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Biological Psychology, 30 (1990), pp. 181-187
Reply_Shanks90.doc
SHARING A COMMON LANGUAGE ABOUT CONDITIONING
REQUIRES ACCURATE CHARACTERIZATIONS OF EACH
OTHERS’ POSITIONS: REPLY TO SHANKS *
John J. FUREDY
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, MSS IA1
Shanks' characterizations of the positions taken in papers that he comments on are inaccurate
on a number of basic counts. For example, the papers were concerned with human autonomic
Pavlovian conditioning, whereas Shanks refers to no autonomic evidence in his reply. Again, the
two papers more specifically targeted by Shanks (Furedy, 1988b; Furedy & Riley, 1987) do not
deny "that cognitive processes have any relevance for conditioning", but rather advocate that
both cognitive and non-cognitive factors play roles that need to be empirically determined for
different preparations and conditions. And the characterizat ion of cognitive factors in those
papers, contrary to Shanks, is not a teleological, intentional one, no matter how fashionable such
teleological forms of cognitive psychology may be among many current philosophers and
psychologists. We can proceed towards an empirical resolution of disagreements about the role of
cognitive factors in human Pavlovian autonomic conditioning only if we both refer to the relevant
autonomic conditioning evidence, and also characterize each others' positions with some
accuracy.
Keywords: Autonomic conditioning, Pavlovian, cognitive theory, intention
1. Introduction
I recognize that the hortatory tone of my paper's title may strike some as
inappropriate, but consider, to begin with, that the topic of the recent
Biological Psychology symposium dealt not with " human Pavlovian conditioning" (Shanks, 1990, p. 171) but with human autonomic Pavlovian conditioning
(Furedy, 1988a, p. 77) which is, of course, a sub-class of Pavlovian conditioning.
Similarly, the two papers that comprise the main target of Shanks' comments
(Furedy, 1988b; Furedy & Riley, 1987) were restricted (both by
* The preparation of this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science and
Engineering Research Council of Canada. The author is am indebted to M agnus Kristjansson
for comments.
Address for reprints: John J. Furedy, as above.
Editor's note; This is a reply to a commentary paper which appears in this issue (Biological
Psychology, Volume 30, Number 2, pp. 171-179. Requests for reprints of the commentary paper
should be addressed to its author, David R. Shanks, MRC Applied Psychology Unit, 15 Chaucer
Road, Cambridge CB2, 2EF, U.K.
0301-0511/90/$3.50 0 1990 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
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J.J. Furedy / Sharing a common language
titles and by textual content) to autonomic conditioning. Of course both our and
others' (Kimmel & Lachnit, 1988; Lovibond, 1988; Martin & Levey, 1988;
Ohman, 1988; Siddle & Bond, 1988) papers made reference to ideas that were
not originally developed from autonomic conditioning evidence and theoriz ing,
but the discussions of the relevant empirical evidence focussed on autonomic
conditioning. In contrast, Shanks (1990) makes no reference to any autonomic
conditioning evidence. Accordingly, when Shanks indicates that "it is
disheartening to discover that different people who all have an interest in
conditioning can fail to share a common language in which to discuss it" (p.
172), I suggest that his pessimistic appraisal of the extent of shared common
language is due to his own looseness in characterizing the positions taken in
the papers on which he is commenting.
Similarly, it is to grossly mischaracterize the Furedy (1988b) and Furedy and
Riley (1987) papers as taking a position that "essentially denies that cognitive
processes have any relevance for conditioning" (p. 171). At the beginning of
the penultimate paragraph of the former paper, I wrote that "although in the
present paper I have been concerned to explore S-R factors in HPAC [human
Pavlovian autonomic conditioning], it should not be thought that I do not
recognize, or am uninterested in, the role of cognitive factors", and ended the
description of our research on these cognitive factors by stating that my "interest
in measuring relational-learning (cognitive) processes in HPAC continues"
(Furedy, 1988b, pp. 148-149); references to those relational-learning
measurement papers that began in the early 1970s are available in Furedy
1988b). Rather than citing similar passages from the Furedy and Riley (1987)
paper, I shall just quote a book reviewer who read it as proposing a " two
process theory in which response learning ... and cognitive learning ... can
[both] be tested in dual paradigm experiments" (O'Gorman, 1988, p. 372).
Again, then, at least part of the problem of Shanks' complaint about the lack of
shared common language stems from his failure to characterize accurately the
position on which he is commenting.
In the same vein, the following brief comments on Shanks' four points (p.
