We say that a newborn baby knows how to cry, suckle, and sneeze. We say that a child knows how to walk and how to ride a tricycle. The evidence is simply that the baby and child exhibit the behavior specified. Moving from verb to noun, we say that they possess knowledge, and the evidence is that they possess behavior. It is in this sense that we say that people thirst for, pursue, and acquire knowledge.
But this brings us at once to the question of what it means to possess behavior. We saw in Chapter 4 that to say that a response is emitted does not imply that it has been inside the organism. Behavior exists only when it is being executed. Its execution requires a physiological system, including effectors and receptors, nerves, and a brain. The system was changed when the behavior was acquired, and it is the changed system which is “possessed.” The behavior it mediates may or may not be visible at any given moment. There are parallels in other parts of biology. An organism “possesses” a system of immune reactions in the sense that it responds to invading organisms in a special way, but its responses are not in existence until it is being invaded. It is often useful to speak of a repertoire of behavior which, like the repertoire of a musician or a company of players, is what a person or company is capable of doing, given the right circumstances. Knowledge is possessed as a repertoire in this sense.
One meaning of “to know” is simply to be in contact with, to be intimate with. It is in this sense that a person is said to know sin, beauty, or sorrow, or a man to know a woman in the biblical sense of having carnal knowledge of her. There is an implication, of course, that behavior is changed by the contact.
We are said to know how to do something—open a window, spell “anacoluthon,” solve a problem—if we can do it. If we can get from here to there, we are said to know the way. If we can recite a poem or play a piece of music without reading it, we are said to know it “by heart,” a curious bit of physiologizing.
We are also said to know about things. We know algebra, Paris, Shakespeare, or Latin, not only in the sense of having had contact with a field, a place, a poet, or a language but in the sense of possessing various forms of behavior with respect to them. We know about electricity if we can work successfully, verbally or otherwise, with electrical things.
All these forms of knowing depend on a previous exposure to contingencies of reinforcement, but we are also said to have a special kind of knowledge if we can simply state instructions, directions, rules, or laws. A person may know how to operate a piece of equipment because he has read the instructions, or how to get about in a city because he has studied a map, or how to behave legally because he knows the law, although he may never have operated the equipment, visited the city, or felt the hand of the law himself. Knowledge which permits a person to describe contingencies is quite different from the knowledge identified with the behavior shaped by the contingencies. Neither form implies the other.
Pavlov’s dogs have been said to know “when to salivate,” but they did not salivate because they knew that the bell would be followed by food. A rat could be said to know when to press a lever to get food, but it does not press because it knows that food will be delivered. A taxi driver could be said to know a city well, but he does not get around because he possesses a cognitive map.
John Locke and other British empiricists emphasized mere contact with a stimulating environment. They did not explain why a person should attend to the world around him, why he should connect (associate) two features which occurred together so that one then reminded him of the other, or why he should think about them at all. We saw in Chapter 5 that some of Locke’s successors introduced an element of belief or will into the empirical position, but knowledge about the world is due to more than contact with a given setting, because it is due to the contingencies of reinforcement of which that setting is a part. The “experience” from which knowledge is derived consists of the full contingencies.
We do not act by putting knowledge to use; our knowledge is action, or at least rules for action. As such it is power, as Francis Bacon pointed out in rejecting scholasticism and its emphasis on knowing for the sake of knowing. Operant behavior is essentially the exercise of power: it has an effect on the environment. The advancement or augmentation of learning proposed by Bacon was the furthering of human behavior in the interests of the human condition, and the achievements of modern science show that he correctly foresaw its character. Nevertheless, the concern for power has recently been challenged. The West is said to have made a fetish of the control of nature. It is certainly not difficult to point to the unhappy consequences of many advances in science, but it is not clear how they can be corrected except through a further exercise of scientific power.
There is room in a behavioristic analysis for a kind of knowing short of action and hence short of power. One need not be actively behaving in order to feel or to introspectively observe certain states normally associated with behavior. To say, “I know a sea lion when I see one,” is to report that one can identify a sea lion but not that one is now doing so. A response temporarily forgotten may still be claimed as knowledge, as when we say, “I can’t think of it at the moment but I know it as well as I know my own name.”
