Abstract
The British biologist, philosopher, and psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan is widely regarded as one of the founders of comparative psychology. He is especially well known for his eponymous canon, which aimed to provide a rule for the interpretation of mind from behavior. Emphasizing the importance of the context in which Morgan was working—one in which casual observations of animal behavior could be found in Nature magazine every week and psychology itself was fighting for scientific legitimacy—I provide an account of Morgan’s vision for the comparative psychologist qua professional psychologist. To this end, I explore the important connection between Morgan and the evolutionary theorist, philosopher, and psychologist Herbert Spencer. It is from Spencer, I contend, that Morgan inherited a number of his key epistemological and methodological concerns about the nascent science of comparative psychology. This extends all the way to the canon, which only works as intended when paired with a Spencerian understanding of mental evolution as a progressive linear sequence. Far from being an incidental residue of a pre-Darwinian time, hierarchy was intentionally built into the very core of Morgan’s scientific comparative psychology.
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Notes
As far as I can tell, the precise definitions put forth by Morgan in his (1890) Animal Life and Intelligence and his 1886 “On the Study of Animal Intelligence” are almost the same. However, the larger discussion in which those discussions are nestled does illustrate a far larger role for consciousness, as per Fitzpatrick’s and Goodrich’s contention that Morgan was shifting towards Romanes. For Romanes’s definitions, see (1882, p. 17). He repeats them in Mental Evolution in Animals. Morgan’s earlier definition can be found in Morgan (1886, p. 184). Morgan’s later definitions appear in Morgan (1890, reflex and instinct: pp. 422–423; intelligence: p. 458).
Romanes’s thoughts on monism are collected in Mind and Motion and Monism (1895), which was edited, appropriately enough, by Morgan. Morgan’s own thoughts appear in both his early major works of psychology (Morgan 1890) and (1894)—as well as in a paper (1893b). Morgan refers to his position as analytic monism, implying that one underlying thing could be analytically, but not ontologically, separated into mental and material aspects.
See Radick (2000, p. 22, n. 84) for some important concerns about Richards’s account.
I do not doubt the importance of this debate to Morgan, but Radick’s conclusion need not follow. Morgan’s concerns with the absence of language were primarily epistemological and dealt with how comparative psychology had to be studied given the absence of language. If some organism or another were found to have language, it may impact the avenues available for studying that organism, and likely the assessment of its mental abilities as well, but it is unclear how it would damage Morgan’s larger reform project.
The exact timing, nature, and cause of his transition from vociferous skeptic of a science of animal minds to cautious advocate have been of considerable historical interest. Some authors have argued for a shift within the late 1880s due either to his monism or the influence of Romanes (Costall 1993; Richards 1987, p. 380), whereas others document the shift in the early 1890s (Radick 2000). More recently, Fitzpatrick and Goodrich (2017) have argued for two separate shifts, an early one based on the influence of Romanes and then a later one initiated by the work of the experimenter T. Mann Jones and shifts within Morgan’s own philosophy of science.
A similar partition, albeit with a different interpretive structure, is also found in Fitzpatrick and Goodrich (2017).
See, for instance, Hayward (1884), Shaw (1881), and Wedgwood (1882). Romanes himself extensively discussed the use of anecdote; see, for instance, Romanes (1879) and (1882), preface. Unfortunately, no full study of anecdotalism has been undertaken, but see Jamieson and Bekoff (1992), Mitchell et al. (1997), and Lidwell-Durnin (2019).
The full text of the note is as follows: “PLEASE, Mr. Editor, is a pet baboon (NATURE, vol. xxv. p. 217) more interesting than either a pet sparrow or a pet canary bird? Don’t give rise to the suspicion that there is any nepotism in the affair!” The importance of social standing for the trustworthiness of observation has a long history; it was a common theme for Darwin and especially Romanes (1882, preface).
The most notable example of this is Romanes (1882).
