Chapter 9: The Formation of New Movement Systems Under the Influence of Problems
Margaret Floy Washburn
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Is this chapter we shall attempt very briefly to sketch an account of the way in which movement systems become broken up and new ones constituted out of old ones under the influence of purposes. That is, we shall consider the processes of thinking. And it is not primarily with the conscious accompaniments of such breaking up of old systems and formation of new ones that we shall be concerned. These conscious accompaniments will be discussed in the chapter that follows. It is rather with the mechanism of thinking than with the way it feels to think, that we have just now to deal.
The logician says that an act of reasoning is a complex act of judgment, consisting in fact of three judgments, which he calls respectively the minor premise, the major premise, and the conclusion. Thus if I reason that the weather must be cold this morning because I see steam rising from the nostrils of horses, my process of thought may be resolved into the minor premise that steam is rising from the horses' nostrils, the major premise that whenever steam thus rises the weather is cold, and the conclusion that the weather is cold to-day. It would certainly appear that the process of judgment, by which we make the assertion that a thing is something else, that A is B, must be fundamental to processes of reasoning which can thus be reduced to series of judgments.
What, then, is the essential nature of a process of judgment? We are, as has just been said, not concerned just now with the question as to the nature of the conscious processes that accompany judgment. Marbe [1] wrote a monograph whose conclusion is that there are no conscious processes which
( 175) especially characterize judgment. Our present point of attack is this: how are movement systems related and constituted when, instead of applying the verbal formula 'A suggests B,' we use the formula, 'A is B'?
When A suggests B, either the two movement systems, A and B, form part of one and the same system, so that there exist associative dispositions between them as wholes, or some movement or smaller movement system contained in A is identical with a movement or smaller movement system contained in B. In the language of the older psychology, either A and B are linked by contiguity, as having been once experienced together, or they are linked by similarity, as having a part in common. The sight of one person may suggest another with whom he is frequently met, or it may suggest some one whom he has never seen but who has a likeness to him. We get the typical cases of 'A suggests B' in unguided revery, and it may be noted that when A has suggested B its influence generally stops. Gazing at a chandelier in a hotel lobby, I find myself thinking of Galileo; the chandelier has ceased to concern me and my attention has flown to ideas connected with the beginnings of modern science.
Now, one difference between 'A suggests B' and 'A is B' is that in the latter case A does not drop out of the account. It really was the slow swinging of the chandelier to and fro that suggested Galileo watching the cathedral lamp. The movement systems succeeded each other in approximately the following order: (1) systems concerned with the chandelier as a whole; (2) systems concerned with its slow movement to and fro; (3) systems concerned with Galileo and linked, as the chandelier was, with the 'slow swinging' systems. Now, did I, in the process of making this connection, say to myself, 'That chandelier is swinging'? Or did I pass at once on to Galileo without pausing to notice the connecting link? If I said, 'The chandelier is swinging,' I made a judgment: if not, the case was one of mere 'association of ideas.' The peculiar feature of making the judgment about the chandelier would be that the
(176) movement systems concerned with the chandelier as a whole would recur for an instant. The sequence of movement systems would in this case be: (1) systems concerned with the chandelier as a whole; (2) systems concerned with its slow movement to and fro; (3) a recurrence of the systems concerned with the chandelier as a whole ('the chandelier is swinging,' not merely 'swinging' as a phenomenon ready to detach itself from this particular context;. In a judgment, a part of the movement system concerned with the subject lasts over after the rest has ceased to act (the swinging of the chandelier is attended to after the rest of it has dropped from attention). This smaller system, a component part of the subject system, is the predicate system. Its emergence and persistence is followed by a recurrence of the subject system as a whole. Thus, the sequence is 'A—B—B-as-a-part-of-A.' And the subsequent associative dispositions will be determined not only by the predicate B, but by the predicate in connection with the subject A. If in the train of revery in which I passed from the chandelier to Galileo, I had really stopped to make the judgment 'The chandelier is swinging,' my thoughts for the next instant or so would have dwelt with the phenomenon of the swinging chandelier, and not merely with swinging objects in general. I might, for instance, have wondered if it were securely hung.