We also use “know” to mean “being under the control of,” a condition which is not the only determiner of our behavior. When we say, “I went to the meeting knowing that X would be speaking” (where knowing could be replaced by believing, expecting, realizing, or understanding), we report that our behavior was affected by some prior indication that X would be at the meeting, but the behavior itself could not be called knowing that fact. To say, “I went thinking X would be there,” suggests a less clear or less reliable prior indication, a distinction between thinking and knowing mentioned in Chapter 7. It has been said that “all knowing consists of hypotheses … regarded as proven or held very tentatively,” but we are more likely to say “I think” with regard to a tentative hypothesis and to reserve “I know” for the proven case. The difference is not critical, however. The assertion “I know someone is hiding in this room” implies weak evidence but is nevertheless a strong response, presumably for other reasons. Similar conditions may prevail even though a remark is not made.
Much of what is called contemplative knowledge is associated with verbal behavior and with the fact that it is the listener rather than the speaker who takes action. We may speak of the power of words in affecting a listener, but the behavior of a speaker in identifying or describing something suggests a kind of knowledge divorced from practical action. Verbal behavior plays a principal role in contemplative knowledge, however, because it is well adapted for automatic reinforcement: the speaker may be his own listener. There are nonverbal behaviors having the same effect. Perceptual responses which clarify stimuli and resolve puzzlement may be automatically reinforcing. “Getting the meaning” of a difficult passage is similar. The whole world of fantasy is perceptual behavior which is automatically reinforcing, and some parts fall within the field of knowledge. Contemplation of this kind would be impossible, however, without a previous exposure to contingencies in which action is taken and differentially reinforced.
In a simple sense of the word, I have understood what a person says if I can repeat it correctly. In a somewhat more complex sense, I understand it if I respond appropriately. I may do so “without understanding why he says it.” To understand why, I must know something about the controlling variables, about the circumstances under which I should have said it myself. I come to understand a difficult text in this sense when, by reading and rereading it, I acquire a stronger and stronger tendency to say what the text says.
Understanding sometimes means knowing reasons. If I throw a switch to put a piece of apparatus into operation and nothing happens, I may try the switch again, but my behavior quickly undergoes extinction, and I may then look to see whether the apparatus is connected with the power source, or whether a fuse is blown, or whether the starting switch is broken. In doing so, I may come to understand why it has not worked, in the sense of discovering the reasons. I have acquired understanding by analyzing the prevailing contingencies. Teachers are sometimes urged to give their students a deeper understanding of what they are learning by showing them that the rules they have memorized are descriptions of real contingencies. They are not to teach the commutative law alone; they are to show the reasons why it works.
We ourselves often acquire a deeper understanding of a rule in this sense through exposure to the natural contingencies it describes. Thus, if we have memorized a maxim and observed it, we may again begin to be modified by the natural consequences. We discover, for example, that “it really is true” that procrastination is the thief of time, and we then understand the maxim in a different sense. The understanding gained by moving from rule-governed to contingency-shaped behavior is usually reinforcing, in part because the reinforcers in the latter case are less likely to be contrived and hence less likely to work in the interest of others.
We also find it reinforcing when a rule, as a description of contingencies, makes them less puzzling or more effective. If a given situation has not evoked any very useful verbal behavior, we may be reinforced by what a writer says about it if we can then respond in the same way. We understand what he says in the sense that we can now formulate the contingencies he describes more exactly or respond to them more successfully.
Information theory arose from the analysis of transmitted signals, as in a telephone line. In the field of verbal behavior it could be applied to the sound stream of speech between speaker and listener or the marks in a letter sent from writer to reader. The message has, as I have said, an apparently objective status.
Information is used in a very different way in describing individual behavior. Just as the external practice of storing and later consulting memoranda is used metaphorically to represent a supposed mental process of storing and retrieving memories, so the transmission of information from one person to another has been used metaphorically to represent the transmission of input to output (or of stimulus to response). The metaphor is at home in theories derived historically from the reflex arc, in which the environment enters (or is taken in by) the body and is processed and converted into behavior. Like stored memories or data structures, information begins as input (necessarily coded) but changes progressively until it becomes a predisposition to act. In an operant analysis, as I have pointed out, we do not need to follow the stimulus through the body or to see how it becomes a response. Neither the stimulus nor the response is ever in the body in any literal sense. As a form of knowledge, information can be treated more effectively as a behavioral repertoire.
It is often said that reinforcement conveys information, but this is simply to say that it makes a response not only more probable but more probable on a specific occasion. It brings a response under the control of related deprivations or aversive stimulation as well as of stimuli present at the time it occurs. Information in this sense refers to the control exercised by environmental conditions.