See especially Romanes (1882, p. 28n). He did, however, state that much work in comparative psychology would be primarily observation-based and was not always suited to experiment.
The problem of other minds refers to the idea that we supposedly only have direct access to our mind, and therefore the notion of others having minds at all can never be known with certainty. It is especially prominent in Cartesian thought.
The inferential move is not quite as simple as presented here. It is elaborated later in the paper.
There is another conceptual argument going on here. In Romanes (1879, p. 123) he writes, “Homo sapiens is the lord of creation, because, having sprung from the primates he started with some little power of abstract thought, which, through the instrumentality of continuously improving language, was forced on by natural selection at a probably astounding pace.” Central to Romanes’s thinking, then, is the idea that, on the thesis of evolution, we should see no stark breaks in kind, but rather non-human animals should possess human faculties in vastly diminished degrees. Diminishment of degree is doing the same kind of work as presence or absence would do for someone who thinks about evolution differently. Ultimately, though, Romanes writes to Morgan confirming that he does not believe animals have what Morgan calls isolation (and Romanes generalization) and that their dispute is terminological. See Morgan (1882, p. 524). It should be noted, however, that Romanes was notorious for rendering all disputes with him as merely terminological; see Baldwin (2015, pp. 58–59).
Also see his report in the Transactions of the South African Philosophical Society (1883a). The anecdotes, many previously published in Nature, were reported by Romanes (1882, pp. 222–225). For a historical discussion of animal suicide, with particular emphasis on the scorpion, see Ramsden and Wilson (2014).
Morgan also engaged in far more expansive treatment of the same argument, in which many of the philosophical influences are made explicit, in Morgan (1885). Unfortunately, The Springs of Conduct is a difficult work for tracking the development of Morgan’s thinking, given that it may have been completed in 1883 (see Schwartz, ed. 2010, p. 327). It therefore presents an acute problem in the discrimination of earlier from later thinking. See also Clifford (2010), especially “On Theories of Physical Forces” (pp. 109–123), which Morgan cited as a formative influence. Morgan’s presented the same argument in Morgan (1886).
The emphasis on verification is also stressed repeatedly in Morgan (1884a).
He used Huxley’s now misleading jargon of neuroses for neural states and psychoses for psychical or mental states.
He sets out a similar justification for science in Romanes (1882, introduction).
Romanes also stresses this point in (1882, preface).
Also see the discussion in Fitzpatrick and Goodrich (2017).
This view of Animal Life and Intelligence is echoed by Boakes (1984).
Conwy Lloyd Morgan to Herbert Spencer, 27 July 1898), Atheneum Collection of Spencer’s Correspondence, MS. 791, no. 269, University of London Library. Cited in Richards (1987, p. 245).
Use-disuse is another way of referring to the inheritance of acquired traits. To use a toy example, the daughter of someone who had trained to be a marathoner would be better at distance running. The source for this idea is ostensibly Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy (Lamarck 1914), although Spencer was likely the leading proponent of it in England at the time and rarely mentions the Lamarckian lineage of the idea.
There are additional nuances to Spencer’s position. He thought, for example, that the universal characteristic of certain relations to the environment, like time and space, could explain why these would become universal features of the mind (Spencer 1855, pp. 579–580).
The exact motivation behind why Spencer was so committed to it are less clear, although Richards has ably argued that at least part of it was his desire to preserve a sense of progress and direction within a naturalistic world view (1987, pp. 287–294).
Romanes discusses this extensively in Mental Evolution in Animals (1884).
In pangenesis, inheritance occurred via postulated tiny particles called gemmules that were produced throughout the body and were transmitted to the offspring during reproduction, thus carrying acquired traits. Darwin presented this theory in The Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication (1868). For Morgan’s discussion of pangenesis, see Morgan (1890, pp. 131–137).
For Morgan’s other early references to Weismann, see (Weismann 1893).
