The Scientific Method by Henry M. Cowles

Author:Henry M. Cowles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

A version of Occam’s razor sharpened through psychological debates, “Morgan’s Canon” had an immediate effect on the field. Its success among a younger generation of practitioners effectively settled the dispute over how to study other minds in Morgan’s favor, even if he rolled back his opposition to comparative psychology’s scientific status in the meantime. Romanes’s reliance on anecdotes was increasingly dismissed as anthropomorphic, not least because he imported the interpretations of his informants along with their observations. In this regard, Morgan won.24

At first, applying the canon seemed to buttress Morgan’s hunch that animals, though often intelligent, could not reason—that is, there was no evidence they contemplated various means to a predefined end. Morgan illustrated his interpretation with a series of “experiments” he conducted at home in his garden with his fox terrier. In one test, the dog, named Tony, had to learn to carry an imbalanced stick in his mouth. Morgan described Tony’s behavior as “solving in a practical way a problem in mechanics.” When Tony learned to carry the stick, Morgan insisted that what might have looked like reasoning had in fact been “trial and error,” an adaptation that was not (here Morgan drew on evolutionary theorists) limited to creatures with minds, much less reason. The same thing happened when Tony learned to open the garden gate: if you just saw the end-result, you might think he had reasoned it out; but in fact, Morgan argued that a “relation between means and end did not appear to take form in his mind.” Watching Tony fail to escape the garden over and over, Morgan formulated his canon against the anthropomorphic tendency to find in the minds of animals the reasoning processes we pride ourselves on.25

The lesson for Morgan was, again, less about animal behavior and more about scientific behavior. “In zoological psychology,” he concluded, “we have got beyond the anecdotal stage, we have reached the stage of experimental investigation.” The point for Morgan was the same as for both Darwin and Romanes: what you did with the animals at hand. And while Darwin could be read as “observing” through the eyes of others, accumulating through letters and reports and eye-witness accounts, Morgan wanted something else. Whether or not he achieved it, his canon became a weapon in others’ pursuit of the same ideal. The irony of that eventual success was what it said about the scientists themselves. As Romanes himself had pointed out, not even humans cleared the bar where it was usually set: “A general idea of causality,” for example, “demands higher powers of abstract thought than are possessed by any animals, or even by the great majority of men.” So, what could you do? You lowered the bar or you raised it; either you granted reason to nonhuman animals or denied it to humans, too. And the strength of Morgan’s Canon, in the hands of those who came after him, was such that, within a decade, it was being applied not just to dogs and cats but to humans, too—with unflattering results.

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