From the book: Cognitive Psychology In Question. Costall, Alan (ed.) (1987). St Martin’s Press.

Noel W. Smith

HUMANS AS COMPUTER PROCESSORS?

Cognitivism has made strong inroads into current psychology and perhaps has even become a dominant conception. One of its most characteristic features is the invoking of analogies to the most recent advancements in science and technology, such as holograms, neural physiology and computers. This has given it an appearance of objectivity and scientific standing. Computer operations have received the most attention and are usually viewed as providing an insight into neural activity. Neurons are, in turn, assumed to be the locus of mind. Computer models, then, will illuminate the neurology of mind. These models are sometimes viewed as metaphors but more often, literally, as a reflection of the computational status of human cognition.

A long-standing alternative to these assumptions is available in the interbehavioral psychology of J.R. Kantor. (Specific interbehavioral critiques of analogies may be found in Blewitt, 1983; Kantor, 1935; 1936; 1978; Swartz, 1958). This psychology will be delineated in this chapter but a brief background about the man may be appropriate at this point. Kantor studied at the University of Chicago under such luminaries as James Angell, leader of the functionalist school of psychology; George Herbert Mead, sociologist; and John Watson (during summers when Watson returned to Chicago from Johns Hopkins University.) While some of the terminology of these men and traces of their concepts can be found in Kantor’s early writings he showed a remarkable degree of independence from both dualistic and mechanistic thinking from the very beginning. His published writings span a period from 1918 to the time of his death in 1984. He saw everything in system rather than in pieces and was always adamant about identifying and rejecting any constructs that were not derived from actual events. This approach led him to emphasize the interbehavioral field (Kantor, 1959; Mountjoy, 1976) as the stage on which all events are played and on which they must be viewed.

IMPLICIT TRADITIONAL POSTULATES

The alternative to cognitivism that is usually cited is behaviorism: There are cognitions aflr/behaviors, the former often producing the latter. The latter is not reducible to the former because it is primarily effector action. Therefore studies of behavior, while legitimate and worthwhile, deal with mechanistic acts and cannot include cognitions. Cognitions are also private and not directly observable as are behaviors. Some cognitivists regard them as unobservable in principle because thoughts, images, beliefs, and other ‘private’ events do not have shape and other physical features of matter. A few cognitivists (e.g. Boneau, 1974; Bandura, 1978) would combine cognitions and behavior as complementary.

The foregoing account of some of the commonly stated contrasts between behaviorism and cognitivism imply some of the assumptions that cognitivists make. Sampson (1981), in his critique of cognitivism makes clear an important element in its assumptions:

The cognitive tradition is usually contrasted with the objectivist tradition of British empiricism, which has also influenced the contemporary forms of psychology but which emphasized the properties of the object more than those of the subject. Cognitive psychology recognizes a disparity between what is ‘out there’ and its internal representation and argues that behavior is a function of the subjective world as transformed and represented internally, (p. 730)

This is revealing, but the implicit fundamental postulates that run through much if not all of cognitivism need to be explicated. The following are usually involved:

1. Stimuli are inputs that are processed by the brain; this is followed by a response output.
2. The brain directs and regulates behavior and interprets the world for us.
3. All knowledge comes through the senses to the central nervous system where it is processed and then stored.
4. Experience or mind is different from behavior.
5. The external world is represented internally.
6. External forces control behavior or internal forces control behavior or internal and external forces control behavior.

Attneave (1974) illustrates several of these (Postulates 1,2, 3, 5). He advances the Kantian position (without referring to Kant) that the world as we know it is a pure illusion and states that we only have the information that is taken in through the sense organs and then processed by the brain (in Kant’s terms, transformed in the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’). To assume that our experience of the world is anything but a representation is naïve, he insists. There is no alternative to the illusory world. Further, ‘there is really no way [this position] can be wrong’ (p. 493). (Mason (1976) makes a very similar claim and includes apes.) An assertion such as this rests on unexamined traditional implicit postulates. Because Attneave cannot even conceive of an alternative he is deprived of an informed choice. By comparing these implicit traditional postulates with the following explicit interbehavioral postulates the reader will have that informed choice. The reader may also Find an alternative to Haugeland’s (1981) lament that ‘explaining behavior without invoking mental processes is just too hard’ (p. 4).

