Psychology Moves Towards Whitehead
John Pickering
Psychology Department
Warwick University, UK.
This article deals with a change in how psychology treats cognition. A mechanistic paradigm that has predominated for some decades, has been displaced by one that treats cognition as embodied in organic activity. This change means that Whitehead's metaphysics, and process thought in general, are important for the development of the discipline.
From Modern to Postmodern psychology.
When modern psychology emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century, natural science provided both its ontological framework and a methodological ideal[i]. Wundt, Fechner, James and other founding figures envisaged that the new discipline would extend this ideal by the use of phenomenological methods. But with the turn to positivism in the early twentieth century, first behaviourism and most recently Cognitivism came to dominate the discipline. Cognitivism was founded on the assumption that the activity in a nervous system is a form of information processing similar, even identical, to that carried out by a computer.
Despite their significant differences, these paradigms shared nineteenth century ontology, a commitment to objective, quantitative data and to reductionism. The assumption was that mental life could, eventually, be completely understood in terms of quantitative methods and a unitary, closed explanatory vocabulary, be it physiology, learning theory or computation. Phenomenological methods, being subjective, qualitative and essentially open and diverse did not fit. They were first marginalised then discarded, partly to identify psychology with an heroic community stretching back to the Enlightenment whose task was the objective investigation, and ultimately the scientific explanation, of mental life. This was the metanarrative of modern psychology.
But science no longer has the authority it had in the late nineteenth century and postmodernism has brought a profound skepticism towards metanarratives of such universality.[ii] Unfortunately, 'postmodern' is an overstretched term that scientists view with suspicion as being anti-scientific. It has come to be associated with claims that scientific findings are merely social conventions or with the misuse of scientific ideas.[iii]
However, postmodernism is not anti-scientific at all[iv]. In its more constructive forms it provides the means to enrich the resources of science in general and helps release psychology in particular from the impasse of scientism. The impact of postmodernism on psychology has been to diversify both theory and methods. Rather than a single style of inquiry and a unified explanatory vocabulary, it encourages psychologists to broaden the methods and theoretical constructs they use.[v] This challenges the popular image of the scientist as an explorer who finds things in uncharted realms that were there before they were discovered. However, as Rorty, a philosopher with a greater tolerance for postmodernism that most, remarks: " ... many of the things which common sense thinks are found or discovered are in fact made or invented"[vi] Accepting this we may in turn accept that the truths psychologists make about mental life will be richer if more diverse conceptual resources are used to make them.
Postmodern psychology then, avoids a single theoretical stance and is not reliant on only one style of investigation. However, synthesizing a plurality of views and techniques is not a merely a stylistic option. It is a powerful epistemological gambit, and one that is particularly important for the investigation of consciousness.
Consciousness and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
Consciousness has returned to the head of psychology's research agenda, after being ignored for most of the twentieth century. During that time, due to the turn to positivism, subjectivity was assumed to be outside the scope of a properly objective psychology. Consciousness, and human consciousness especially, is indeed the most complex mix of physical, organic and cultural phenomena ever to be the object of scientific investigation. But what that means is that an exclusive commitment to reductionism or operationalism is inappropriate. It would severely restrict what we could discover about consciousness, if positivism were to be the sole epistemological option
Fortunately, it is not. In the constructive postmodern spirit, we may not only study consciousness scientifically but also take account of other traditions for knowing the mind. Some of these traditions take phenomenology as their starting point while others treat consciousness as an aspect of organic systems. In organic systems, as Kant pointed out, wholes and parts are hard to distinguish since they are in some important sense 'for' each other. Adapting the vocabulary of Dynamic Systems Theory, we can say that organic systems are emergent, self-creating patterns of causation. These patterns flow dialectically between parts and wholes, reflecting their mutual evolution. Attempting to reduce such systems to isolated components, or dealing merely with particular types of causation, will therefore disclose only a limited range of phenomena.
