I. Causes or Reasons?
John Watling
University College, London
The book 1 is a collection of twelve essays, each followed by a comment of approximately one third the
length by another writer. Each essayist is allowed a short reply to the comments on his essay and some essayists, for good measure, refer to essays besides their own. The first four essays concern the central opposition between reasons and causes; the other eight deal with a variety of more special topics. The eight writers concerned with the first four essays fall into two opposed parties. There are those who hold explanations in terms of reasons nearest their hearts, J. H. Grundy, D. W. Hamlyn, R. S. Peters and
Charles Taylor, and opposed to them stand those holding causal explanation in highest esteem, Robert
Borger, N. S. Sutherland, Stephen Toulmin and A. J. Watson. This division differs from that between the philosophers, whose main interest lies in conceptual questions, and the scientists, whose interest lies in nature. It differs because, in their investigation of phenomena, all the writers who are scientists seek causes and none seeks reasons, whereas among the writers who are philosophers are to be found some whose conceptual inquiries have led them to reject causal explanation and one, Stephen Toulmin, who has been led in the other direction.
The preface suggests that the book has arisen from a desire on the part of the editors to give those who, in investigating the explanation of behaviour, seek its causes an opportunity to re-establish their pursuit after a successful onslaught upon it by a number of anti-mechanistic philosophers. Many philosophers, Cioffi and Borger write, regard the causal explanation of behaviour as a finally discredited objective; can they be shaken out of their complacency? To this end Toulmin, in his essay ‘Reasons and
Causes’, argues that, amongst the factors in a man’s situation which determine his behaviour, those which are the reasons for which he acts differ from those which are merely causes of his behaviour, in that the former operate only because the man has recognized their relevance to the question how he should act. Further, Toulmin asserts, this recognition of relevance is some thing which arises, and can only arise, in the process of learning to perform actions of certain types. Therefore, he concludes, those features of a man’s situation which are the reasons for which he acts are features which determine his behaviour because he has learned to perform actions of the type in which he is engaged. Unless a causal explanation of his behaviour makes reference to the learning process that has taken place, it will ignore
1 R. Borger and F. Cioffi (Eds.), Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences: Confrontations , Cambridge
University Press, London 1970, xii + 520 pp., £5.
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his reasons for acting and cannot be a complete explanation. On the other hand, Toulmin sees no reason why a causal account of learning processes should not be given. If it can, then the factors in a man’s situation which are his reasons will have been revealed as causes, although, of course, they will always be causes of one special kind, owing their efficacy to the occurrence of a process of learning.
Sutherland’s essay is a direct counter-attack on the anti-mechanists. He argues that the fact that certain concepts exist in language is evidence that they were once found useful, but of nothing more than that. The fact that it is common to describe and explain the behaviour of human beings in terms which are never applied to inanimate things, nor even, in some cases, to other animals, reveals the beliefs which people held and still hold, but fails to establish those beliefs. Sutherland himself finds certain of these terms acceptable for the description of behaviour: indeed he believes it impossible to describe complex servo-mechanisms without speaking of them as homing on a target or as having a goal. He holds, again, that there is a useful distinction to be made between the actions of a human being and the movements of that human being’s body. What he objects to is the restriction of such terms to human beings and the conclusion that, where those terms apply, mechanistic explanation is impossible.
This leads him to offer an account of human action in terms of its causes and to criticize Charles
Taylor’s account of teleological explanation. The other arguments which Sutherland attempts to rebut are those from the unpredictability of human beings, from the ability of the human being to find sentences which are true but which cannot be proved in some logical system, and from the impossibility of a causal explanation of consciousness.
Among the first four essayists, the two who are unconvinced of the virtues of causal explanation are Hamlyn and Taylor. Taylor’s piece is a presentation, with some simplification, of the main theses of his book The Explanation of Behaviour, so that there is no need for an account of it here.