INTERBEHAVIORAL POSTULATES

Interbehaviorism steps completely outside the historical dichotomy of mechanism verses mentalism and the more recent uneasy hybrid of cognitive behaviorism. Unlike any other system or approach, it has explicitly and formally stated its postulates on all levels of generality (Kantor, 1959; Kantor and Smith, 1975). It is only when fundamental assumptions are clarified in this manner that one can fruitfully proceed to interpret empirical data or to argue about points of logic.

For the sake of brevity the protopostulates are omitted here and the metapostulates and postulates combined and somewhat abridged:

1. Psychological events are continuous with all other events of the universe and equally objective and naturalistic.
2. Such events consist of occurrences that follow their own principles of organization and are therefore relatively independent of and irreducible to those of any other domain of events such as culture, biology or chemistry although these fully participate.
3. They involve bio-ecological evolution and biological organization of species, cultural conditions, and interactional history of the individual as conditions for a level of organization that constitutes psychological events.
4. They must be dealt with as concrete occurrences from which constructs such as relationships and laws are derived and not have traditional constructs such as mind-body diremptions, a homunculean brain, or analogies from domains at other levels of organization imposed on them.
5. They consist of multiplex fields of interactions involving stimulating objects with evolved stimulus functions, responding organism with corresponding response functions, setting factors, history of past interactions, and media of contact between the organism and the stimulating object.
6. They have their causality not in putative internal or external forces but in the total interbehavioral field.

While the implicit postulates of cognitivism are construct-based and these constructs are then imposed on data, the interbehavioral constructs are event-based; that is, they begin with observations rather than historical doctrines. Bentley’s (1950) statement about postulates seems to represent the type of model they present: ‘ “science” is … a procedure of observation and postulation with all observation recognizing that it takes place under postulation, and with all postulation recognizing that it arises out of observation’. Because of the emphasis on a field of events there is no room for such constructs as mechanistic body or metaphysical mind, nor for the common assertion that mind and body are one. The observable field provides no evidence for ‘they’ or ‘one’. These constructs have no concrete referent either in observation or inference. The attempt to ascribe psychological actions to neurons is equally spurious. No one has ever observed a neuron think, perceive, plan, believe, will or remember, or for that matter, to encode and decode. But investigators have observed that the impairment of neurons impairs various actions, and this indicates their necessary role in all psychological activities rather than their sufficiency. The role of neurons as necessary factors is an observable part of the field. The observed field precludes an ‘empty organism’ or ‘black box’ just as it precludes treatment of the entire organism or any component as a determiner of complex events.

The interbehavioral field (Postulate 5) also precludes singling out one factor and making it the determiner of the entire event. Thus the environment does not cause or determine the event nor does the organism’s biology or its culture. Culture and individual history as well as the nervous and other physiological systems along with anatomical structure and necessary conditions participate in the field (Postulates 2, 3) but do not determine it. Causality consists of the total integrated field (Postulate 6). This psychological field is a level of organization that must be studied in its own right and not reduced to or determined by any of its components (Postulate 2). Thus any centrisms of organism, culture, setting or individual history are obviated. There is no internal-external, mind-body, cognition-behavior distinction. Other diremptions such as private-public, real world-phenomenal world, and experiential-objective are equally spurious (Postulate 4). In as much as all events in the universe are held to be continuous with all others (Postulate 1), thought (better, thinking ) cannot be unextended or any less physical than the radiation of a star, the fall of a stone, or the bark of a dog; and the subtle or covert activities such as imagining, believing, perceiving and reasoning are directly continuous with more overt behaviors and no different in principle.

