The Act of Creation (87 page)

 

 

I have laboured this point at the risk of repetitiveness because once
accepted, it allows us to dispense with terms like transfer, spreading,
'generalization' (in sense b, cf.
p. 537
), and
'association by similarity' -- and to close the lid of the semantic
Pandora box. Take, for instance, Watson's famous experiment intended to
establish a 'conditioned fear reflex' in an infant eleven months of age,
by striking an iron bar with a hammer each time the child touched its
pet animal, a white rat. After this was repeated several times within
the span of a week, little Albert responded with fear, crying, etc.,
whenever the rat was shown to him. But he also showed fright-reactions
in varying degrees to rabbits, fur coats, cotton wool, and human hair --
none of which had frightened him before. Watson concluded, and a number
of textbooks with him, that the conditioned reflex had 'spread' or been
'transferred' to all furry things -- words which have the connotation of
motion in space, conveying the image that the child had somehow lifted
its fear-reaction from the rat and put it down on the piece of cotton
wool. In fact the idea of the 'spreading' of the conditioned response was
originally derived from Pavlov's notion of the irradiation of excitatory
processes spreading across the cortical tissues. This physiological
theory of Pavlov's has long been abandoned [11], but its unconscious
echoes still haunt the laboratories. On a metaphorical level there is of
course no objection to saying that the child's dread had spread from rats
to cotton wool, but on the technical level the concept of 'spreading' has
no explanatory value, and has been the source of endless confusion. (The
same applies to 'transfer', and to 'generalization' used as a synonym
for spreading.) Instead of pretending that the child has shifted its
response, along a so-called generalization gradient, from rat to cotton
wool, we should say that it has
abstracted
the tactile quality of
furriness, and
recognized
it in the cotton wool. And its reaction
to it was perfectly logical, because Watson had taught it that furriness
always signalled the dreaded bang. It would of course be nonsensical
to pretend that this child of eleven months was incapable of seeing the
difference between rabbit, cotton wool, and human hair. But at that time
the tactile quality alone was relevant, and with regard to that, rabbit,
rat, and fur coat were all 'the same thing' (cf.
pp. 537
ff.).

 

 

We can observe the operation of the same principles on the
verbal
level at a more advanced age. Stern's daughter, Hilda [12], at the age of
nineteen months, had been in the habit of pulling at her parents' noses;
when she discovered that the tips of their shoes (before having leaned the
name 'shoe') offered the same satisfactory opportunities, she promptly
named them 'noses'. Again, instead of speaking of 'transfer', etc.,
we shall say that the child recognized an abstracted quality that could
be found in various objects. Koffka mentions a boy of twenty-six months'
to whom "la-la" first meant song or music; later when he heard a military
band, it meant soldier, and finally all kinds of noises, including sounds
like claps and thuds. . . . Another little boy uttered the word "atta"
at the end of his eleventh month whenever anything disappeared -- when
a person left the room or when a light was turned out.' [13]

 

 

The first object- and relation-concepts to be abstracted and named are
those which have the greatest functional relevance to the child. At that
stage no verbal distinctions are made between objects and attributes,
between qualities and things in which these qualities are vested, between
nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Lala refers to music; it functions as a
collective name for bells, soldiers, instruments; and if we feel that
Lala is a silly name for a soldier, but regard 'redcoat' or 'poilu'
as reasonable, then only because wearing a red coat or being unshaven
appear to us more relevant martial qualities than making music. When the
child learns to use words, the functionally most important aspect of an
as yet unnamed object or event will provide its name; the less important
aspects of secondary qualities are then relegated to the role of 'going
together with it' -- its 'attributes' or 'parts' or 'functions'. But the
criteria of relevance change with age; when Stern's little girl learned
to walk, shoes acquired a more important function than that which they
shared with noses; and with it a new name.

 

 

Of course the visual experience of Watson's baby is different when it
touches a rat and when it touches a fur coat; but it is the touch that
matters, the visual aspect is irrelevant, and accordingly, in its overt
reactions, the baby does not discriminate between the two. Similarly,
the baby mentioned by Koffka saw the difference between the shapes of its
Teddy bear and of its stuffed rabbit; but this difference is irrelevant
at the early age when all that matters is manipulating a soft toy;
hence the name 'dolly' was sufficient to symbolize the whole class, and
no motivational need arose for explicit verbal discrimination. Adults
behave much the same way. The Eskimoes have several words for various
kinds of snow where we have only one; but Malinovski's savages had only
one word,
manna wala
, for all insects and birds -- except those that
could be eaten. Building workers, who shift from job to job, cannot be
bothered to learn one another's names; all electricians are 'Sparks'
and all carpenters 'Chippies'. Elderly ladies addicted to romantic novels
from the lending library feel that the names of authors are irrelevant;
all that matters is that it should be a 'nice book'.

 

 

Thus all along the line we abstract and discriminate only qualities
which are relevant to us; and new discriminations arise as a result of
changes in our criteria of relevance -- where 'us' refers to animal and
man. In the normal development of the individual these changes are due
to maturation and guided learning. In the experimental laboratory,
as in reformatory schools and other brainwashing establishments,
rewards and punishments effect the transformation of the subject's, or
victim's, scale of values. In classical conditioning all tuning forks
are 'the same thing' to the dog until the difference in pitch is made
significant by the giving or withholding of food. In guided learning,
all pages in his algebra book look the same to the schoolboy until he
learns to distinguish linear from quadratic equations at a glance.