Hamlyn’s essay is an attack on the concept of conditioning. He argues that any explanation of a modification in an animal by conditioning is an explanation in terms of a physiological process. Since
Hamlyn takes it as axiomatic that the only interesting explanations of modifications in animals concern what the animal does, in fact its actions, and also that, since actions are more than movements and physiology can explain no more than movements, physiological explanations of actions are impossible, he concludes that conditioning cannot have any fundamental interest for the science of behaviour and so should be dropped from psychology. What is, he seems inclined to think, worse, is that in the attempt to use conditioning to provide explanations of actions, which is, according to Hamlyn, to attempt the impossible, psychologists have incorporated into the notion a number of elements which are foreign to its nature. These are very obvious in operative conditioning, which cannot provide sufficient conditions of an animal’s behaviour unless it is regarded as a process in which the animal
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comes to see that a certain operation produces a result which it desires. However, even with conditioning theories much closer to Pavlov’s, such as Watson’s, Hamlyn holds that the replacement of the connection between stimulation of the nerve endings and a skeletal or autonomic physiological reaction by a connection between the situation in which the animal stands and a behavioural response introduces the question of how the animal sees the situation and the intelligibility of the response. Thus
Hamlyn’s case against conditioning is that, being a physiological process, it can provide no explanation of what animals and human beings do. It seems to do so only because psychologists have paraded before us, dressed up as conditioning, some thing which is not conditioning at all.
What illumination about the explanation of behaviour do these essays provide? Sutherland speaks like a brave man. He seems willing to discard the concepts in which it is customary to describe and to explain men’s behaviour even when those concepts are ‘enshrined in our language’. This makes a striking contrast with Charles Taylor’s assertion that the rejection of the ‘very language we use for action and feeling’ is ‘just too much to swallow’. It contrasts with Hamlyn’s assumption that only the explanation of actions is of any interest and with Toulmin’s insistence that it must be possible to reconcile explanation in terms of reasons and explanation in terms of causes. However, Sutherland’s words are braver than his deeds. He does not reject the concept of action nor, therefore, the task of explaining actions. Indeed, as I have already remarked, he asserts that some mechanical operations can only be described in terms of actions. Thus none of the first four essayists rejects the concept of action, although two regard it as implying a particular kind of causal explanation and two as implying an explanation in terms of reasons. This is one main question brought into focus by these essays: can the concept of action be retained by those who insist on the complete adequacy of causal explanations? If the answer is that it cannot then the correctness of Hamlyn’s and Taylor’s main assumption, that explanations of actions in terms of purposes and beliefs are genuine and provide the only interesting explanations of behaviour, becomes of great importance for the mechanist. Only if it is mistaken can he maintain his position. Both Sutherland, in a very brief sketch, and Taylor offer accounts of the explanation of actions. The correctness of these accounts and the consequences of them need to be considered. Hamlyn himself offers no account of the explanation of actions, but he makes one important claim about it, a claim which he has made before. It is that, since an action is more than bodily movements, an explanation of bodily movements can never explain an action. A causal explanation of bodily movements may provide necessary conditions for the occurrence of an action, but it cannot provide sufficient conditions. This claim needs to be assessed.
Sutherland would have done better, in my opinion, to adopt the bolder course and reject the concept of action altogether. The temptation to describe various servo-mechanisms in
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anthropomorphic terms is not great and other descriptions are available. The ball-valve of a water cistern is a device which operates so that the water is maintained at a constant level, but why is it necessary to speak of it as acting to produce that result rather than as tending towards it? Admitting the concept of action commits Sutherland to the view that actions can be caused. He contends, like
Toulmin, that a man’s actions may be explained by a particular kind of causal explanation of his bodily movements, but the kind he specifies is not Toulmin’s. Sutherland takes the example, ‘He signalled out of courtesy’, and his account of its meaning can, I think, be summed up as, ‘He signalled because his brain was in a certain state, one in which it normally is. That brain state has the effect that, in a wide variety of conditions, he makes bodily movements which please other people’. In just the same way,
Sutherland suggests, a missile may be said to home on a target. It will do so if its movements are the result of its mechanism and if that mechanism produces, in a wide variety of conditions, movements which keep it on course to the target. This account, as Sutherland’s commentator, Grundy, remarks, has the faults of Ryle’s dispositional accounts. It equates acting in order to please with having such a nature
(for Sutherland, such a brain) that, in a wide variety of circumstances, one acts in a way that pleases.
Therefore, according to this account, sea-gulls, whose brains produce, under a wide variety of circumstances, aerial movements which please human beings, act courteously when they fly.