There are a number of scientific consequences that follow from the interbehavioral approach. Empirical studies are immediately directed towards observable events involving interrelationships. Interpretive constructs, guided by a field of events, are kept in conformity with observations. Simplistic explanations can be avoided as well as mechanism, mentalism, and reductionism. Analogizing from other sciences, and hence treating psychological events as things they are not, can also be avoided. Instead, the full range of human activities such as perceiving, knowing, learning, thinking, imagining, feeling and choosing can be given full recognition. These activities will not be converted to hypothetical engrams, animistic powers, inputs and outputs, drives, instincts, and other imposed verbal creations, which, being unobserved and unobservable, violate the scientific requirement of corrigibility. They will be seen rather as fields of complex interactions, amenable to observation and experimentation or other means of study. The resulting constructs of laws, explanations and relationships can be refined and corrected. Prediction and control can be enhanced and their limitations better understood because of the increased number of factors and interrelationships considered.

SOME ISSUES

The Overt-Covert Continuum

Just as observation rejects mind and body it brings to the fore the continuity of psychological events. The concrete and legitimate acts that have been confused with such constructs as mind and body or brain and body can be seen as occurring at varying degrees of activation. Consider the fencer who is imagining a bout with his next opponent: At first he sits quietly imagining the opponent’s thrusts and his own parries and his own thrusts to out-maneuver the opponent’s parries. As he continues imagining the scene he becomes slightly more overt, his arms moving minutely, his shoulders and torso twisting slightly, and his legs shifting a bit. As he becomes more involved in bettering the opponent his gestures becomes more and more overt until finally he is making full movements of thrusting, ducking, parrying, sidestepping. One who is imagining a debate with an opponent might go through the same continuum from totally covert to fully overt action involving speech as well as gestures. At what point is the action mental and at another bodily or physical? Is it not a continuity of action involving varying degrees of activation and observability with no fundamental difference in kind?

We need to note that in these imaginative acts the opponent is not present. The fencer or debater is interacting with a substitute stimulus object rather than a direct stimulus object (Kantor, 1924). The substitute may be a calendar or a watch that reminds the individual of the coming event, something heard or read, or any number of other possibilities. It is curious that we have a convention in the English language of referring to mental arithmetic but to silent reading. Is there any difference in principle between the two? Is not ‘mental’ arithmetic just silent arithmetic, a concrete activity at the covert end of the continuum? Is not ‘silent reading’ more concretely meaningful than would be ‘mental reading’? Silent arithmetic may involve the use of juxtaposed numerical images which reading does not, but these images or those of reverie or those stimulated by reading are all interactions with substitute stimulation.

Children regularly engage in imaginative acts that are mixtures of varying degrees of covertness and overtness as in the case of one who pretends to drive a car while sitting in a box and making sounds to simulate a motor and moving hands in such a manner as to imitate the back and forth motions of hands controlling a steering wheel. The child does not imagine and then overtly act but engages in a unified act. It makes little sense to try to divide these acts into mental and physical. They are concrete imaginative interactions with substitute stimulus objects. It is not that imagination affects action but that imagination is action.

Privacy as Bogus

The notion of privacy is often invoked in support of private states of consciousness. These are often said to differ from physical events and are unknowable. It is often said, as Haugeland (1981) has noted, that thoughts ‘cannot be observed’, ‘ . . . they are somehow essentially subjective’, and are only ‘inferred or hypothesized intermediates’ (p. 4). The perennially favorite example of a private event is the toothache. But what is the basis of this assertion of privacy? It can only be that you are not in a position or situation to observe my toothache. And that is only to say that my toothache is not your toothache.

If we examine the components of the interbehavioral field we observe that in some cases a stimulus object may be observable to only one person and in other cases to many. A motion picture may stimulate many people simultaneously, and they can report on its contents with considerable agreement although their evaluation of it may vary considerably and such reactions are less readily observable. However, knowing something of the individual’s past history will increase our probability of correctly inferring that person’s evaluative or affective response.

