A small part of the universe is contained within the skin of each of us. There is no reason why it should have any special physical status because it lies within this boundary, and eventually we should have a complete account of it from anatomy and physiology. No very good account is now available, however, and it therefore seems all the more important that we should be in touch with it in other ways. We feel it and in some sense observe it, and it would seem foolish to neglect this source of information just because no more than one person can make contact with one inner world. Nevertheless, our behavior in making that contact needs to be examined.
We respond to our own body with three nervous systems, two of which are particularly concerned with internal features. The so-called interoceptive system carries stimulation from organs like the bladder and alimentary tract, from glands and their ducts, and from blood vessels. It is primarily important for the internal economy of the organism. The so-called proprioceptive system carries stimulation from the muscles, joints, and tendons of the skeletal frame and from other organs involved in the maintenance of posture and the execution of movement. We use the verb “feel” in describing our contact with these two kinds of stimulation. A third nervous system, the exteroceptive, is primarily concerned with seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling things in the world around us, but it also plays an important part in observing our own body.
All three nervous systems presumably evolved to their present condition because they served important biological functions, but they came to serve another function with the appearance of verbal behavior. People eventually asked questions of each other, the answers to which called for a different kind of responding to the body. Questions such as “Are you hungry?”, “Does your head ache?”, “What are you doing?”, “What do you plan to do tomorrow?”, “What did you do yesterday?”, and “Why are you doing that?” evoke answers which are useful in predicting and preparing for what a person will do, and they seem to give information about a world beyond the reach of other people.
We might expect that because a person is in such intimate contact with his own body he should be able to describe its conditions and processes particularly well, but the very privacy which seems to confer a special privilege on the individual makes it difficult for the community to teach him to make distinctions. The community can teach a child to name colors in various ways. For example, it can show him colored objects, ask him to respond with color words, and commend or correct him when his responses correspond or fail to correspond with the colors of the objects. If the child has normal color vision, we expect him to learn to identify colors accurately. The community cannot, however, follow the same practice in teaching him to describe the states of his own body because it lacks the information it needs to commend or correct him.
Fortunately, it does not follow that no one can learn to describe some of the states of his own body, because the verbal community can to some extent solve the problem of privacy. For example, it can teach responses descriptive of internal conditions by using associated public conditions. Something of the sort happens when a blind person is taught to name the objects he feels by a teacher who merely sees the objects. The teacher can commend or correct him because the visual and tactual stimuli are almost perfectly correlated. The verbal community follows a rather similar practice when it teaches a child such an expression as “That hurts.” When the child has received a sharp blow or cut, the public blow or cut is fairly reliably associated with the private stimuli generated by it. The verbal community uses the public information, but the child may eventually say “That hurts” while responding only to the private event. He has learned to describe a private stimulus with an accuracy which depends only upon how well the public and private events agree.
The practice explains why terms which describe pains almost always describe their public causes. “Pain” itself comes from the Greek and Latin for punishment. A sharp pain is the pain produced by a sharp object; a dull pain by a dull object. Pains can be wrenching or piercing; a headache may pound; and “excruciating” is related to crucifixion. We often ask about feelings by asking, “What does it feel like?” and the answer usually refers to a public condition which often produces a similar private effect. Thus, a person who has had a stroke of luck may say, “I feel as if I’d won a million dollars.” A standard literary practice is to describe feelings by describing conditions which are likely to arouse similar feelings. Keats reported what it felt like when he first looked into Chapman’s translation of Homer, in the following way:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—
The verbal community may also circumvent the restrictions imposed by privacy by using collateral responses to the stimuli which a person is to learn to identify or describe. For example, it may observe not only that a child receives a painful blow, but that he cries. The private stimuli which come to control the response “That hurts” are then less likely to be described with terms first descriptive of public stimuli. Similarly, although the community may teach a child to say, “I am hungry,” because it knows that the child has not eaten for a long time, it is much more likely to take advantage of collateral behavior: it observes that the child responds quickly or eats ravenously when given food. It then tells him that he is hungry, and the child may acquire the expression “I am hungry” with respect to collateral private stimuli to which the verbal community had no access.
Terms referring to emotional or motivational states often show some connection with the external circumstances responsible for them. For example, we feel sad in the original sense of sated, or excited in the sense of stirred up, but these expressions may be little more than metaphors. We are not tense in the literal sense of being stretched, or depressed in the literal sense of weighed down. We may have acquired these words under circumstances which have no connection with behavior or feelings. Almost all terms descriptive of emotions which do not carry a direct reference to inciting conditions were originally metaphors.
Although the verbal community solves the problem of privacy in this way and succeeds in teaching a person to describe many states of his body, the descriptions are never completely accurate. The physician allows for considerable latitude when his patient describes his aches and pains. The difficulty is not that the patient is not being stimulated in a perfectly clear way, it is simply that he has never been exposed to instructional conditions under which he has learned to describe the stimuli adequately. Moreover—and this is a point of the greatest importance, to which I shall return later—the original biological functions responsible for the evolution of the nervous system have not produced the system the verbal community needs. As a result, we are particularly likely to distrust reports of private stimulation, especially when a description has other consequences—as, for example, in malingering.