Sutherland’s account of ‘He signalled out of courtesy’ might, it is true, be read another way. It could be read so as to give the meaning, ‘He signalled and, were it not the case that his brain state is one which, under a wide variety of conditions, produces bodily movements which please other people, he would not have signalled’. Since his brain state is held to cause his signalling, this implies that his brain could not have been in the state it was unless that state produced bodily movements which please other people. Such an account has greater plausibility. It does not imply that sea-gulls act courteously when they fly, since they would fly as they do whether or not their flight pleased human beings. It is, indeed, very close to Taylor’s account if it implies that the man’s brain state is to be explained by the fact that such a state would produce certain effects. Again, it makes an association between learning and acting with a purpose, perhaps such a one as Toulmin intended, if it implies that the man’s brain state is now what it is because, in the past, being in that state produced bodily movements which pleased other people. However, these accounts do not fit the analogy Sutherland draws with homing missiles and cannot be what he intends. His account of acting with a purpose is the one I gave at first: to act with a purpose is to be so controlled by one’s brain that one’s movements tend to realize that purpose.
The distinction between an organism, or a system, which converges on a certain result, as servo-controlled mechanisms such as water cisterns do, and one which aims to produce it must, since both converge, lie in the explanation of the convergence. Sutherland thinks that it is enough that the
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explanation lies within the system or organism, that is, within its brain or its mechanical or electrical circuits. Such a distinction puts a stone that falls to the earth into the class of things which converge but do not aim and the water cistern into the class of those which both converge and aim. Those who find this characterization of the distinction inadequate are not unreasonable. A better distinction is to be found in Taylor’s account of teleological explanation. However, before I turn to that, I should like to comment on Hamlyn’s assumption that no mere explanation of movements can explain an action. If it were the case that the distinction between an organism which is acting and one which is merely changing lay in the explanation of the changes, then the right kind of explanation of the changes would be an explanation of the actions, despite the fact that to say that it acted is to say more than that it changed. In just the same way, to assert that something is a piece of igneous rock is to assert more than that it is a piece of rock, yet it is possible to explain why a piece of igneous rock exists merely by explaining why the piece of rock exists.
The distinction between converging on a certain result and aiming to produce it which is provided by Taylor’s discussion of teleological explanation rests on whether or not the changes which take place are produced by the fact that those changes will lead to, or tend to lead to, that result. This distinction separates changes which are explained, and determined, by antecedent causes and changes which are explained, and determined, at least in part, by facts concerning what results those changes would, if made, bring to pass. It is clear that the servo-controlled systems fall, by this distinction, into the class of those systems which converge upon, but do not aim to produce, results. It is equally clear that when we think of people as performing actions we very often think of them as knowing, or seeing, what results their actions will have and as, through that knowledge, controlled by that fact. It is not true of the water cistern that the tap opens because opening will lead to the level rising; rather, it opens because the level is low. It would open even if, due to a large hole in the tank, opening could never produce the required level. Of course, as Sutherland remarks in criticism of Taylor’s account, it is very often true of people and animals that movements which we regard as performed for the sake of a result, such as a lion getting up-wind of its prey in order not to be scented, are not always caused by the fact that the movement will produce that result. Often the lion gets up-wind even though getting up-wind is not sufficient for it to escape scenting. However, what is important is that when we ascribe actions to animals and people we very often suppose that they know, rather than hold false beliefs concerning, the results of their actions, and when we suppose this we suppose their actions controlled by the fact that the actions will produce those results. Of course, although this is what we imply when we speak of people and animals as acting, it may be that we are mistaken in supposing that they ever do, or could, act. That is why I suggested that Sutherland would be on safer ground if he rejected the concept of
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action and hence escaped the necessity of reconciling action with mechanism. He could still allow that people seem to act, just as someone who believes that seals became so well adapted to life in the ocean by natural selection can still admit that there is every appearance that they were designed for that life.
I said that Taylor’s account is not explicitly as I gave it and that that was a significant fact. I think that Taylor’s account as stated has my more explicit version as its consequence, and that the reason Taylor avoided the more explicit version is that it makes it very implausible to suppose that anything could have a teleological explanation. It is strange that although, both in his own book and in this essay, Taylor speaks first of teleological systems and only later moves to the consideration of actions, he does not in fact consider any systems, such as the biological processes of adaptation and even some physical systems have been thought to be, which are teleological but which do not involve actions. Had he done so the strangeness of supposing that there are any such explanations would have been much more apparent. The strangeness I mean can be made explicit by considering Taylor’s account of teleological explanation. To explain a piece of behaviour in terms of the end for the sake of which it occurs is to attribute it to the fact that a situation obtained in which it would bring about that end. Taylor claims that such a fact is open to observation and allows prediction. Unless it is possible to decide by observation what effects a piece of behaviour would have, this fact is not open to observation.
