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From Cell-Surface Receptors to Higher Learning: A Whole World of Experience

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Philosophy of Behavioral Biology

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science ((BSPS,volume 282))

Abstract

In the last decade it has become en vogue for cognitive comparative psychologists to study animal behavior in an ‘integrated’ fashion to account for both the ‘innate’ and the ‘acquired’. We will argue that these studies, instead of really integrating the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, rather cement this old dichotomy. They combine empty nativist interpretations of behavior systems with blatantly environmentalist explanations of learning. We identify the main culprit as the failure to take development seriously. While in some areas of biology interest in the relationship between behavior and development has surged through topics such as extragenetic inheritance, niche construction, and phenotypic plasticity, this has gone almost completely unnoticed in the study of animal behavior in comparative psychology, and is frequently ignored in ethology too. The main aims of this paper are to clarify the relationship between the concepts of learning, experience, and development, and to investigate whether and how all three concepts can be usefully deployed in the study of animal behavior. This will require the full integration of the psychological study of behavior into biology, and of the idea of learning into a wider concept of experience. We lay out how, in a systems view of development, learning may just appear as one among many processes in which experience influences behavior. We argue for a position in which development and learning are tightly assimilated to one another. Not learning and development, but learning as part of development. This new synthesis should help to overcome the age-old dualism between innate and acquired. It thereby opens up the possibility of developing scientifically more fruitful distinctions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Dutch zoologist Nikolaas Tinbergen was one of the founders of the study of comparative ethology, for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 with the Austrian Konrad Lorenz, with whom he shared a strong working relationship, and the German Karl von Frisch, who worked independently on the dance language of honey bees. Robert Aubrey Hinde is a British ornithologist, ethologist and psychologist whose doctoral studies at Oxford University coincided with Tinbergen’s arrival there after the Second World War.

  2. 2.

    Theodore Christian Schneirla was an American animal psychologist from the ’30s and ’40s who greatly influenced Daniel Lehrman and other developmental psychobiologists.

  3. 3.

    The “Skinner box”, also known as an “operant conditioning chamber” is an apparatus still in wide use that was designed by the psychologist B.F. Skinner. In the chamber, stimuli, punishments, and rewards can be mechanically delivered on a predetermined schedule to the animal subject in the chamber, whose behaviors, e.g., bar pressing (used for rats) or key pecking (used for pigeons), are mechanically recorded and carefully logged in their temporal relation to the delivery of associated stimuli and reinforcers.

  4. 4.

    http://www.douglasrecherche.qc.ca/news/1006

  5. 5.

    Ecological developmental biology concerns itself with the interactions between developing organisms and their environmental contexts in the real world (Gilbert and Epel 2009).

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Acknowledgements

This paper has been a long time developing. It stems from our interactions while KS was a postdoctoral research associate in the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University. Members of the Indiana University Biology Studies Research Group provided comments on an early version of this paper, and we are especially grateful to Lisa Lloyd for her written comments on that version. We would both like to thank Indiana University’s New Frontiers program for supporting the symposium “Reconciling Nature and Nurture in the Study of Behavior” organized by KS in 2007. We benefitted from a presentation of these ideas at the 2007 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, which included commentary by Luc Faucher. We are grateful to the editors Katie Plaisance and Thomas Reydon for their comments, as well as two anonymous referees for the press. We would also like to thank Ulrike Pompe for her careful reading of the penultimate draft. KS’s research is funded by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number 0878650). CA was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation while visiting the Ruhr University, Bochum, during the final preparation of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Karola Stotz

  2. History and Philosophy of Science, and Cognitive Science Program, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Colin Allen

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  1. Karola Stotz
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  2. Colin Allen
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Correspondence to Karola Stotz .

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  1. University of Hanover, Hanover, Germany

    Kathryn S. Plaisance

  2. , Institut für Philosophie, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Im Moore 21, Hannover, 30167, Germany

    Thomas A.C. Reydon

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Stotz, K., Allen, C. (2012). From Cell-Surface Receptors to Higher Learning: A Whole World of Experience. In: Plaisance, K., Reydon, T. (eds) Philosophy of Behavioral Biology. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 282. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1951-4_5

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