In the Epilogue to this compact
book, Jerome Kagan, professor emeritus of psychology at Harvard University,
makes a confession: He did not fully
understand the “plot” of his book until he had finished writing it. I have to make a similar confession: If by a
“plot” is meant a single thesis which determines the book’s organization, or
which its various arguments undertake to support or illustrate, I doubt that
this book has a plot. It has what might be called themes, and I will state these below,
but it was apparently not written to advance these themes. As the author’s
confession suggests, they appear to have emerged in an attempt to survey the
experimental work of a lifetime, say something about the beliefs that guided
it, and contrast it with the work of others in the field.

One gathers that the effort must have
threatened to get out of hand. In the
Introduction, Professor Kagan observes that his book could easily have been a
thousand pages long, instead of a mere two hundred. Although his notes contain little but bibliographical data, they
alone total over thirty pages. A
complete and thorough discussion of the literature cited in them would have
made for a very large book indeed. It
would also have made for some very tough reading; for the subject is difficult
and the findings reported are contentious. 
Commendably, Professor Kagan chose to give us a more compendious
treatment, which must have required large cuts from earlier drafts. Unfortunately, the results of Kagan’s effort
at condensation are sometimes a little too condensed. The professor’s diction is always careful, and his syntax is
always firm, but his accounts are sometimes so brief as to be nearly cryptic.
As we shall see later, he is also prone to make obiter dicta that are not
motivated by the context or supported by the evidence.

Developed in its first three
chapters, the book’s most important theme is the need for a distinction between
what the author calls schemata and
what he calls semantic networks,
meaning in both cases hypothetical structures, or representations, in the
brain. Schemata are structures and
representations that result from sensory/motor contact with physical objects
and events —the mental pictures, as it were, that you get from seeing an
elephant, smelling a skunk, hearing a train pass by, tasting an onion, lifting
a board, and so on. Once established,
the resulting schemata become the patterns that you use to recognize, make
sense of, and react to, or deal with, similar objects and events. Sharing some of the features of what they
represent, schemata have verisimilitude; they enjoy the truth of
correspondence. By contrast, semantic
networks are interlocking systems of words and concepts having only an
artificial relation to what they represent. 
Some semantic forms may be tied to schemata, but others are not. They represent not discernible realities but
logical possibilities enjoying only the truth of coherence. The reader familiar with Immanuel Kant, whom
Kagan cites frequently, will recognize here the influence of his famous
distinction between empirical content
and logical form. There are also
vestiges of Plato in this talk of forms.

Kagan says that both kinds of
form are resident in the brain; they are, in fact, brain structures. Kagan emphatically denies, however, that the
representational, or mental, powers and traits of these structures can be
described in physiological terms. 
Psychology can make use of brain physiology. In fact, psychology cannot do without physiology; but it also
cannot be reduced to it. Cognitive
science must have its own distinctive language. Unfortunately, Kagan is not as forthcoming as might be desired
about what distinguishes this language from others. Grant that neuro-physiology
cannot displace psychology. One would
like to know precisely why not. Grant
that the cognitive scientist is not talking about the physiological features of
brain states. One would still like to
know what she is talking about. No doubt, we can safely suppose that the
defining feature of mental representations is their representational character,
but Kagan does not venture to tell us where that is to be found or in what it
consists.

What he does tell us, in Chapter
1, is that it is discrepancies between our schemata and our observations and,
in Chapter 2, that it is inconsistencies in our networks that often have the
most significance for us. We are sometimes motivated more by the unfamiliar
than by the familiar. Novelty, change,
surprise, puzzlement, incongruity, uncertainty, and the like can make a greater
difference than repetition, reinforcement, etc. Thus, small children sometimes show more interest in objects that
differ from those they encountered earlier, and adults sometimes show more
interest in facts that belie their preconceptions. Hence, we are told in
Chapter 3, a subject’s response to a new stimulus cannot be predicted without
knowledge of her history. All of this
seems correct, even indisputable, but a behaviorist will wonder what is gained
by phrasing it in terms of as yet unidentified brain structures. Grant that where there is learning there
must be alterations in the nervous system. 
Grant too that we now have the technology to detect brain responses to
various stimuli. One may still want to
know how postulating otherwise unspecified “schemata” explains an infant’s act
of focusing his attention on a new or different object—especially given Kagan’s
well-advised warnings about the uncertainties of interpreting behavior.

Chapter 4 on “Implications for
Development” begins by criticizing the hypothesis that infants have an innate
understanding of numbers and solid objects  
The chapter also includes a critique of Piaget’s ascriptions of
conceptual knowledge to infants, but Kagan wants us to know that he does not go
as far as Locke in supposing that the infant mind is a tabula rasa. He looks favorably, for example, on
Chomsky’s belief in an innate capacity for language, but he also wants us to
know that he does not think all human capacities are innate. In particular, he understands that adverse
circumstances and unfavorable environments can hinder the cognitive development
of those less fortunate than we are. In
short, he believes nothing that might constitute a threat to egalitarianism.

Chapters 1 through 4 having
focused on the experiments, Chapter 5 on Creativity and Personality casts a
wider net. It begins by speculating on
the reasons for the popularity of T.S. Elliot, Jane Austen, Frank McCourt and
other literary figures. According to
Kagan, we count these authors as creative because of the novelties in their
work. Kagan extends the same theory to
Sigmund Freud, who became popular when he overturned established views about
sexuality. Resistance to the theory of
continental drift in geology shows, however, that the novelty of an idea cannot
be too great. After making this
observation, Kagan treats us to broadsides against reinforcement theory and
sociobiology, which are said to have been popular, like Freud, for reasons
unrelated to their merits—which Kagan’s undocumented caricatures do nothing to
reveal. Chapter 5 ends with a critique
of personality inventories and with apt warnings about how a choice of
terminology can beg questions and mislead.

The author appears sometimes to
criticize other thinkers on the basis of rumor rather than reading. Thus, he quotes Wittgenstein as wrongly
denying that we have a concept of a game, when what Wittgenstein denied was
only that there is anything that all games have in common. Kagan also attributes to behaviorists belief
that animals are motivated by a desire for pleasure and to sociobiologists
belief that human beings are innately selfish, although real behaviorists don’t
talk about mental states, and sociobiology began with the theory that that
there is a genetic basis for altruism. The only explanation I can think of for
these lapses is that Kagan has not always read, or not always read carefully,
the objects of his criticism. Instead,
he has accepted second hand the caricatures of their critics.

That said, however, it must also
be said that Professor Kagan’s remarkably compact summary of his life’s work
and thought contains much learning and more than a little wisdom. Many cognitive scientists will want it in
their libraries.

© 2002 Max Hocutt

Max
Hocutt, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, The University of Alabama

Categories: Philosophical