Further, what effects a piece of behaviour will have depends not only upon the situation which obtains when it is performed but also upon that which obtains very soon afterwards. If the explanation of the behaviour lies in this fact, then it lies, in part, in what happens later. But no explanations lie in what happens later, therefore no teleological explanations of the kind Taylor defines could possibly be correct. Consider, as I suggested, an application of this account to a case where neither actions nor beliefs are involved. The fact that the seals born today are streamlined might be explained by the fact that the situation is such that streamlining will lead to their getting more to eat, but such will be the situation only if in the life-time of these seals the oceans will not dry up. Therefore the fact that the seals now being born are streamlined arises from the fact, among others, that the oceans will not dry up in their lifetime. Once one has seen this one turns from a teleological explanation of Taylor’s kind to an explanation in terms of natural selection in which, indeed, the streamlined shape of the seals born now is attributed, in part, to the fact that in the past the streamlined shape of their ancestors led to those ancestors getting more to eat. In my opinion Taylor gives a more or less correct account of teleological explanation and, by doing so, clearly reveals why it is illegitimate.
This illegitimacy is not present in Taylor’s account of the explanation of actions. In that account the explaining fact is not that the behaviour will produce the end, but that in the opinion of the person whose action it is it will produce the end. Against this view the objection no longer applies, since
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a fact concerning someone’s beliefs about the future is not itself a fact about the future. However, the fault has been avoided only because the explanation now given of a person’s action in terms of his reasons is not a teleological one. Teleological explanations have as antecedents facts of the form, ‘The situation was such that the behaviour would lead to the end’, and the antecedent, ‘He believed the situation was such that the behaviour would lead to the end’ is not of that form. The fact that a piece of behaviour has its explanation in a belief concerning the effects of that behaviour does not imply that the behaviour is teleological or goal-directed. The fact that a man faltered because he believed that faltering would lead to disaster does not establish that he faltered in order to produce disaster.
In sum, Taylor claims that actions have a teleological explanation, yet on his accounts of action explanation and teleological explanation they do not. Again, but for different reasons, on his account of teleological explanation nothing could possibly have a teleological explanation. I think his account right and teleological explanation impossible. I think he is right, too, in believing that actions have a teleological explanation but, if so, his account of their explanation needs amending. The part played by belief, essential as it is, must in some way leave the explanation its teleological form. However, although this will vindicate much that the anti-determinists hold concerning actions, it will have the consequence that no actions can possibly occur.
Borger, who comments on Taylor’s essay, finds teleological explanations unsatisfactory because they are incomplete. Certainly they are incomplete, but so are many causal explanations; in neither case does the incompleteness make the explanation empty. If I explain the breaking of a cup by pointing to the fact that it was dropped, then, although I leave out a great deal, my explanation has content. It must have, since the fact that the cup was dropped might have had nothing to do with its breaking. Similarly, if I explained the streamlined shape of a particular seal by claiming that the situation was such that a streamlined shape would lead to its catching more fish, then I would leave out a great deal, yet my explanation has sufficient content to be, in many people’s opinion, quite false.
I have suggested that it may seem that living things possess adaptive characteristics (adaptive characteristics which are in fact the result of natural selection) in order that they shall be able to survive.
It seems so because of the apparently inescapable connection between, for example, wool keeping sheep warm and sheep having wool. Yet the sheep living at present are not woolly because wool will keep them warm; they are woolly because wool kept their ancestors warm. That a characteristic arises by natural selection is the nearest thing to its occurring for the sake of a certain end. To employ an unhistorical analogy, just as constant temporal succession is held by Kant to be the nearest thing in experience to causal consequence, for which reason he speaks of it as the schema of causation, so natural selection might be regarded as the schema of ‘occurring for the sake of’. In much the same way
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the inescapable connection between jumping bringing a man over a stream and his jumping may be separated into two connections: ‘he jumped in order to get over’ and ‘he jumped because on earlier occasions jumping got him over’. So learning by trial and error might be regarded as the schema of
‘doing it in order to’. This may be what leads Toulmin to assert, as we have seen, that ‘actions can be done “for reasons” only if they are actions of types which we learn to perform’. However, learning may not be the only way of explaining the apparent connection between jumping bringing a man over a stream and his jumping. The Gestalt psychologists proposed the existence of insight and the history of science seems to abound with examples of original, unlearned solutions to problems.
Moreover, although living things are never regarded as having characteristics for the sake of ends which those characteristics fail to promote, people and animals are regarded as acting in order to achieve ends which their actions only frustrate. It is difficult to see why those unsuccessful actions must be ones which they have learned to perform.