Information theory, with respect to the behavior of the individual, is merely a sophisticated version of copy theory. The external world is internalized, not as a photographic or phonographic reproduction, but sufficiently transduced, encoded, or otherwise modified to be more plausibly regarded as stored within the body.
The central question of scientific knowledge is not What is known by scientists? but What does knowing mean? The facts and laws of science are descriptions of the world—that is, of prevailing contingencies of reinforcement. They make it possible for a person to act more successfully than he could learn to do in one short lifetime or ever through direct exposure to many kinds of contingencies.
The objectivity which distinguishes rule-governed behavior from behavior generated by direct exposure to contingencies is furthered by tests of validity, proof, practices minimizing personal influences, and other parts of scientific method. Nevertheless, the corpus of science—the tables of constants, the graphs, the equations, the laws—have no power of their own. They exist only because of their effects on people. Only a living person knows science in the sense of acting under its control with respect to nature. But this is not to say that “every instance of knowing involves coming to terms in some way with the subjective and phenomeno-logical.” Knowledge is subjective in the trivial sense of being the behavior of a subject, but the environment, past or present, which determines the behavior lies outside the behaving person.
If action were determined by feelings or introspectively observed states of mind, it would be true, as Michael Polanyi and Percy W. Bridgman have insisted, that science is inexorably personal. As Bridgman once put it, “I must describe things as they seem to me. I cannot get away from myself.” This is true in the sense that a scientist must behave as an individual. But if he analyzes the world around him, and if, as a result, he states facts or laws which make it possible for others to respond effectively without personal exposure to that world, then he produces something in which he himself is no longer involved. When many other scientists arrive at the same facts or laws, any personal contribution or personal participation is reduced to a minimum. What is felt or introspectively observed by those whose behavior is governed by scientific laws is very different from what is felt or introspectively observed as the result of exposure to the original contingencies.
It is absurd to suppose that science is what a scientist feels or introspectively observes. No one person can respond to more than a minuscule part of the contingencies prevailing in the world around him. If it is said instead that science is a kind of group consciousness, then we must look at how this is held together, and we shall find that what are communicated among scientists are statements of facts and rules and laws, not feelings. (The personal role of the scientist sometimes seems to be emphasized because of the apparent coldness of objective knowledge, as some religious works have continued to be transmitted by word of mouth, in spite of the invention of writing and printing, because the written form seems devoid of feeling. Spoken verbal behavior has a brief period of objectivity between speaker and listener, but it is very brief, and the joint presence of two parties gives oral communication an apparent warmth and depth which is missing from a book.)
A philosophy, a moral climate, a class consciousness, and a spirit of the times are other intellectual possessions which fall within the field of knowledge and account for some of the large patterns of behavior characteristic of a people, a class, a period, or a culture. A person is said to act or speak as he does because he is a pragmatist, a member of the proletariat, a practitioner of the work ethic, or a behaviorist. Terms of this sort classify behavior having identifiable consequences under given circumstances. Conflicts, such as that between empiricism and rationalism, are conflicts between contingencies, and if the history of ideas seems to show the development of human thought, it is not because, for example, romanticism leads to classicism and vice versa, but because the practices characteristic of one ism eventually produce conditions under which a different pattern of behavior is generated and for a time maintained.
In Five Stages of Greek Religion, Gilbert Murray described the change in the Roman Empire under Christianity as “a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism; a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and faith in normal human effort; a despair of patient inquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a conversion of the soul to God.” According to Peter Gay, “He christened it a ‘failure of nerve.’ ” “Christened” is possibly a pun, but the failure of nerve is a rather characteristic appeal to pseudophysiology, a coming down to earth after a sustained flight of mentalism. The evidence which justifies ascribing the behavior of Romans to asceticism, mysticism, pessimism, and so on should serve as well in making a few guesses about the prevailing contingencies. The ascetic is no less reinforced by delicious food, sex, and so on than others (indeed, his asceticism would scarcely be admired if he were), but his behavior is clearly under the control of other consequences—most of them probably the punitive sanctions of early Christianity. Pessimism and a loss of self-confidence, hope, and faith are, as we saw in Chapter 4, associated with a lack of strong positive reinforcement A despair of patient inquiry suggests defective schedules of reinforcement, and a cry for infallible revelation a search for rules in lieu of contingencies which might shape behavior directly. An indifference to the welfare of the state and a conversion of the soul to God suggest a shift from governmental to religious sanctions. How much more we should know if the prevailing contingencies had been described rather than the feelings and isms generated by them!