In some cases it is the response that may be available to many or to few. We cannot directly observe a silent chuckle, but we can observe a grin. Thus, the stimulus object or the response phase of the field may vary in observability in different cases and in various circumstances. Probably the entire interaction is unobservable in the case of a toothache, but even here the dentist can observe swelling or inflammation and anticipate a painful reaction. In nearly all situations one or another aspect of the field is observable to someone other than the individual in question and is thereby available to some extent for study.

This does not differ in any fundamental way from the situation that other sciences face. Whether analyzing the artefacts and soil samples from an archaeological excavation, attempting to understand a distant star from its radiation spectrum, or writing a biography from scraps of information all investigators are confronted with less than total access to the information they need. Psychology is not in an inferior position in this regard, assumptions about a private mind notwithstanding. In fact, psychology has a special advantage in its opportunity to use self-reports, a striking contrast with the silence of the stone tool from an ancient campsite. This does not overlook the fact that self-reports must be cautiously used and do not themselves constitute complete access, but they are important additional sources of information. Limited access and self-reports provide no basis for special principles that are paraded under the banner of cognitivism. Objective measurements of covert behaviors are available by such means as Stephenson’s (1953) Q-Methodology.

The Myth of Brainology

Cognitivism has its roots in the turbulent and socially insecure Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman periods of western development. During this period the scholars at Alexandria and other intellectual centers turned increasingly toward abstractions as replacements for the observations that had characterized the Greek approach in the Hellenic period. The psyche known to Aristotle as functioning characteristics of an organism (Kantor, 1963; Smith, 1974) became the immortal soul. It was the soul or psyche that willed, sensed, thought, reasoned and chose salvation or damnation. Cognitivism became an intrinsic part of western theology.

As the science of physiology began to develop in the late eighteenth and in the nineteenth centuries, it became a source of inspiration for converting psychology’s theological construct of mind or soul into a body organ. This was usually the brain, but at times has also been endocrine glands, muscles and genes. The doctrine of a homunculean/computer brain became the substitute for the doctrine of theological soul. The terminology has changed to the jargon of technology but the principle remains the same. Note the following definition of soul from Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary (1968): ‘an entity which is regarded as being the immortal or spiritual part of the person and, though having no physical or material reality, is credited with the functions of thinking and willing, and hence determining all behavior.’ In this ordinary dictionary definition, a reflection of a cultural mode of thinking, if we change ‘soul’ to ‘brain’ and read only the part beginning ‘is credited…’ we have the current dogma about the brain that flourishes in scientific circles. The substitution is transparent.

And yet there is no evidence that the brain does any of these homunculean tasks. The claims for it are based on the elementary confusion of necessary versus sufficient conditions (Kantor, 1947; Smith, 1982). And is there any evidence or logic that would support the assumption that anything can be a cause of itself? Can an organism’s behavior be self-caused? Can an organ within the organism cause itself to act and in turn control the rest of the organism? Does not the causal organ require another causal agent and that another, etc.? The classical infinity of homunculi are necessarily invoked by the brain doctrine, as they are by any viewpoint that posits an agent within the organism (or even the organism itself) as causative of actions. Cognitivism, brainology and allied doctrines grew out of theology, not science; and this logical impasse is a direct consequence of that origin.