It is just such unsuccessful actions which form the theme of Watkins’s essay ‘Imperfect
Rationality’. In it he is concerned, like the earlier essayists, with explanation in terms of a person’s reasons, but he treats of the limits which irrational or bungled actions appear to set to it, rather than the general questions of its legitimacy or indispensability. An irrational action, according to Watkins’s definition, is one in which a person’s action is inappropriate to his aims and situational appraisal, Such an action cannot, therefore, be explained in terms of the person’s intentions and beliefs. Watkins argues that irrational actions are logically possible, that bungled actions and failures to carry out plans are prima facie examples of them, and that actions which appear to be irrational are of great interest to the historian. The historian’s interest is to discover whether the actions are in reality irrational or whether they only appear so. Indeed, Watkins proposes that historians should proceed on the assumption that the subjects of their inquiries act rationally. This is what he calls the ‘principle of rationality’: those who seek explanations of actions need not believe it, but they should act as if they did.
I think that Watkins enjoins this maxim on the historian because he sees no alternative for him, in any particular case, except ‘to throw up his hands and declare that the agent must have taken leave of his senses’. He enjoins the principle because he believes that otherwise the search for an explanation must be abandoned. Now, this is not correct: the alternative to the search for reasons is the search for explanations of another kind, if an historian abandons the search for reasons when the true explanation lies in reasons, then he will not find the explanation, but, just as surely, he will fail to find it if he persists in the search for reasons when the true explanation lies elsewhere. Watkins’s principle is bad because it seeks to restrict the possibilities which the investigator bears in mind. Watkins urges that his principle humanizes our view of agents. If we seek truth, this may or may not be a virtue.
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Of course the search for rational explanations of actions which seem irrational may be enormously fruitful. Certainly it is in many of those explanations which make up so large a part of
Freud’s work. It is astonishing, therefore, to find Freud cited by Donagan as one of the irrationalists.
Presumably Donagan is misled by classifications of irrational agents, which Watkins and others are inclined to use, such as ‘crazy’ and ‘has taken leave of his senses’. He has failed to notice the absurdity of attributing the equation of psychopathological and irrational behaviour to Freud, whose central achievement was to demonstrate such behaviour’s rationality. The topic arises because Watkins opposes his own view of the value of attempting rational explanations of unsuccessful and bungled actions to Collingwood’s contention that historians should interest themselves only in success.
Donagan claims that Collingwood makes amends for this mistake later in the same book ( An
Autobiography ) censuring Freud’s approach to the explanation of totemism. Collingwood fulminates against Freud’s analogy between primitive societies and diseased individuals. The description Freud actually uses is ‘neurotic’ and Collingwood was evidently ignorant of the fact that Freud drew no definite line between normal and neurotic behaviour. Nor can he have read Totem and Taboo . Had he done so he would have discovered that Freud’s ruling analogy lies between the savage and the child, that he supposes that in the aboriginal tribes we find the ‘infancy of society’.
The greater part of Watkins’s paper is devoted to a discussion of decision theory. This has as its object the question whether a rational action one which finds its explanation in the agent’s reasons
— is one which ‘could not be bettered, given one’s present situational information (which may, however, be more or less incomplete or incorrect)’. Watkins means ‘could not be bettered as a way of fulfilling one’s present aims’. At first sight it seems that it need not be, since a person may act rationally but stupidly. It seems that to accept that it must be is to be misled by an ambiguity of the expression
‘irrational act’, that between ‘act which cannot be explained in terms of person’s intentions and beliefs’ and ‘act which, as the agent should have been clever enough to see, would not have furthered his aims in the situation he believed to hold’. However, Watkins means the ‘present situational information’ to consist of the agent’s beliefs and nothing more. It is not to include any deductions from them, however obvious they may be. Once this is explicit, the identification of a rational action with one which could not, under these conditions, be bettered is not obviously objectionable. It is not clear to me whether
Watkins rejects the identification, arguing that we must treat all actions as rational but must allow that an agent, in deciding how to act, will simplify his beliefs and aims and will, in emphasizing some of them on a particular occasion, let others slip from him; or whether he accepts the identification but claims that we must treat actions not as rational but as approximating to rationality, as being, as he puts it, imperfectly rational. Certainly he is right to point out that simplification, emphasis and forgetting do
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take place, but why should not these factors too be regarded as determining the agent’s ‘present situational information’? If they are, then their operation does not imply that a rational action is not an optimal one.