Current Behavior. The question “What are you doing?” asks for information which may be quite public but which is at the moment out of reach of the questioner, who may be speaking over the telephone, for example, or in the dark, or around a corner. The vocabulary in which the answer is given can be acquired when the behavior is visible to all parties, and the verbal community therefore suffers no limitation. Descriptions may be confined to topography (“I am waving my hand”) or may include effects on the environment (“I am drinking a glass of water” or “I am sewing a button on my shirt”). Proprioceptive stimuli are dominant when a person describes his own behavior in the dark, but they are closely related to the public stimuli used in instruction by the verbal community. Questions of this sort are asked because the answers are important to the community, but, as we shall see later, they also become important to the speaker himself and in ways which are likely to maintain their accuracy.
Probable Behavior. “What are you inclined to do?” is a metaphorical question, to which a metaphorical answer might be “I lean toward going.” To tend to do something is also a metaphor, suggesting being pulled or stretched. Answers presumably depend upon stimulation generated by conditions associated with a marked probability of action. When something funny happens on a solemn occasion, we may report, “I felt like laughing” or, “I wanted to laugh” or, “I could scarcely keep from laughing.” The stimulation thus described presumably accompanied earlier instances when laughter occurred and a suitable vocabulary was acquired.
Perceptual Behavior. A person may be asked, “Do you see that?” or, less idiomatically, “Are you seeing that?” and the answer may be checked by asking for the name or a description of what is seen.
Past Behavior. Answers to such questions as “What did you do yesterday?” or “Whom did you see?” can use a vocabulary acquired in connection with current behavior. A person simply speaks from a special vantage point: he was necessarily there. Such questions are scarcely different from, say, “What happened yesterday?” (Whether it is easier to describe yesterday’s behavior if one also described it yesterday is a matter of some importance. It has been suggested, for example, that we do not remember what happened in infancy because we were not able to describe it at that time [“infant” once meant “incapable of speech”], but we do not constantly describe the behavior we are engaging in although we can usually describe it later. Nevertheless, the quick forgetting of dreams and of passing thoughts which have not been clearly “noted” suggests that a current running account is the best way to make sure that behavior can be described at a later date.)
Covert Behavior. A much more difficult question is “What are you thinking?” where “thinking” refers to behavior executed on such a small scale that it is not visible to others. (Other uses of the word “think” are discussed in Chapter 7.) In describing covert behavior we may be describing public behavior in miniature, but it is more likely that we are describing private conditions associated with public behavior but not necessarily generated by it. Verbal behavior can easily become covert because it does not require environmental support. “I said to myself …” is used synonymously with “I thought …,” but we do not say, “I swam to myself.”
Covert perceptual behavior is especially puzzling. Imagining or fantasying, as ways of “seeing” something in the absence of the thing seen, are presumably a matter of doing what one does when what is seen is present. I shall return to this point in Chapter 5.
The verbal community may resort to instrumental amplification, as of the activity of muscles, and thus in a sense make covert behavior public, and encourage a return to the overt level as by asking a person to “think out loud,” but it cannot maintain the accuracy of covert behavior. There is no problem, however, in the provenance of the vocabulary. The words used to describe covert behavior are the words acquired when behaving publicly.
Future Behavior. Another difficult question is “What are you going to do?” The answer is, of course, not a description of the future behavior itself. It may be a report of strong covert behavior likely to be emitted publicly when the occasion arises (“When I see him, I shall remind him that he owes me ten dollars”). It may be a prediction of behavior based on current conditions with which the behavior is often associated (“When things are like this, I generally give up” or “I’m hungry and I am going to get something to eat”). It may be a report of a strong probability of behaving in a given way.
Statements about future behavior often involve the word “feel.” Perhaps “I feel like playing cards” may be translated as “I feel as I often feel when I have started to play cards.” “What do you want to do?” may refer to the future in the sense of asking about the probability of behavior.
An attitude (“Do you really want to do what you are doing?” or “Do you really want to go to the beach for your vacation?”) may be part of the metaphor of inclination or tendency.
In general the verbal community can check the accuracy of statements regarding inclinations and tendencies, at least in a statistical way, by looking at what happens, and the accuracy of the control maintained by private stimuli is thus to some extent assured. We shall see that self-descriptive behavior also serves the individual himself and that when it does so, it tends to remain accurate.
Multiple Translations. Conditions relevant to behavior are reported according to the circumstances in which they have been acquired, and this means that an expression may be translated in several ways. Consider the report “I am, was, or will be hungry.” “I am hungry” may be equivalent to “I have hunger pangs,” and if the verbal community had some means of observing the contractions of the stomach associated with pangs, it could pin the response to these stimuli alone. It may also be equivalent to “I am eating actively.” A person who observes that he is eating voraciously may say, “I really am hungry,” or, in retrospect, “I was hungrier than I thought,” dismissing other evidence as unreliable. “I am hungry” may also be equivalent to “It has been a long time since I have had anything to eat,” although the expression is most likely to be used in describing future behavior: “If I miss my dinner, I shall be hungry.” “I am hungry” may also be equivalent to “I feel like eating” in the sense of “I have felt this way before when I have started to eat.” It may be equivalent to “I am covertly engaging in behavior similar to that involved in getting and consuming food” or “I am fantasying eating” or “I am thinking of things I like to eat” or “I am ‘eating to myself.’ ” To say, “I am hungry,” may be to report several or all of these conditions.