172) reveal a lack of accuracy in characterizing positions. Regarding (1) the
cognitive account that I am concerned with is not the teleological one that
assumes purpose and "intentionality", and seeks to provide an explanation of
behavior in terms of what is "rational" or "consistent with the purposes" of
the organism. It is also true that Tolman combined teleology and cognitivism,
but, as stated in one of the two target papers, "the connection between
cognitivism and purposivism is merely historical or contingent, rather than
logical or necessary" (Furedy & Riley, 1987, p. 16). An example of an
ateological, mechanistic cognitive approach to behavior in general by a phil osopher psychologist is a book by Maze (1983), who is strongly committed to a
pro-cognitive but anti-teleological position. With regard to cognitive, but
ateological strains in my own position concerning human Pavlovian autonomic
J.J. Furedy / Sharing a common language
183
conditioning, an example is provided by "the claim that awareness of the CS-US
relationship is necessary, but not sufficient, for autonomic conditioning (see, e.g.,
Dawson, 1973; Dawson & Furedy, 1976; Furedy, 1973) [which] is a position that
involves no talk of purposes whatsoever" (Furedy & Riley, 1984).
Concerning (2), for reasons given above (and elaborated in Furedy & Riley, 1984, and
Maze, 1983), I reject the equation of "cognitive" with "intentional", but agree that an
intentional (i.e., teleological or purposive) "theory of Pavlovian conditioning" (or of
any other set of psychological phenomena) "would be extremely difficult, a priori" (p.
172) to construct, because of the circularity involved in the explanatory constructs.
Furedy and Riley (1984) indicated the difficulties involved in teleological accounts in
Skinnerian behaviorism, and similar comments have been made regarding physiological
psychology (Furedy, 1989a), and a psychophysiological account of cardiac reactivity
(Furedy, 1989b).
Shanks' third point that "instead" of the intentional theory, "the evidence points to
the view that Pavlovian conditioning consists in the learning of excitatory or
inhibitory links between the mental images of the conditioned (CS) and unconditioned
(US) stimuli" (p. 172) seems to confuse a priori reasoning (that he apparently uses
to dismiss intentional theory) with a posteriori (i.e., evidence-based) reasoning. In
addition, the fact that Shanks does not refer to any autonomic conditioning "evidence"
renders this point of marginal relevance for either the Pavlovian autonomic
conditioning symposium in Biological Psychology (for terms of reference, see Furedy,
1988a), or for the two target papers on autonomic conditioning (Furedy, 1988b;
Furedy & Riley, 1987).
The fourth point asserts that the distinction between the "mechanism of learning"
and the "nature of the knowledge that is acquired during learning" is an "absolutely
crucial" one (p. 172). In my reading of Shanks' paper, there is not much in the
following text that seems to provide any logical (apriori) or evidential (a posteriori)
justification for this strong assertion, but, in any case, the assertion is irrelevant to the
two-process view of Pavlovian autonomic conditioning that we have put forward,
namely that both cognitive (S-S) and non-cognitive (S-R) processes or mechanisms
play a part in the phenomenon, and that the parts played need to be determined by
empirical research.
The remaining three sections of Shanks' paper do not really refer to issues that were
raised in the target papers. For example, the third section discusses the relation
between "cognition" and "conditioning", but the former term is taken in its
representational, intentional sense, whereas the latter term (from the subsequent text)
includes instrumental as well as Pavlovian conditioning, and excludes any reference to
Pavlovian autonomic conditioning. Accordingly, the remainder of this reply, rather than
being organized in terms of Shanks' sections, will simply make brief comments on a
few important mischaracteri-
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zations of positions taken in the target papers (Furedy, 1988b; Furedy & Riley,
1987) as these appear in Shanks' paper.
2. Mischaracterizations of positions taken in the target papers
Shanks cites our definition of a proposition as "any expression that is statable in
the form X is Y" (Furedy & Riley, 1987, p. 3, emphasis added), and considers it to
be refuted by the example of "Charles loves Diana" (p. 172). I think Shanks has
neglected to note the presently emphasized letters in the definition he cites. The
expression "Charles loves Diana" does, of course, qualify as a proposition, since it can,
without too much ingenuity, be readily put into an X-is-Y form, i.e. where "Charles",
"is", and "a lover of Diana" would serve as the subject (X), copula, and predicate (Y)
terms in a proposition which clearly has truth value.
Concerning more general aspects of our cognitive/propositional position, it may be
more "usual" to "refer to intentional, or representational, mental states", and it may
even be true that many people are on Shanks' side in thinking this to be a more "
perspicuous" (p. 173) position. However, adopting such a position entails accepting a
representational theory of knowledge along with the teleological intentionality concept.
This is not the place to detail the difficulties to which this stance leads when one
attempts to develop a coherent and non-circular explanatory system (for an account of
these difficulties in explaining behavior, see Maze, 1983), but of course the fact that
"numerous psychologists and philosophers have advocated the view that cognitive psychology concerns intentional states" (p. 173) does not make it right. In another
discussion of related issues, I have conceded that " I have not kept up with the details of
the latest fashions in cognitive science" (Furedy, 1989c, p. 131) and I am prepared to
make a parallel concession here with regard to being out of step with one form of
currently popular cognitive psychology. What I am not prepared to concede, however,
is that the position we have put forward in the target papers (Furedy, 1988b; Furedy &
Riley, 1987) has to be cast in representational-intentional terms. Rather, our
cognitive/propositional position is deliberately ateleological, and specifically avoids
representational language in its formulation. Hence when Shanks ends his section by
asserting that "Furedy's concern, though, is to see what such a [n intentional,
representational] system has to do with conditioning" (p. 174), he has grossly mischaracterized what our concern was, as stated in the two target papers.
