Classical Conditioning and the "Law of Effect": Historical and Empirical Assessment

Abstract

It is convenient to begin with an historical generalization that the status and nature of adaptiveness (and related concepts such as purpose) comprised one of the most vexing problems of the mechanistic sciences of the 1800s and early 1900s, and thus helped set the path of their development in that period and in succeeding periods. Both casual and systematic observations compiled over centuries indicated that much inborn behavior was adaptive or beneficial to the organism as a whole, appropriate to the conditions in which it occurred; and, according to Franklin Fearing ( 1930), the beneficial character of reflexes had long been accepted as one of their principal characteristics. A brief and schematic account of early philosophical treatments of adaptiveness reveals the kind of conceptual oppositions in which would typically occur. In Descartes' hypothesis of the reflex, the occurrence of the reflex act could be explained merely by specifying the eliciting stimulus and describing the given anatomical structure of the organism, but he appealed to an institution or order of Nature representing God's wise and benevolent providence to account for the adaptiveness of the reflex (cf. Collins, 1971, p. 15 et passim; Pastore, 1971, pp. 28-33). Adaptiveness implicated a mind capable of foreseeing the beneficial conse quences of behavior, but in Descartes' account of animal behavior, the mind belonged not to the organism constrained by the eliciting stimulus to perform that action, but rather to the God who anticipated the consequences and guaranteed them in designing the organism. In Descartes, we find a conceptual opposition

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