[Excerpt from _Thinking_about_Thinking_ (1983) by Tom Glenn] Behaviorism and Functionalism The first set of assumptions, behaviorism, includes (in Win- ter's cosmology) both the classical behaviorism of Watson, Pav- lov, Lorenz, Skinner, and their followers; and the various schools of psychology derived from Freud. This viewpoint lies beneath all the paradigms Harmon (1981) categorizes as passive- atomistic. What their proponents have in common is a belief that human beings are determined by forces over which they have no control, whether external (stimuli) or internal (inner drives, conditioned responses). The second, functionalism, epitomized by the work of Parsons Merton, and others of the structural-func- tionalist school of sociology, differs from the first only in the source of the determination. The functionalists believe that man is determined by society over which he has no control. The "control" and "normative" schools of sociology (Horton, 1966) are based on the functionalist set of assumptions which equate to Harmon's passive-social quadrant. I object to both of these sets of assumptions on several grounds. First, whether their apologists deny that thinking ex- ists at all or simply view it as an epiphenomenon (in the sense that it has no effect on what happens in life; a sort of power- less, castrated voice that prattles on aimlessly, commenting fu- tilely on what it cannot control, and sometimes deluding itself into believing that it does indeed exert some influence), they depict human beings as essentially powerless, basically driven by forces, hapless, helpless, passive--despite what their own neu- tered little minds say, running on foolishly. Hence, people cannot matter, cannot make any difference, cannot count, and are therefore morally irresponsible. While I can conceive of the notion that Hitler or Stalin might be morally irresponsible in the sense that they were driven by forces within themselves that they could not control, it surpasseth my imagination to think that, say, Mozart, Da Vinci, or Shakespeare do not make any difference, do not matter. Second, if either behaviorism or functionalism is complete and accurate in its description of human beings, the pursuing my subject (or any other subject) any further is folly of the most risible sort. I must be silent, for I am in illusion. And my despair will be vain despair for it will be itself an illusion. This is the stuff of insanity and possibly of evil--as I shall consider in the chapter 4. Third, if I must be silent, then so too must the behavior- ists and functionalists, for they too are determined. What they say, think, or do is also risible folly, unless they "make the dubious presumption that, unlike the subjects of their studies, they are immune to the . . . laws they purport to describe" (Harmon, 1981, p. 32). In short, the logic of their beliefs makes their beliefs immaterial. Fourth, the origin of stimulus or drive is inexplicable in both sets of assumptions. Here Freudianism, behaviorism, and functionalism must be dealt with separately for their apologists say different things. In Freudianism, while the passions them- selves--sex drive, survival, and the like--can be explained by biological programming (an argument I have no quarrel with as long as it is assumed to be incomplete; I shall return to this point) the virtually universal repressions and distortions described by Freud's followers cannot. Where did they come from? If the answer is society, then where did society get them? The only answer the followers of Freud are able to give is that society found it necessary to construct a fable (a restrictive morality) so that people could survive, resulting in repressions of otherwise natural instincts. But the survival of people-- others--for which the restrictive morality was created is not a drive. Besides, how can societal pressure explain ostensibly universal pathologies like female penis envy, male castration fear, and the Oedipal complex? Freudians cannot answer these questions plausibly. Behaviorism suffers from the same kind of infinite regress. "If one person's behavior is caused by (is a response to) a stimulus generated by another person, the other person's behavior (the stimulus) must itself logically be the effect of some prior stimulus. This assumption of infinite regress raises the ques- tion of where the first cause (the ultimate origin of the stimu- lus) came from. The question is unanswerable by behaviorist theories, except by resorting to explanations of physical deter- minism or divine intervention" (Harmon, 1981, p. 35).* ___________________ *This description bears some resemblance to the "double interact" described by Weick (1979): "The unit of analysis in organizing is contingent response patterns, patterns in which an action by actor A evokes a specific response in actor B (so far this is an interact), which is then responded to by actor A (this complete sequence is a double interact)" (p. 89). But Weick does not specify the origin of the initial action by actor A--it could be a response to some other stimulus or it could be an intentive act, originated by the actor based on his attribution of meaning. And the response by actor B is not determined by actor A's stimu- lus; it is "evoked"--suggesting a role for choice and interpreta- tion. The element of determinism in behaviorism is missing in Weick's description. _________________________________ Those who argue functionalism fall into the same sort of infinite regress, for they are unable to explain how society can determine its members when society is nothing more than a collec- tion of its members. They must assume that society both is its collective membership and at the same time is something more, that people, when they aggregate, somehow create a force which controls them. Functionalists attempt to explain all this by stating that the controlling aspect of society is inherited from the past. Unfortunately, the explanation merely compounds the problem. The tracing backwards leads to infinity without locat- ing the original source of societal control. Fifth, none of these ways of looking at human beings can explain man's ability to interpret. People's undeniable ability to ascribe meaning to stimuli and to choose what meaning to as- cribe cannot be accounted for within any of these systems. By way of example: when a person sees a geometric illusion in which the length, orientation, curvature, or direction of lines is wrongly perceived and know that his or her perception is wrong, he or she is exercising an ability that is beyond the explanation of these models. The ability is that of interpreting, changing the meaning of a stimulus (and thereby the reaction to it). Moreover, the human being is perfectly capable of holding two quite different meanings for the same stimulus at the same moment and reacting to the clash or contrast between them. This capaci- ty is the essence of humor, a point I shall discuss at length in chapters 5 and 6. These systems of thinking, in short, explain some of human behavior but not all of it. Ernest Becker, in The_Denial_of Death (l973), laments Freud's unfulfilled brilliance, his failure to get past or let go of his own framework and thereby carry his own uncanny insights to fruition. The limitations of Freud's explanations of human behavior stem from his insistence on dwelling on sex and death--Eros and Thanatos--to the exclusion of other elements in human life, for example the irony between man's god-like and animalistic qualities. Consequently, Freud failed to explain more than a part of human behavior. The same criticism, in a broad sense, can be levelled at the behaviorists and functionalists. Their insistence upon a consis- tent, scientifically objective theoretical framework boxed in their insights. As I shall argue later, they limited themselves to facts when meaning was what they were after. Each of these ways of thinking about human beings, as a result, explains part but not all of human behavior. They are not so much inaccurate as incomplete. Copyright Tom Glenn, 1992