悠长假期

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正在看《奖励的惩罚》（Punished by rewards), 搜索关于斯金纳的文章。分析他自己，他的恬淡文字和诚恳态度很是动人。

It is often said that behaviorists do not view themselves as they view their subjects -- for example, that they regard what they say as true in some sense which does not apply to the statements of the people they study. On the contrary, I believe that my behavior in writing Verbal Bebavior, for example, was precisely the sort of behavior the book discusses. Whether from narcissism or scientific curiosity, I have been as much interested in myself as in rats and pigeons. I have applied the same formulations, I have looked for the same kinds of causal relations, and I have manipulated behavior in the same way and sometimes with comparable success. I would not publish personal facts of this sort if I did not believe that they throw some light on my life as a scientist.

I was taught to fear God, the police, and what people will think. As a result I usually do what I have to do with no great struggle. I try not to let any day "slip useless away." I have studied when I did not feel like studying, taught when I did not want to teach. I have taken care of animals and run experiments as the animals dictated. (Some of my first cumulative records are stamped December 25th and January lst.) I have met deadlines for papers and reports. In both my writing and my research I have fought hard against deceiving myself. I avoid metaphors which are effective at the cost of obscuring issues. I avoid rhetorical devices which give unwarranted plausibility to an argument (and I sometimes reassure myself by making lists of the devices so used by others). I avoid the unwarranted prestige conferred by mathematics, even, I am afraid, when mathematics would be helpful. I do not spin impressive physiological theories from my data, as I could easily do. I never convert an exploratory experiment into an experimentum crucis by inventing a hypothesis after the fact. I write and rewrite a paper until, so far as possible, it says exactly what I have to say. (A constant search for causes seems to be another product of that early environment. When my wife or one of my daughters tells me that she has a headache, I am likely to say "Perhaps you have not been eating wisely" or "You may have been out in the sun too much." It is an almost intolerable trait in a husband, father, or friend, but it is an invaluable scientific practice.)

I must admit that all these characteristics have been helpful. Max Weber could be right about the Protestant Ethic. But its effect is only cautionary or restrictive. Much more important in explaining my scientific behavior are certain positive reinforcements which support Feuer’s (23) answer to Weber in which he shows that almost all noted scientists follow a "hedonistic ethic." I have been powerfully reinforced by many things: food, sex, music, art, and literature -- and my scientific results. I have built apparatuses as I have painted pictures or modeled figures in clay. I have conducted experiments as I have played the piano. I have written scientific papers and books as I have written stories and poems. I have never designed and conducted an experiment because I felt I ought to do so, or to meet a deadline, or to pass a course, or to "publish rather than perish." I dislike experimental designs which call for the compulsive collection of data and, particularly, data which will not be reinforcing until they have been exhaustively analyzed. I freely

change my plans when richer reinforcements beckon. My thesis was written before I knew it was a thesis. Walden Two was not planned at all. I may practice self-management for Protestant reasons, but I do so in such a way as to maximize non-Protestant reinforcements. I emphasize positive contingencies. For example, I induce myself to write by making production as conspicuous as possible (actually in a cumulative record). In short, I arrange an environment in which what would otherwise be hard work is actually effortless.

I could not have predicted that among the reinforcers which explain my scientific behavior the opinions of others would not rank high, but that seems to be the case. Exceptions are easily traced to my history. I take a silly pride in the fact that "Freedom and the Control of Men" (1955-56) appears as an example of good contemporary prose in textbooks written for college freshmen; Miss Graves would have been pleased. But in general my effects on other people have been far less important than my effects on rats and pigeons -- or on people as experimental subjects. That is why I was able to work for almost 20 years with practically no professional recognition. People supported me, but not my line of work; only my rats and pigeons supported that. I was never in any doubt as to its importance, however, and when it began to attract attention, I was wary of the effect rather than pleased.

Many notes in my files comment on the fact that I have been depressed or frightened by so-called honors. I forego honors which would take time away from my work or unduly reinforce specific aspects of it.

That I have never been interested in critical reactions, either positive or negative, is probably part of the same pattern. I have never actually read more than a dozen pages of Chomsky’s famous review of Verbal Behavior. (A quotation from it which I have used I got from I. A. Richards. When Rochelle Johnson sent me a reprint of her reply to Scrivin’s criticism of my position, it only reminded me that I had never read Scrivin. Clark Hull used to say that I did not make hypotheses because I was afraid of being wrong. Verbal statements are, indeed, right or wrong, and in some sense I want my statements to be right. But I am much more interested in measures for the control of a subject matter. Some relevant measures are verbal, but even so they are not so much right or wrong as effective or ineffective, and arguments are of no avail. For the same reason I am not interested in psychological theories, in rational equations, in factor analyses, in mathematical models, in hypothetico-deductive systems, or in other verbal systems which must be proved right.

