes need not go on at all. I think, then, we need not agree with Mr. Bartlett and Miss Smith when they say, 'But what, in this instance, switches me off from the series 'going in this direction' to the series 'going in that,' is the response to a universal quality or relation. That, and that alone, gives us the peculiar characteristic of thinking.'