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is frequently much simpler than explaining it as the result of a complex process of
instrumental conditioning. But, at a minimum, Morgan was suggesting that we
should not trust psychological explanations of behavior unless we are convinced
that those explanations are indispensable—that is to say, unless we are convinced
that the behavior in question cannot be explained in nonpsychological terms. This
is not, I suspect, a methodological principle with which very many of the authors
cited in the preceding section will disagree.
The roots of the cognitive explosion in the study of nonlinguistic creatures lie in
an increasingly widespread sense that the existing tools for the nonpsychological
study of behavior have produced patently inadequate pictures of infant and animal
cognition and human evolution. Psychological explanations are appealed to be
cause they seem required to make sense of the complex behaviors that can be both
observed and experimentally demonstrated. And of course they are appealed to
very selectively. Few advocates of extending psychological explanation to the
realm of the nonlinguistic think that we should completely set aside our nonpsy
chological models of behavior. Few would deny, for example, that the cognitive
ethologist should be ready to characterize many types of behavior in terms of in-
nate releasing mechanisms—namely, fixed patterns of behavior that are more com
plex than reflexes, often involving a chained sequences of movements rather than a
simple reaction, and that yet seem to be instinctive (Tinbergen 1951). Nor is it
being proposed that the experimental study of animal behavior should completely
abandon explanations formulated in terms of processes of conditioning, whether
classical or instrumental.1 It seems clear that much of infant behavior is best un
derstood in terms of the sensorimotor schemas so carefully studied and docu
mented by Piaget. And many cognitive archeologists have devoted considerable
time to learning the techniques of stoneknapping and Neolithic tool construction
with a view to investigating just how cognitively sophisticated they are.
Psychological explanations of nonlinguistic behavior are hard won—and, of
course, only provisional. It may well be that a nonpsychological explanation will
emerge for behavior that we currently think requires a psychological explanation.
It is hard to see how any such possibility could be ruled out in principle. What
seems highly unlikely, however, is that satisfactory explanations in wholly nonpsy
chological terms will be found for all the behaviors for which psychological expla
nations are canvassed. It is difficult to imagine that researchers into animal behav
ior, infant development, and human evolution will return to the methodological
precepts of behaviorism. Even though they might, in any given situation and in
complete conformity with Morgan's canon, always investigate whether a nonpsy
chological explanation might be forthcoming, it is (I think) inconceivable that psy
chological explanations will be banished from the study of nonhuman creatures.
The shift to the cognitive has now cast too many roots and the independence of
thought from language is now too deeply engrained for that to be possible.
If Morgan's canon is to be applied effectively, however, we require both a
specification of the distinctive features of psychological explanation and some sort
of understanding in operational terms of how behavior requiring such explanation