In an 1891 review, he affirmed that the jury was still out (Morgan 1891).
The claim that bird pecking was fully instinctive and required no learning came from the famous experimental research of Douglas Spalding (1954).
The "Great Chain of Being” refers to a complete hierarchical ordering of all animals; the best-known work on it, even if now a bit outdated, is Lovejoy (1976 (originally 1936)).
Technically, even accepting Spencer’s claim that diverse organisms must encounter the same challenge of integrating sensory experience, one need not accept that they do it in the same way, i.e. one need not accept that organisms think in a similar way. I cannot find a specific response to this concern in Spencer, but he is clearly comfortable making the assumption. I suspect such worries are far more the product of us now trying to shake off our Spencerian (and early hierarchical) heritage than anything Spencer himself would have needed to deal with.
For Morgan, intelligence operates via associative learning; see especially (1894a, p. 215).
This leads to Morgan’s idea of emergent evolution later in life; see especially Morgan (1923).
Morgan mentions the influence of Herbert Spencer, but declines to fully adopt a Spencerian position.
This somewhat echoes the analysis provided by Allen-Hermanson (2005). However, he seeks to elucidate Morgan’s concepts of higher and lower in terms of Morgan’s thinking about emergence rather than engage with the historical development of the canon. Also note that such monistic thinking was far from an isolated event. As Morgan himself mentioned, monism was the philosophy du jour, and his active participation in the philosophical quarterly The Monist (founded 1888) put his work in the company of other monistic thinkers such as Ernst Mach and Paul Carus.
Morgan’s theory of selective synthesis entailed that he was not nearly as obsessed with establishing continuity as many early evolutionists, including Spencer and Romanes.
And, correspondingly, “infra-consciousness,” the “mental” that corresponded to simple matter within Morgan’s monistic framing. This approach was almost certainly derived from the “mind-stuff” thesis of Clifford (1878).
For more on Morgan’s hierarchy, see Clatterbuck (2016).
See Ruse (2009).
For an analysis of the pervasiveness of such thinking, see Hodos and Campbell (1969).
Fitzpatrick and Goodrich (2017) have called attention to shifts in Morgan’s philosophy of science. Specifically, they focus on Morgan's evolutionary account of mental development according to which new concepts are selected for "congruence" against the mental environment. According to Morgan, the key factor of the scientific viewpoint is that it will always strive towards congruence with perception. Morgan’s viewpoint, then, as understood by Fitzpatrick and Goodrich, is empiricism, but of a more sophisticated, somewhat coherentist, stripe. Morgan’s sophisticated empiricism is, in turn, amenable to incorporating the more inferential study of the mind. Nonetheless, Morgan’s emphases remain similar, especially given his prioritization of arbitration via experience. Therefore, the account of the canon provided here fits well within Fitzpatrick and Goodrich’s interpretation of Morgan’s more mature philosophy of science.
Perceiving the why and thinking the therefore are characteristic features of human cognition for Morgan.
Given that comparative psychologists are forced to gauge animal psychical faculties against a human standard, Morgan discussed three ways to do so: the method of levels, the method of uniform reduction, or the method of variation. Levels imply that if two animals share a higher-level faculty (to whatever degree), then they equivalently share lower-level faculties. Uniform reduction implies that all animals (including humans) share all faculties, but each faculty is uniformly reduced in non-human animals. And per the method of variation, any shared faculty can be increased or decreased with respect to humans (or other animals). Morgan goes on to state that, "on the principles of evolution we should unquestionably expect that those faculties which could give decisive advantage in the struggle for existence would be developed in strict accordance with the divergent conditions of life," and therefore endorses the method of variation.
For a more detailed, if non-historical, discussion of how this works see Allen-Hermanson (2005).
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Arnet, E. Conwy Lloyd Morgan, Methodology, and the Origins of Comparative Psychology. J Hist Biol 52, 433–461 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-019-09577-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-019-09577-2