The only way out of this dilemma is to begin not with historical constructs but with observed events. What we observe are organisms in interplay with things around them in which the interplay or interaction changes historically and in different contexts. This total field of relationships constitutes causality and is not reducible to culture, context, individual history, genes, organism or brain. This field of interactions requires no activating agent, for it goes on continuously, each factor changing and being changed by the others. As the field needs no activating agent neither does it require an invisible interpreter, processor, or storage depot. As Kvale and Grenness (1967) have put it. The necessity of an ‘inner man’ to guide behavior falls away when behavior is conceived as man’s relatedness to the world. Behavior is independent of the others, (p. 137)

SOME COGNITIVE BEHAVIORS

Kantor developed his interbehavioral field psychology in the 1920s, and refined it for the next six decades, but it has received little attention (see Smith and Ray, 1982; Morris, Higgins and Bickel, 1983, for possible reasons). Even in his initial analysis of cognitive acts he provided a thoroughly non-mentalistic and objective approach to them while behaviorists were, for the most part, avoiding them. A reading of these early works (e.g. 1920, 1921, 1923a, 1923b, 1924-26) is still rewarding. (For a complete bibliography of Kantor’s work up to 1976 see Smith (1976).) They remain a major and seminal statement about cognitive as well as other interbehaviors (originally called ‘organismic’). The following are brief accounts of a few covert interbehaviors.

Perceiving

This type of interaction is semi-covert because the stimulus object is often overt or explicit. It is a discriminating act that often precedes another action. The sailor notices that his sail does not have the best configuration and then adjusts it accordingly. Perceiving is not something that occurs inside the organism which must involve processing or interpreting but is a joint function of perceptible object and perceiving organism. As a field act it includes (a) the nature of the stimulus object and its meaning to the individual based on past contacts; (b) a medium of contact such as light, sound or flesh (touch); (c) an organism with the appropriate sense organs and biological organization; and (d) a setting. In the example of the sailor this would include a sail with its configuration in the wind; a setting requiring adjustment of the sail (such as having an appreciable distance to go rather than coming into a dock); the organism with eyes, brain, metabolism, circulatory system and other vital anatomical structures and physiological processes; the interactional history of the sailor with various sail configurations as they relate to sailing efficiency; and sufficient light to facilitate the interaction.

As this example illustrates, perceiving is not simply a reaction to the intrinsic properties of a thing but what it means to the individual. Various configurations of the sail mean not just configurations per se. They mean more or less efficiency in sailing. Even further removed from intrinsic properties is an object that may mean evil or holiness or special value or use to an individual. The meanings consist of the interaction of the field factors, their joint relationships. (For a recent extensive treatment of perception, including research studies see Smith, 1983.)

Voluntary Acts

These acts are those of choosing. They may be anywhere on the continuum from covert to overt. Choosing is usually approached as an act that is either (a) determined by virtue of its position in a sequence of a cause and effect chain, or (b) free by virtue of an exertion of will power. Varying combinations of freedom and will are also proffered as well as a distinction between determinism and causality for which causality is a motivating force. To the interbehaviorist the issue is spurious, for these powers are metaphysical fictions. Instead of invoking such fictions one must examine the actual factors involved

when individuals make choices. Such an examination leads us to a quite different approach. By way of example let us consider the individual who browses in a library and selects a book to read. We do not observe any series of causal events that determine the browsing and selecting or that surmounts determinism by exercise of free will. But when we turn to events rather than constructs we may learn something of the individual’s interests, the preference for simple or detailed information, the amount of time available for reading, recommendations by a teacher or a friend, and other factors. After describing the various factors such as the individual’s looking at a few books, checking tables of contents, texts and indexes, and considering these against needs, time available, previous recommendations and other relevant factors and perhaps impulsive ones as well, there is no need to add a metaphysical force of determinism or will that executes the decision. Rather, the field of ongoing factors as described constitutes the choosing. These factors are the casual conditions. There is nothing else to add and no justification to impose any abstract forces.

This descriptive approach includes the events that can be correlated with other events—particular sets of conditions such as examining each book, noting its relevance or other important features in terms of needs, reading time, etc. These field factors change continuously with each book examined, new thoughts about possible uses for it, its comparison with previous books examined, rejection of one or another of these, and tentative acceptance of one or more while anticipating others. Selecting the final book that is most useful is a final field of events for that series. Noting the time and proceeding to a checkout station would be another series of fields. The course of events that involves proceeding to the checkout station would constitute a volitional rather than a voluntary event, for it involves no distinct choosing but requires instead a series of intermediate or auxiliary acts to consummate a goal response. (See Kantor, 1924-26, for a description and distinction of each; and Smith and Shaw, 1979, for a further analysis of volitional acts.)