Perhaps the sentence that contains the most serious inaccuracies is the assertion
that the "evidence seems compelling that animals and humans do learn S-S
associations, that is, they learn something about the relationship between CS and US,
rather than, say, between the CS and UR" (p. 176). TO begin with, if evidence relevant
to this claim were properly cited, it would have
J.J. Furedy / Sharing a common language
185
to be from human Pavlovian autonomic conditioning (the area of our concern), and no
such evidence is cited. In addition, it has been made quite clear that we have not argued
that the human Pavlovian autonomic conditioning (HPAC) phenomenon is either a
result solely of S-S or of S-R learning. Rather, we have put forward a " ‘two-process
view’ (Furedy & Riley, 1987, pp. 10-13), which recognizes both as potentially
important determinants of the HPAC phenomenon" (Furedy, 1988b, p. 141). Finally,
and most importantly, the quoted, sentence from Shanks misrepresents the S-R position
when it suggests that the position asserts that the organism learns something
“
about” the “relationship between ... the CS and US” (p. 10), because that constitutes
a propositional (in our terms, cognitive) formulation of the S-R position. The CS-UR
relation, like “the Hull-Spence rg-ss hypothetical mechanism ... does not express a
propositional relationship, because the true/false category cannot be sensibly applied
to it” (Furedy & Riley, 1987, p. 3). In Furedy (1988b) I proposed, as a particular
formulation of the S-R position, a revised contiguity-reinforcement S-R theory, and
both I and Kimmel (1988, p. 196) agreed that revivals of these sorts of S-R positions
will probably remain unpopular in terms of receiving experimental research
attention. That is a matter of choice. It is not a matter of choice, but of logic, that
such S-R positions cannot adequately be characterized in propositional, cognitive terms,
as if they asserted that the organism learns about S-R (contiguity between CS and UR)
or R-S (reinforcement between CR and US) relations.
Another inaccurate characterization is the claim that "Furedy consistently implies
that an S-S theory must be an intentional one" (p. 177). Despite the use of italics in
the above quote, the citations that Shanks uses to back up his strong claim provide no
justification for it. Instead, as indicated at the outset of this paper, the position taken in
the target papers refers to cognition in its purely propositional, ateleological sense,
even though earlier workers like Tolman, and many later workers, may hold to a
teleological, intentional view. Our concern has been with an examination of the role of
non-intentional S-S (propositional knowledge) processes as measured by subjective
contingency and S-R factors in Pavlovian autonomic conditioning. It should also be
noted that my recent discussions on this topic with more cognitively oriented
workers like Dawson, Siddle, and Lovibond (of whom only some, like Lovibond, hold
a strongly intentional view of cognition) have been based on experimental autonomic
conditioning evidence concerning the observed relations between subjective
contingency and electrodermal measures.
Finally, on the question of whether the Rescorla-Wagner model is cognitive (p.
178), I think it best in the interests of space to refer readers to footnote 2 in Furedy and
Riley, (1987, pp. 21-22), which details why, despite the labelling of the authors of
this model as a contiguity one, it is really a cognitive-contingency model. Of course to
follow this argument the distinction between (propositional) contingency and (nonpropositional) contiguity must
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be clearly understood, and talk of learning "about" the relationship between CS and
UR must be eschewed.
3. Conclusions
In referring to the papers in the special issue of Biological Psychology, Shanks
referred to "a casual observer reading these papers" (p. 171). I suggest that readers
consider these papers (including the replies by the participants) a little less casually,
recognizing, at the very least, that the topic was human Pavlovian autonomic
conditioning, even though, of course, other areas are also of relevance. In addition,
considering that Shanks' remarks were focussed on my paper in that collection (Furedy,
1988b), and were intended to discuss the role of cognitive factors, I draw attention to
the fact that I began that paper with three cognitive accounts of human Pavlovian
autonomic conditioning which "all posit propositional information as a central
determinant" (Furedy, 1988b, p. 139), and reviewed evidence that was contrary to
this account (Furedy, 1988b, pp. 139-141). Shanks fails to refer to any of this (or
any other) autonomic conditioning evidence. My hope is that both opponents and
proponents of current cognitive views will do so in future discussions, because, to end
with the comment made by another contributor to the special issue, "Only a science
that admits all the facts can hope to really comprehend any of them" (Kimmel, 1988,
p. 196).
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