A Purposive Behavior Model

Abstract

The title of this talk, ‘A purposive behavior model’, is intended to stir faint reverberations of Tolman’s Purposive Behaviorism in Animals and Man in any of you old enough to have heard of it. It was published in 1932 at about the time when I was devouring all the information I could get about robots, and even trying to make one out of Meccano. I have heard that Tolman started out as an electrical engineer and as I did too I have always been sympathetic to his views. During a barbarous period in the history of psychology he kept alive some of the progress towards an understanding of higher mental processes that had been made by nineteenth-century associationist philosophers. The rest of the early behaviorists were so terrified of the bogy of mentalism that they didn’t dare to even think about any behavior more complicated than a reflex, or any part of the nervous system above the neck. Tolman seems to have escaped the worst effects of this general phobia, perhaps because he had a better appreciation of the capabilities of complex mechanisms.

Supported by grant number A66 from the National Research Council of Canada.