 

 

Distinctions which are irrelevant to the subject will either go entirely
unnoticed
; or they may be
perceived but not retained
; or
they may be retained but not
verbally
discriminated. Thus if we
fail to observe differences, it is either because we lack the equipment
for doing so ('lack of discrimination' in the colloquial sense), or
because the differences are 'indifferent' to us, or not important enough
to give them verbal labels (e.g. knowing stars by sight but not by name).

 

 

I have dwelt at some length on the subject of abstraction and
discrimination because although most of what I have said would seem
self-evident to the layman, this would not be the case with students of
experimental psychology -- or of philosophy, if it comes to that. Already
in the twelfth century A.D. John of Salisbury remarked that the world
had grown old discussing the problem, and that it had spent more time
on it than the Caesars took to conquer the world. But Pavlov, Watson,
and those directly or indirectly influenced by them have certainly made
confusion worse confounded.*
From the genetic point of view, abstraction and discrimination appear
(cf.
pp. 608
f.) as the latest extensions of the
basic principles which we saw at work on all levels of the hierarchy,
starting with the integration of functions and differentiation of
structures in morphogenesis. Abstraction, by creating pattern and order
out of the chaotic stream of experience, corresponds to the former;
discrimination in perception and the consequent differentiation of
response correspond, as language indicates, to the latter. If we wish
to indulge in analogies, we might say that the categories of Aristotle
acted as embryonic inductors on the self-differentiating morphogenetic
fields of conceptual thought.

 

 

 

The Magic of Names

 

 

We have so far distinguished several stages in the child's progress:
(a) the abstraction of pre-verbal object concepts (and action concepts);
(b) attaching a verbal symbol, which soon acquires central importance,
to the concept; (c) the discovery, signalled by the appearance of the
naming question, that all things have names, that the words previously
learned are only particular instances of a general relation between words
and things. The next step consists in the concretization of this relation
itself in the concept 'name'. The child has realized that not only have
all things verbal handles and labels attached to them, but that these
labels and handles are called
names
.

 

 

A characteristic feature of this development is that at each step a
relation has been abstracted and turned into a
relatum
. At the
first step the relation between the varied particular appearances of
the mother was turned into a single relatum 'mama', which now enters
as a unit into other relations; at the last step the relation between
words and things was abstracted and turned into the conceptual entity
'name'. 'Name' is the verbal symbol attached to the relation of verbal
symbolism; by being made explicit and conscious the relation is now
experienced as a concrete relatum.

 

 

In fact, an over-concrete relatum. To quote Piaget: 'Names are, to
begin with, situated in objects. They form part of things in the same
way as do colour and form. Things have always had their names. It has
always been sufficient to look at things to know their names. . . . To
deform the name is to deform the thing.' [14] When a child of four and a
half was asked how one knows that the sun's name is 'sun', it answered:
'Just because one sees it'. And when a child of nine was asked whether
one could have given another name to the sun, he answered: 'No -- because
the sun is just the sun'. Another child of six and a half, when pressed,
admitted that God could have given the sun another name, but in this case
'God would have done something wrong'. [16]

 

 

When Herschel discovered Uranus, the German naturalist Sachs remarked
sceptically: 'What guarantee have we that the planet found by him really
is Uranus?' Equally inspired was this philosophic reflection of an
Englishman: 'English is the most logical language; a knife, for instance,
is called by the French
couteau
, by the Germans
Messer
,
and so on, whereas the English call it
a knife
which is after
all what a knife really is.'

 

 

In the mentality of primitives, the person and his name are magically
related. In Eastern religions, evocation of the names of deities -- the
recital of mantras -- fulfils a magic function; in Tibetan Buddhism the
work is left to the prayer mill. This attitude lingers on in medieval
philosophy (Realists versus Nominalists); in all forms of magic, and,
more covertly in modern science -- in the unconscious belief that words
like gravity, entelechy, or electro-magnetic 'field', etc., somehow have
an explanatory value
an sich
(cf. Book One,
VII
). Such is the power of verbal symbols to focus
attention that it confers on hazy concepts in statu nascendi the
appearance of hard, tangible concreteness, and 'gives to airy nothing
/ a local habitation and a name'. The name is then experienced as a
self-evident explanation, a saturation of free valencies as it were.

 

 

 

The Rise of Causality

 

 

During its first years the child does not discriminate between
nominal, attributive, and causal predications -- as earlier it did not
differentiate words according to grammatical categories.

 

 

When children between five and six are asked: 'Why does the sun not fall
down?', they will answer: 'Because it is hot', 'Because the sun stops
there', 'Because it is yellow'. [15] And the moon does not fall down
'Because it is very high up', 'Because the sun is not there', etc. The
significant aspects of an experience are connected as 'going together'
in an undifferentiated 'feeling of relation'. [16] Goethe's 'Connect,
always connect' seems to be the motto of the child as, out of the fluid
raw material of its experiences, it selects and shapes patterns and
relations -- relations which will be re-classed and re-grouped later on
according to shifts in motivation and interest leading to the emergence of
new criteria of relevance -- until the final, more rigid but not always
more perfect adult relation-categories emerge. The urge to connect,
to aggregate matrices of experience into more comprehensive ones;
the fumbling for hypotheses about the way things are held together,
the tentative formulation of rules of the game -- in all these fertile
activities we see the participatory tendencies at work: intimations of the
fundamental unity of all things. Later on they will crystallize in magic
causality, with its correlates: animism and 'mystic participation' (to
use an expression coined by Lévy-Bruhl for the mentality of
primitives, and applied by Piaget to the mentality of the child). Needless
to say, the self-asserting tendencies too play their obvious part both
in the child's overt behaviour and its fantasy world.

 

 

It seems that the first relational patterns which are discriminated
are relatively static forms of
attribution