Knowing

Knowing is a relationship of the knower and the thing known (Kantor, 1924-26; Kantor and Smith, 1975; Parrott, 1983). In this type of conduct the individual does not bring about any change in the thing known but only becomes newly oriented to it. It differs from meaning in that meaning interactions are incomplete and often result in some further action such as manipulation or verbalization—selecting the ripest apple after discriminating ripeness or correcting the fingering on a violin after hearing an unharmonious note—while knowing is complete and independent. The two may, of course, go hand in hand. Each act of knowing is the establishment of a new relationship. Some of these may be merely perceptual as in coming to newly discriminate subtle differences in the facial features that distinguish one member of a pair of identical twins from the other member. The act of recognizing is one of knowing something that has been distinguished earlier. In understanding we are able to relate a thing to other conditions: to one who knows, a piece of rock discloses mineral contents, its origins, and its possible commercial uses. In sum, the joint relationship between a knowing organism and a knowable world constitutes knowing.

Memory and Recollection

Interbehaviorism distinguishes between ‘memory’ and ‘remembering’ on the one hand and ‘memorization’ and ‘recall’ or ‘recollection’, on the other. Perhaps these could be called memory! and memory 2 in as much as the English language has two meanings for the word. Memory, is the postponing of an action until some later time when we remember to carry it out; it intimately involves substitute stimulation. To illustrate the latter function a little further than that given in a previous section, if I announce to a class that I am about to rake my fingernails across a blackboard and make preliminary movements many students will cringe or shudder. They react to my announcement and gestures as a substitute for the actual raking of fingernails. If I suggest that they imagine that they are eating their favorite ice-cream many will report that to some extent they can taste it. (This is precisely the principle involved in hypnosis: Smith (1978).) This substitute stimulation makes possible inventions, art, symbolization, analogies, metaphors, inferences, reminiscences and remembering. It allows us to act in the absence of the original objects and to develop the most complex of human acts and human products. Culture depends heavily upon it. It is of special note that it obviates the abstractions of mental processes and brain storage.

In remembering we project events into the future and complete them at projected times by substitute stimulation. A shoe repairer tells me that my shoes will be ready next Tuesday. If I use a formal reminder I jot it down in an appointment book which, when I turn the page on Tuesday, reminds me to fetch my shoes. If I use an informal reminder I think of something else I will be doing on that day and when that event transpires I am reminded of the shoes. The latter is, of course, more tenuous and unreliable, and I may forget. In the latter case when I reach for the pair of shoes to put on but find them missing I have a new substitute stimulus or reminder. We are continually projecting future actions, sometimes weeks or even years ahead, for which the original stimulus will not be present. We remember or forget to carry them out, depending on the adequacy of the substitute stimulus. Despite the great importance this conduct assumes in our daily lives there is apparently no research on it, nor have any psychologists other than Kantor even considered it.

In contrast to memory, memorization and recall (memory 2 ) have received an enormous amount of attention. Much of this is patterned after the nineteenth-century work of Ebbinghaus in which association units such as nonsense syllables, lists of words or numbers, and the like are studied. Kvale (1974) and Giorgi (1976) have criticized this for the elimination of meaning when meaning is precisely what we should be studying.

