[From Bruce Abbott (2018.04.12.1125 EDT)]
Hi Richard,
Interesting: The Dewey quote you provided is exactly the one I had put into a paper I’m working on, before I began to entertain doubts about whether Dewey really had circular causation in mind, despite his noting that the reflex arc should be considered a circle.
Dewey specifically is attacking the reflex arc concept in psychology, which is a rather different animal than the physiological reflex arc that served as the prototype for the psychological version. At that time, psychology was defined as the study of the mind, and Dewey notes that stimulus, nerve conduction, and motor response are mapped onto the mental sphere as sensations, thoughts (ideas), and acts, and that these constituents were being treated as “a patchwork of disjointed parts, a mechanical conjunction of unallied processes.� Instead, Dewey contends, “what is wanted is that the sensory stimulus, central connections and motor responses shall be viewed, not as separate and complete entities in themselves, but as divisions of labor, functioning factors, within the single concrete whole, not designated the reflex arc.�
“What shall we term that which is not sensation-followed-by-idea-followed-by-movement, but which is primary; which is, as it were, the psychical organism of which sensation, idea and movement are the chief organs?� Referring to the “physiological side,� Dewey says that its essence is a “coordination.� To illustrate what he means by this term, he refers to William James’ example of a child who, curious about the nature of a candle flame, reaches out to touch it. The ordinary analysis would treat the visual sensation arising from the flame as a stimulus and the reaching as a response. But this is incomplete: “ . . . we begin not with a sensory stimulus, but with a sensori-motor coordination, the optical-ocular, and that in a certain sense it is the movement which is primary, and the sensation which is secondary, the movement of the body, head and eye muscles determining the quality of what is experienced. In other words, the real beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a sensation of light.�
I take Dewey to mean here that to perceive the flame, the child must orient her body, head, and eyes toward the flame, an act of looking. Thus the stimulus side of the reflex arc consists not of mere stimulation of the optical receptors, but of orienting the receptors so that the stimulus can be received: “. . . both sensation and movement lie inside, not outside the act.�
Dewey continues: “Now if this act, the seeing, stimulates another act, the reaching, it is because both of these acts fall within a larger coordination . . … More specifically, the ability of the hand to do its work will depend, either directly or indirectly, upon its control, as well as its stimulation, by the act of vision. . . . The reaching, in turn, must both stimulate and control the seeing. The eye must be kept upon the candle if the arm is to do its work; let it wander and the arm takes up another task.â€?
Here Dewey has added another “coordinationâ€?: the act of reaching depends upon the act of vision. What was stimulus and response in the reflex arc has been replaced by seeing – actively turning the eyes so thhat the image of the flame falls upon the retina, and reaching – acttively moving the hand toward the flame, guided by the vision of the flame.
From our modern perspective it is obvious that Dewey’s “coordinations� are the relations between perception and action that are imposed by a control system. But as I interpreted what Dewey was saying, it seemed to me that he was decomposing the stimulus-idea-response view of the reflex arc into a sequence. In the flame example, the child actively explores its environment and the image of the flame chances to appear on the retina. Curious, the child fixates its eyes on the flame and, ignorant of its properties, initiates an exploration by reaching out in order to touch it. This is clearly not a reflex act in which some adequate stimulus triggers a reaction. Dewey is not analyzing a reflex as the actions produced by a control system when a sudden disturbance is applied to its controlled perception. Instead, he is arguing that such things as “seeing� have both sensory and motor components in which each is altered by the other. This is certainly different from the way the reflex arc concept was then being applied, which did not differ materially from Descartes’ view that animal behavior (and involuntary human behavior) comprises a series of reflex actions in which stimulation acts via the nerves to trigger a response, altering the stimulation playing upon the individual’s senses and thus producing yet more activity through further reflex action. For Dewey, seeing involves not only the active centering of the object of interest on the fovea, but the active processing of the information provided (ideas, thinking) in the light of prior experience and current conditions. (See Dewey’s discussion of how a noise may be interpreted differently depending on the context.)
Bruce
[From: Richard Pfau (2018.04.11)] –
Bruce,
Thank you for providing Dewey’s article. Very interesting. I had seen references to it before, but this is the first time I have read it.
My reading of the article is that his thinking is compatible with PCT’s closed-loop view of what is happening.
For example, in his criticism of the reflex arc concept, he states “What we have is a circuit, not an arc or broken segment of a circle. This circuit is more truly termed organic than reflex, because the motor response determines the stimulus, just as truly as sensory stimulus determines movement” (p. 363). Similarly, on the last page he writes that “The reflex arc theory…gives us literally an arc, instead of the circuit… The circle is a coordination… It is the coordination which unifies that which the reflex arc concept gives us only in disjointed fragments” (p. 370).
With Regards,
Rich
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On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 3:05 PM, Bruce Abbott bbabbott@frontier.com wrote:
[From Bruce Abbott (2018.04.11.1600 EDT)]
In 1896 the American philosopher John Dewey published what came to be an influential article, The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology. The reflex arc is the foundational concept of stimulus-response psychology, in which all behavior is said to occur as responses to prior stimuli. Proponents of PCT sometimes point to this article as containing an early recognition that behavior operates via a closed loop of circular causation and not, as the reflex arc concept implies, via a one-way, open loop pathway leading from stimulus through the nervous system to response. Yet on rereading this seminal paper I find reason to doubt this understanding of Dewey’s analysis.
To be sure, Dewey’s writing does not make for easy reading. It can be difficult to comprehend exactly what Dewey intends, and perhaps it is this fact that has led readers to read into that writing more than is actually stated. It is also possible that I am not understanding Dewey correctly, and for that reason I’ve attached the article as a pdf and would ask anyone who may be interested to read it and provide their own analysis of Dewey’s meaning, and we can then have a conversation about it. The paper is short.
Bruce