Note that I spoke just now of 'stopping' to make a judgment. It always involves delay to make a judgment, because it always involves going back on one's tracks, as it were, to revive the movement systems connected with the subject of the judgment after one has passed on to the predicate systems. For this reason, judgments are most commonly made under the influence of a problem which secures the persistent influence of the subject system. Thus for example if I were a builder or an electrician, with a permanent problem of investigating chandeliers and such objects, I should be much more likely, after noting the swinging, to recur to the chandelier instead of going on to Galileo. The judgments we make in the course of a day are usually determined by our problems: if one is a painter, on
(177) going into a room one makes judgments about the pictures on the walls; if one is an electrician, one makes judgments about its lighting arrangements. Thus Watt (148) could say that determination by an Aufgabe, a problem idea, is the characteristic feature of a judgment.
Now, a process of reasoning or inference is a judgment made indirectly. When for any reason I cannot put my head outside the window and feel for myself that the weather is cold, I have to arrive at the conclusion by inferring it from some such fact as that the horses are steaming. It is self-evident that if a simple judgment means delay, a process of reasoning means a longer delay; and it would be almost impossible for so long a delay to occur without the influence of a problem idea, and, in more complicated processes of reasoning, the activity attitude.
In reasoning, as in judgment, we start of course with the subject we are reasoning about. And always in reasoning, as often in judgment, we start also with the thing we want to prove about our subject; the predicate of our conclusion. I have an interest in knowing whether the weather is cold before I begin to reason about it: if "cold" had not entered my mind there would be no reasoning about it. Professor James. calling the predicate of the conclusion P, says, "Psychologically, as a rule, P overshadows the process from the start. We are seeking P, or something like F " (57, Volume II, page 338). This means, of course, that P, the predicate of the conclusion — coldness, in the example we have been using — acts together with the subject as a problem idea. We have, then, in operation two systems of tentative movements, those connected with the subject (the weather to-day), and those connected with the predicate (cold). The outcome of reasoning is the setting into action of movement systems that are connected with both of these systems; any other movement systems will be inhibited by the persistent recurrence of these two as the problem idea. We want to continue our thinking and planning on the basis of the ascertained fact that it is or is not a cold day.
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Now, surely, it may be supposed, if we have both the subject and predicate systems excited, if we are attending to the weather and the possibility of its being cold, these two systems must have old associative connections so that the processes of association can go on without any reasoning being necessary. We have experienced cold days before, and we know what can and what cannot be done on them. This is what is called proceeding on an hypothesis. But the difficulty is that these old associative dispositions do not really connect 'to-day's weather' with the predicate 'cold'; they only connect 'weather' with 'cold': If the movement systems connected with our true subject, 'to-lay's weather,' remain active as apart of the problem, the mere hypothesis that it is cold will be soon inhibited by a return to the full problem. Not until some member of the full movement system which constitutes 'to-day's weather,' a very complicated system involving much more than 'weather' in general, proves to have associative dispositions in common with 'cold,' will the delay and constant reference back to the problem cease. Until that time, while we may be saying to ourselves, "If it is cold, I'd better take a closed cab, and have more coal put on the furnace before I go," these meditations will constantly be interrupted by the recurring question, "But is it really cold?"
But what about fallacies, mistakes in reasoning? We cannot fully describe the process of correct reasoning without examining the ways in which it may go wrong. Reasoning or inference proceeds by the discovery of what the logicians call the middle term (the steaming breath of the horses, in our example), which has associative dispositions linking it with both the movement systems of the problem, the subject system and the predicate system. Now, does the correctness of the reasoning depend on the strength of these associative dispositions? Does it, in our example, for instance, depend on the number of cold days on which we have seen the horses' breath rising like steam in the air?