The interbehaviorist notes that recall or recollection is a reperformance. That is, one repeats a previous act with more or less accuracy. The potential for doing so is from one or more contacts or practice sessions with something to be reperformed —a poem, the principal points of a theory, the general contents of a written sentence or passage. It does not involve postponing an action as does memory, but rather is a reference to the past (Kantor, 1924-26; Kantor and Smith, 1975). In neither case does interbehaviorism assume that there is any storage depot or coding and decoding. As Bourne et al. (1971) have observed,

While it is clear that a person does accumulate and remember ways of behaving and normally does behave in a way that is consistent with his present circumstances, there is no clear evidence in logic or in data that these behaviors are really internal physical units that get stored, processed, searched for, selected, and invoked by some set of internal storage or processing devices. That argument only leads to regressive questions about the mechanisms underlying the mechanisms. It is not an accident that the description of symbolic processes (the functions of some alleged symbolic device) is given in behavioral terms, such as storing, sorting, and selecting. That in itself is a strong clue that, rather than being functions of a device at all, they are functions of a person, i.e., part and parcel of or, better, parameters of his behavior, (p. 13)

One does not retain or store memories 2 but rather re-performs in the presence of the original or a substitute stimulus. Setting conditions can also facilitate or inhibit recollection. For example, we may re-perform better in the setting where we originally practiced or in one that is similar than in a very different one.

Bransford et al. (1977) also question the storage notion of memory 2 . They suggest that one ‘re-creates previous experiences’ (p. 462). They ‘have argued that learning involves the detection of invariant information from a set of acquisition experiences’ and that ‘remembering is assumed to depend on the organism’s state of attunement following acquisition’ (p. 462), attunement being attitude.

By showing how recollection can be retroactive, Kvale (1974) has demonstrated the untenability of a stored memory 2 . As a result of an extensive research programme, Jenkins (1974) has had to abandon the associationist doctrine of memory 2 and replace it with a contextualist approach. He has found that people do not recall sentences, linked words that make up chains of associations according to the association’s. Instead they recall meanings of sentences in accordance with contexts. In these studies it is difficult to see how the recalled meanings could be stored. Jenkins is explicit about this same point: ‘Regardless of our particular analysis, it is clear that the phenomena disclosed by these experiments pose formidable problems for storage theories of memory’ (p. 792)

and ‘memory is not a box in a flow diagram’ (p. 749). Although these experimenters have undertaken their work in complete independence of interbehaviorism, that work converges directly upon it.

Imagery

Our last example concerns imagery. Images have long been the stronghold of the mentalist whose treatment invokes all the historical metaphysical constructs. To the interbehaviorist images are subtle but concrete interactions whether visual, auditory, tactual, olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic or other sensory-linked acts. Such a list almost declares that images involve vestigial remnants of sensing acts. In the gustatory example used in a previous section concerning imagining the eating of ice cream, there is some degree of salivation and probably activation of taste buds and probably a good many other physiological events that would be involved in the actual eating of ice cream in addition to the substitute stimulus with which the interaction takes place. Thus gustatory imaging clearly consists of concrete interactions with the world. Skinner (1963) has noted that whilst we are tempted to say that vision represents the world, this is less so for hearing, and least of all for touch. Yet is there any reason to expect any difference in principle with visual or auditory images? They too are better regarded as vestigial actions in which the brain is but one necessary condition in a field of interacting factors.

If we attribute the image (better, imaging) to the production of a sense organ or the brain, and treat it as a mere representation of an external ‘real’ object, we end up once again in the logical problem of an infinite regress.

The work of Shepard (1978) and Shepard and Cooper (1982) is an interesting example of the confusion of constructs with events. Despite a thoroughgoing mentalistic interpretive framework, the research actually shows the close relationship between images and covert conduct, as well as the role of substitute stimulation. This suggests, as Kantor has noted, that all research is interbehavioral—even when it is not so interpreted, for all that organisms can do is to interbehave and all that investigators can do is to interbehave with the interbehaving organism. If one starts with descriptions of events rather than traditional constructs that get imposed on the events the interbehavioral programme becomes an inevitability. And this can be effected by examining one’s postulates and making them conform to observation. By merely observing a cardinal rule of good science that one’s interpretive constructs must be consistent with the events they interpret, the approach would be interbehavioral even if different in terminology. To put it another way, postulational constructs must match operations. That is the message of interbehaviorism.

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