This attempt is still being made in some treatments of consciousness. Cognitivism was one such, being based on a mechanistic metaphor that treated the nervous system as an information processing system akin to a computer. This metaphor has been influential and productive. It has encouraged the building of robots that, it is hoped, may achieve consciousness. It has lead a new confidence that the activity of the nervous system can be fully understood and that there exist neural correlates of consciousness that once isolated and expressed in computational terms will fully explain experience and eliminate the vocabulary of wishes, intentions and feeling in which we describe ordinary experience.[vii] This Eliminativist position as it is known, is surely Whitehead's Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness imported into psychology: to mistake abstracted and formalised parts for the unformalisable whole.
Cognitivism and Eliminativism are descendants of the mechanistic worldview of Newton & Descartes. However, with the postmodern turn, this worldview is being recast in terms of dynamic patterns of mutual causation and evolving systems of relations.[viii] This re-orientates the investigation of mental life towards what Whitehead called "the creative advance of nature".[ix] Since creative advance is the essence of experience, this helps psychology to re-engage with the prematurely neglected phenomenological projects of Wundt, Fechner and James.
After nearly a century of slumber, psychology is regaining consciousness. The study of cognition is being reclaimed from the computational metaphor which was liberating in the 1950's but became stifling in the 1990's.[x] Subjectivity itself is a major research topic once again.[xi] Feeling is now seen as the core of mental life, rather than as a cognitive by-product.[xii]
For most non-psychologists of course, to propose that feelings are the essence of mental life is little more than common experience. However Western experimental psychology in the twentieth century has not had a great deal of time for common experience. In fact it has been something of a point of principle to show that this or that theoretical construct could 'explain' common experience as something else, something supposedly more fundamental and other than the ordinary stuff of the lived world. But as Husserl warned in the 1930’s, this is to decapitate the science of mental life and to deprive it of its central phenomenon - lived experience.
Husserl's critique remains important. Even after Cognitivism displaced Behaviourism, the situation remained essentially the same: experience itself was secondary, something that could be 'explained' once the primary nature of mental activity had been understood. What was primary for Behaviourism were principles of learning that were assumed to be the same for all organisms. What was primary for Cognitivism was the formal principles of computation on which, likewise, were assumed to be the same for all organisms.[xiii] These formal principles would provide a universal theory of mental life and the nervous system could be understood in terms of the functions it was computing and the representations of the world it used in these computations.[xiv]
Neither Behaviourism nor Cognitivism (nor Eliminativism for that matter) will do as a complete explanation of mental life. Indeed there is no reason to expect that a single, complete, unified theory of mental life can be found. Instead, in line with the postmodern taste for constructive diversity, there is constant critical interaction between theoretical views we may take of it. No single view need be taken as exclusive or predominant.
Paradigm Wars.
Of course, postmodernism did not invent theoretical diversity. There have always been power struggles to be the predominant paradigm in psychology. Presently, Cognitivism appears to be loosing to connectionism and the dynamic systems approach.
Connectionism is a critical response to the implausible claim that formal computational principles could fully capture the essence of mental life. Brains do not appear likely to be computational in the strict sense of being Turing-Machine equivalent. They lack well defined places where information is stored and processed, as the functional architecture set out by Von Neumann requires. As Von Neumann himself noted, nervous systems show densely interconnected neural networks whose activity is far less homogeneous than formal computational theory requires. Connectionism is an attempt to understand this activity from the bottom up, as it were. Models are made of the dense interconnectivity and massively parallel activity of natural nervous systems. These models are networks with inputs from and outputs to their environment. Some of the connectivity of the network is programmed in advance but some is the result of the activity in world around it and on principles of self modification built into the network. In short, the networks can learn and hence become attuned to the objects and events around them.
