Comment on Roger Thomas' "Lloyd Morgan's Canon: A
History of Misrepresentation"
I too applaud Roger's analysis and very
much appreciate his accurate citation of my intro to the reprint of Morgan's Introduction
[cf., Wozniak (1993). Conwy Lloyd Morgan, mental evolution, and the Introduction to
Comparative Psychology. In C.L. Morgan, Introduction to Comparative Psychology
(pp. vii-xix).
For what its worth, here is a brief excerpt
from that introduction that addresses Morgan's actual views (from pp. ix-xi):
"Morgan's Canon is not a principle of
parsimony, it was not formulated as a guide to the description of behavior, it
does not dispense with mental faculties, it is not an appeal to the observable,
and it is not meant to be specific to animal psychology. Even worse, it is
consciously anthropomorphic and based squarely on the adequacy of the
psychologist's personal introspection.
"Within the broad context of Morgan's
approach to the study of mental evolution and his concern with limitations on
the psychologist's ability to know other minds, the famous Canon is best read
as an admonition to psychologists to know their own minds. For Morgan, mind is consciousness. Psychical
states are states of conscious experience.
Scientists who wish to understand the conscious experience of animals
can do so only by analogy to their own mental processes.
"The basis for this view is Morgan's
assumption that the hierarchical organization of human consciousness is the
outcome of an evolutionary process at least partially shared with lower
organisms. On this assumption, human
consciousness contains multiple levels of psychical organization. Certain of
these levels can provide a more or less adequate basis for analogical inference
concerning the nature of animal consciousness.
To prosecute such analogies successfully, however, the psychologist must
satisfy two requirements.
"The first requirement, which Morgan
did not formalize, might be called the principle of adequate
introspection. According to this
principle, psychologists must be sufficiently skilled in analytic introspection
that they can distinguish higher from lower psychical organizations within the
flow of their own conscious processes.
As Morgan puts it:
'It will thus be
seen that in studying other minds through their objective manifestations, it is
primarily essential that we should have, so far as is possible, a thorough and
accurate acquaintance with the only mind we can study at first-hand and
directly, namely our own. Without this, anything
like scientific interpretation is manifestly impossible...the first duty of a
psychologist is to attain accurate and systematic acquaintance with the working
of his own mind, as the cipher in terms of which all other minds must be
read...' (pp. 44-45).
"The second requirement, which Morgan
did formalize, is his famous Canon. In
the context of Morgan's overall argument, it is clear that the intent of the
Canon was to provide psychologists with a guide to the use of their own
introspections. Rephrased to emphasize
this function, it might just as easily have been stated as follows: 'In employing the results of personal
introspection to draw analogical inferences about the nature of animal mind,
the psychologist must strictly avoid interpreting an animal's actions in terms
of his or her own higher psychical processes (e.g., reasoning) when lower
processes (e.g., simple association of ideas) may be sufficient.'"