“What are you doing?” is frequently a request for further information. The question might be asked of someone who is rummaging a box of small objects, and a characteristic response might be “I am looking for my old pocketknife.” The word “rummaging” describes a particular kind of behavior; in addition to a particular topography, it implies a reason. A person who is rummaging is looking for something, and the rummaging will cease when it is found. A different question, “What are you looking for?” narrows the field, and “My old pocketknife” identifies the object sought, the finding of which will bring the behavior to an end. A further question, “Why are you looking for your knife?” might call out the answer “Because I want it,” which usually means more than “Because it is wanting.”
A more direct question about causes is “Why are you doing that?” and the answer is usually a description of feelings: “Because I feel like doing it.” Such an answer is often acceptable, but if the verbal community insists upon something else, it may ask, “Why do you feel like doing it?” and the answer will then be either a reference to other feelings or (at long last) to external circumstances. Thus, in reply to “Why are you moving your chair?”, a person may say, “The light was bad” or “To get a better light on my book.”
Questions of this kind are not always correctly answered, since we often do not know why we behave as we do. In spite of the apparent intimacy of the world within the skin, and in spite of the advantage a person enjoys as an observer of his personal history, another person may know more about why he behaves. The psychotherapist who attempts to give his patient insight is presumably emphasizing causal relationships of which his patient is not yet aware.
When we do not know why we behave, we are likely to invent causes: “I did it, so I must have thought it would help.” It is possible that many myths are little more than invented causes of the superstitious behavior, seemingly uncaused, to be discussed in Chapter 8.
Explanations of behavior vary with the kinds of answers accepted by the verbal community. If a simple “I feel like it” suffices, nothing else will appear. Freud was influential in changing the kinds of answers often given to “Why are you doing that?” He emphasized feelings but allowed for references to personal history. The experimental analysis of behavior goes directly to the antecedent causes in the environment.
I have been emphasizing a difference between feelings and reporting what one feels. We may take feeling to be simply responding to stimuli, but reporting is the product of the special verbal contingencies arranged by a community. There is a similar difference between behaving and reporting that one is behaving or reporting the causes of one’s behavior. In arranging conditions under which a person describes the public or private world in which he lives, a community generates that very special form of behavior called knowing. Responding to an empty stomach by getting and ingesting food is one thing; knowing that one is hungry is another. Walking over rough terrain is one thing; knowing that one is doing so is another.
Self-knowledge is of social origin. It is only when a person’s private world becomes important to others that it is made important to him. It then enters into the control of the behavior called knowing. But self-knowledge has a special value to the individual himself. A person who has been “made aware of himself” by the questions he has been asked is in a better position to predict and control his own behavior.
A behavioristic analysis does not question the practical usefulness of reports of the inner world that is felt and introspectively observed. They are clues (1) to past behavior and the conditions affecting it, (2) to current behavior and the conditions affecting it, and (3) to conditions related to future behavior. Nevertheless, the private world within the skin is not clearly observed or known. I have mentioned two reasons, to which I shall have many occasions to return: in teaching self-knowledge (1) the verbal community must make do with rather primitive nervous systems, and (2) it cannot fully solve the problem of privacy. There is an old principle that nothing is different until it makes a difference, and with respect to events in the world within the skin the verbal community has not been able to make things different enough. As a result, there is room for speculation, which over the centuries has shown the most extraordinary diversity.
Plato is said to have discovered the mind, but it would be more accurate to say that he invented one version of it. Long before his time, the Greeks had constructed an elaborate explanatory system, a strange mixture of physiology and metaphysics. A pure mentalism was not long in making its appearance, and it has dominated Western thinking for more than two thousand years. Almost all versions contend that the mind is a nonphysical space in which events obey non-physical laws. The “consciousness” of which a person is said to be aware has become such a staple of Western thinking that “everyone knows what it means to be conscious,” and the behaviorist who raises a question is called disingenuous, as if he were refusing to admit the evidence of his senses.
Even those who insist upon the reality of mental life will usually agree that little or no progress has been made since Plato’s day. Mentalistic theories are subject to changes in fashion and, as in the history of clothing or architecture, one has only to wait long enough to find an earlier view back in style. We have had Aristotelian revivals and are now said to be returning to Plato. Modern psychology can claim to be far beyond Plato in controlling the environments of which people are said to be conscious, but it has not greatly improved their access to consciousness itself, because it has not been able to improve the verbal contingencies under which feelings and states of mind are described and known. One has only to look at any half-dozen current mentalistic theories to see how much variety is still possible.
Behaviorism, on the other hand, has moved forward. Profiting from recent advances in the experimental analysis of behavior, it has looked more closely at the conditions under which people respond to the world within their skin, and it can now analyze, one by one, the key terms in the mentalistic armamentarium. What follows is offered as an example.