So, while some capacities connectionist systems are specified by the designer, others depend on the history of its encounters with the world around it. These capacities are thus neither a priori nor independently specifiable in formal terms. The behaviour of the system in any encounter is principally a function of past encounters. Not merely in Skinnerian terms, a history of reinforcement but in the more organic sense that states of the world and states of the network are likely to be structurally coupled and related to previous states. This relation is open, not determined, and connectionist systems are not predictable. Indeed it is proposed that more complex ones may even exhibit novel and adaptive responses and thus serve as models of human development.
How well connectionism serves as a generalised psychological model is not yet clear since even the largest artificial networks are minute when compared with real nervous systems. Another potential weakness is that connectionist systems are are too powerful. As they are indefinitely modifiable thyey are equivalent to a Turing Machine and hence any psychological phenomenon can, eventually, be reproduced. They thus fail to be interesting by being tautologous.
Whether these criticisms prove significant or not, connectionism has already had a significant impact on enduring psychological issues, for example, that of the interaction between nature and nurture[xv] More significant here is that any account of the capacity of a connectionist system is necessarily historical. The capacities of networks depend on what has happened to them. This is a fundamental difference from the cognitivist enterprise of abstracting the computational essence of mental life, independent of the contingent particulars of any individual history. Contingency had little role in Cognitivism while it is integral to connectionism. The capacities of a connectionist system reflect the history of that system and the contingent conditions that gave rise to it. Hence the shift from Cognitivism to connectionism is away from the mechanistic and the necessary towards the organic and the contingent.
The dynamic systems approach, which is also known as the theory of embodied cognition, is another critical response to the claim that nervous system activity can be expressed in a universal computational formalism. The objection is that such activity cannot be independent of the system in which it is expressed. Instead the nervous system is taken to be engaged in a unique, cyclic process of adjustment to the flow of action in which organisms participate. Since different organisms have fundamentally different morphologies and act in fundamentally different ways, this flow will be accordingly very different. Rather than treating nervous systems as if they performed essentially similar, and hence formalisable operations, the dynamic approach treats them as vehicles for unique patterns of activity.
These patterns extend beyond the organism to reflect the particular conditions in which the activity occurs and the relationship the organism has with those conditions. The activity of the whole system is a form of sensitive chaos in which some patterns of activity tend to repeat. These patterns, called attractors, are the memory of the system. This memory, however, is not detachable from the present state of the system nor from the history of interaction with the world around it. Although attractors are recurrent each recurrence will reflect the conditions, both external and internal, that obtain at the time of recurrence.
Connectionism and Dynamic Systems Theory are both critical responses to the mechanistic metaphor implicit in Cognitivism. Details need not concern us here. However, what is interesting about these paradigm wars for the present argument is that the winning contestants are reflect a postmodern shift away from the Newtonian-Cartesian world picture. We are moving towards one in which living systems are no longer special cases. It is this that makes postmodern psychology Whiteheadian.
Postmodern Psychology is Whiteheadian.
Here, what is meant by 'Whiteheadian' will be simplified to mean the picture of reality presented in Modes of Thought. Of course, this does not fully reflect the depth and details of Whitehead's philosophy, but, as Whitehead says in the preface, the book helped him to condense the essentials of public lectures given at Harvard and Chicago over 1934 - 1938. These, being among his last attempt to present the core of his views to non-specialists, must provide something of a summa.
The essentials of this picture are:
1. The ultimate constituents of reality are experiences that participate in the creative advance of nature.
2. These experiences are prehensions, that is, the active transition from one state of knowing to another, guided by aim and purpose.
3. Prehensions interpenetrate each other and hence are continuous in time and space - there are no gaps or 'idle wheels' in nature.
4. Hence abstraction, especially in the form of space-like and time-like separation of objects or events gives only a limited picture of reality.
Such a picture could have had no significance for a psychology dominated by Cognitivism which, like the paradigms preceding it, inherited the mechanistic metaphysics of the late nineteenth century. This was that 'reality' was insensate matter whose activity was governed by time invariant physical laws. It was thus feelingless and lacked any sense of experienced duration.