Much of this attitude is Baconian. Whether my early and quite accidental contact with Bacon is responsible or not, I have followed his principles closely. I reject verbal authority. I have "studied nature not books," asking questions of the organism rather than of those who have studied the organism. I think it can be said, as it was said of Bacon, that I get my books out of life, not out of other books. I have followed Bacon in organizing my data. I do not collect facts in random "botanizing," for there are principles which dictate what Poincaré called le choix des faits, and they are not, as Poincaré argued, hypotheses. I classify, not for the sake of classification but to reveal properties.

I also follow Bacon in distinguishing between observation and experimentation. Bacon no doubt underestimated the importance of extending the range of human sense organs with instruments, but he did so in emphasizing that knowledge is more than sensory contact. I would put it this way: Observation overemphasizes stimuli; experimentation includes the rest of the contingencies which generate effective repertoires. I have also satisfied myself that Bacon’s four Idols can be translated into an acceptable behavioral analysis of faulty thinking.

My position as a behaviorist came from other sources. Perhaps, like Jeremy Bentham and his theory of fictions, I have tried to resolve my early fear of theological ghosts. Perhaps I have answered my mother’s question, "What will people think

" by proving that they do not think at all (but the question might as well have been "What will people say

"). I used to toy with the notion that a behavioristic epistemology was a form of intellectual suicide, but there is no suicide because there is no corpse. What perishes is the homunculus -- the spontaneous, creative inner man to whom, ironically, we once attributed the very scientific activities which led to his demise.

To me behaviorism is a special case of philosophy of science which first took shape in the writings of Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré, and Percy Bridgman. Bridgman himself could never make the extension to behavior. He is one man I did argue with. When he published The Way Things Are, (24) he sent me a copy with a note: "Here it is. Now do your damnedest!" I was busy with other things and did nothing. But I could never have convinced him, for it is not a matter of conviction. Behaviorism is a formulation which makes possible an effective experimental approach to human behavior. It is a working hypothesis about the nature of a subject matter. It may need to be clarified, but it does not need to be argued. I have no doubt of the eventual triumph of the position -- not that it will eventually be proved right, but that it will provide the most direct route to a successful science of Man.

I have acknowledged my indebtedness to Bertrand Russell, Watson, and Pavlov. I never met or even saw Watson, but his influence was, of course, important. Thorndike (not a behaviorist but still an important figure in a science of behavior) I met briefly. He knew of my interest in verbal behavior and sent me his Studies in the Psychology of Language. (25) When I wrote to thank him, I told him about my analysis of alliteration and added, "Hilgard’s review of my book [The Behavior of Organisms] in the Bulletin has reminded me of how much of your work in the same vein I failed to acknowledge .... I seem to have identified your point of view with the modem psychological view taken as a whole. It has always been obvious that I was merely carrying on your puzzle box experiments but it never occurred to me to remind my readers of the fact." Thorndike replied, "I am better satisfied to have been of service to workers like yourself than if I had founded a ’school.’ "

Walter Hunter I knew well. He gave me professional advice. I recall his wry smile as he told me, "It only takes one little idea to be a success in American psychology." (He measured the idea with thumb and forefinger.) Clark Hull visited my laboratory in Cambridge and made suggestions, which I never followed. I talked to his seminar at Yale and was invited to the unveiling of his portrait shortly before he died. I have a bound volume of my papers which was once on his shelves under the title Experimental studies in Learning.

Tolman taught summer school at Harvard in 1931, and we had many long discussions. I had been analyzing the concept of hunger as a drive. In my thesis I had called it a "third" variable -- that is, a variable in addition to stimulus and response occupying the intervening position of Sherrington’s synaptic states. I have always felt that Tolman’s later formulation was very similar. When The Behavior of Organisms appeared, he wrote:

I think the two words operant and respondent are swell.... I do think, as I have said so many times before, that what you ought to do next is to put in two levers and see what relationships the functions obtained from such a discrimination set up will bear to your purified functions where you have only one lever. No doubt you were right that the "behavior-ratio" is a clumsy thing for getting the fundamental laws, but it is a thing that has finally to be predicted and someone must show the relation between it and your fundamental analysis. I congratulate you on coming through Harvard so beautifully unscathed!...