A serious difficulty arises from the definition of a rational action which Watkins gives. It is that of allotting a role to decision theory and even of allowing that such a theory can exist. Watkins assumes that each set of aims and beliefs defines what behaviour would be rational for a person with just those beliefs and aims. The behaviour will be that which would best fulfil the aims if the beliefs were true, or which is a fairly good approximation to that. Further, he appears to hold that theories of decision-making which seek to show how to determine, given a set of beliefs and aims, what behaviour is rational may have a heuristic role. These views cannot be held together without self for if a person learns a principle of decision theory relevant to his beliefs and aims, then his beliefs and aims are no longer that set to which the principle is relevant. Indeed, it seems that there can be no principles of decision theory since if there were the behaviour which was rational for someone who knew them would be different from that which would be rational for someone who did not. Yet how could that be, since the principles do no more than spell out what behaviour is rational on that belief?
Freud’s theories are the subject of very much more serious criticism in Cioffi’s essay ‘Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-science’. Cioffi claims that the irrefutability of the principles under investigation is a sufficient condition of an inquiry’s being a pseudo-science but that it is not a necessary condition. An inquiry can be a pseudo-science even if the principles it investigates, or which are proposed as a result of investigation, are refutable. It will be one if the inquiry is carried on in a manner which is calculated to avoid confrontation with falsifying observations. Cioffi seeks to show that Freud’s inquiries were carried on in such a manner and his case is an impressive one. It is true, as
Farrell points out, that in many of his particular accusations Cioffi is prepared to draw evidence from views which Freud expressed at widely different periods and that he makes little acknowledgment of the fact that Freud did undoubtedly abandon views in the face of contrary evidence, but he nevertheless makes points which demand answers. Unfortunately Farrell does not provide detailed discussion of any of Cioffi’s particular accusations. Indeed, some of his defences would be unlikely to have found favour with Freud himself and the fact that he makes them seems to indicate that he suspects Cioffi’s accusations to be true. Farrell writes that it has become clear that a participant in a therapeutic (patient and doctor) situation cannot provide reliable reports on that situation. If that is indeed correct, then the price of this attempt to rescue psychoanalysis from the charge of pseudo-science is the admission that a very great part of the evidence upon which its claims rest is worthless. In any case, despite its price, the defence does not achieve very much, for a lot of Cioffi’s criticism turns on the inconsistency of Freud’s
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theoretical claims and not upon his descriptions of discoveries made in analysing patients. For example,
Cioffi sets side by side Freud’s contention about people who fall victim to a neurosis without undergoing any change in their relation to the outside world: ‘Closer scrutiny of such cases shows us nevertheless that a change has taken place ... the quantity of libido in their mental economy has increased to an extent which by itself sufficed to upset the balance of health and establish the conditions for a neurosis . . .‘ and his admission that ‘We cannot measure the amount of libido essential to produce pathological effects. We can only postulate it after the effects of the illness have manifested themselves’.
Cioffi draws these quotations from Freud’s Collected Papers , Vol. 2, p. 119.
Cioffi admits that many of Freud’s interpretations produce an overwhelming impression of cogency but argues that the impression may be an illusion arising from careful selection by Freud of the material to be interpreted and from our assumption that Freud conducts his interpretations according to a fixed body of rules. He draws-an analogy with various numerological arguments such as Newton’s identification of the beasts mentioned by the prophet Daniel or the extraordinary pieces of scientific knowledge which some have claimed to find in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid. I find this the weakest part of his case. Farrell does not fail to point out that Cioffi’s own claim that ‘there are a host of peculiarities of psychoanalytic theory and practice which are apparently gratuitous and unrelated, but which can be understood when once they are seen as manifestations of the same impulse: the need to avoid refutation’ is itself a piece of interpretation. Like Freud’s interpretations it is open to doubt and, like Freud’s, it is capable of providing illumination.
I have been able to discuss only half the essays in this interesting collection. The others are on more diverse topics. I. C. Jarvie discusses Peter Winch’s views on explanation in anthropology and
Winch replies. J. O. Wisdom and Robert Brown discuss whether and in what sense social groups have emergent properties. George Homans discusses this same topic from another point of view and is answered by P. M. Blau. There is a joint essay by R. A. Boakes and M. S. Halliday on Skinner’s behaviourism, with comments by K. H. Pribram. H. J. Eysenck writes on explanation and the concept of personality. D. Bannister comments on his essay. N. Chomsky writes on explanation in linguistics and Max Black contributes a discussion.
Each contribution is provided with very useful references. There is an index of persons but no general index. The book is extremely well produced.
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