P.S. And, of course, I was pleased as Hell to be mentioned in the Preface.

Another behaviorist whose friendship I have valued is J.R. Kantor. In many discussions with him at Indiana I profited from his extraordinary scholarship. He convinced me that I had not wholly exorcised all the "spooks" in my thinking.

THE CONTROL OF BEHAVIOR

I learned another Baconian principle very slowly: "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed." Frazier in Walden Two speaks for me here:

I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, "Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!" Eventually I realized that the subjects were always right. They always behaved as they should have behaved. It was I who was wrong. I had made a bad prediction.

But that coin has another face: once obeyed, nature can be commanded. The point of Solomon’s House in the New Atlantis, as of The Royal Society founded on Bacon’s model, was that knowledge should be useful. A hundred years later -- in an epoch in which I feel especially at home -- Diderot developed the theme in his Encyclopedie. A hundred years after that, the notion of progress took on new significance in the theory of evolution. Walden Two is my New Atlantis; I suppose it could also be said that in applying an experimental analysis to education I returned to a motto which Bacon as a child saw in his father’s house: Moniti Meliora (instruction brings progress). I believe in progress, and I have always been alert to practical significances in my research.

I began to talk explicitly about the control of human behavior after I had written Walden Two. Control was definitely in the air during my brief stay at Indiana. In Science and Human Behavior and the course for which it was written, I elaborated on the theme. In the summer of 1955, on the island of Monhegan, Maine, where we had a cottage, I wrote "Freedom and the Control of Men" for a special issue of the American Scholar In it I took a much stronger stand on freedom and determinism. My position has been rather bitterly attacked, especially by people in the humanities, who feel that it is in conflict with Western democratic ideas and that it plays down the role of the individual. I have been called Machiavellian, a Communist, a Fascist, and many other names. The fact is, I accept the ends of a democratic philosophy, but I disagree with the means which are at the moment most commonly employed. I see no virtue in accident or in the chaos from which somehow we have reached our present position. I believe that we must now plan our own future and that we must take every advantage of a science of behavior in solving the problems which will necessarily arise. The great danger is not that science will be misused by despots for selfish purposes but that so-called democratic principles will prevent people of goodwill from using it in their advance toward humane goals. I continue to be an optimist, but there are moments of sadness. I find the following in my notebook, dated August 5, 1963.

End of an Era

Last night Deborah and I went to the Gardner Cox’s for some music in their garden. A group of young people, mostly current or former Harvard and Radcliffe students, sang a Mass by William Byrd. It was a cappella and, for most of the singers, sight reading. Very well done. The night was pleasant. Ragged clouds moved across the sky, one of them dropping briefly a fine mist. The garden has a circular lawn surrounded by shrubs and a few old trees. Half a dozen lights burned among green branches. Several kittens played on the grass. We sat in small groups, in folding chairs. Except for a few jet planes the night was quiet and the music delightful. Kyrie eleison... I thought of Walden Two and the B-minor Mass scene. And of the fact that this kind of harmless, beautiful, sensitive pleasure was probably nearing the end of its run. This was Watermusic, floating down the Thames and out to sea. And why

Phyillis Cox may have answered the question. As I said good night, she motioned toward the young man who had conducted the music and said, "You know, he thinks you are a terrible person. Teaching machines ... a fascist....."

Possibly our only hope of maintaining any given way of life now lies with science, particularly a science of human behavior and the technology to be derived from it. We need not worry about the scientific way of life; it will take care of itself. It would be tragic, however, if other ways of life, not concerned with the practice of science as such, were to forego the same kind of support through a misunderstanding of the role of science in human affairs.

The garden we sat in that evening once belonged to Asa Gray. In high school I studied Botany from a text by Gray, called, as I remember it, How Plants Grow. One passage impressed me so much that I made a copy which I have kept among my notes for nearly 50 years. It is the story of a radish. I would reject its purposivism today but not its poetry, for it suggests to me a reasonable place for the individual in a natural scheme of things.

So the biennial root becomes large and heavy, being a storehouse of nourishing matter, which man and animals are glad to use for food. In it, in the form of starch, sugar, mucilage, and in other nourishing and savory products, the plant (expending nothing in flowers or in show) has laid up the avails of its whole summer’s work. For what purpose

This plainly appears when the next season’s growth begins. Then, fed by, this great stock of nourishment, a stem shoots forth rapidly and strongly, divides into branches, bears flowers abundantly., and ripens seeds, almost wholly, at the expense of the nourishment accumulated in the root, which is now light, empty, and dead; and so is the whole plant by the time the seeds are ripe.