Canadian psychologist Jack Martin has provided readers with a carefully constructed, clearly motivated memoir within six concise chapters. As befits the title, From Scientific Psychology to the Study of Persons, Martin charts the unravelling of his initial adherence to the “scientific” psychology of B.F. Skinner as personal self-doubt and intellectual interaction with colleagues gradually take hold. 

Martin, whilst construing his monograph as hovering between “a professional autobiography” and “an autobiographical memoir” (2; cf. 86), is clear about his motives for writing it. First of all, he has been “fueled by the common inclination of older people” such as himself to “revisit” his own life, especially “events and experiences” which have aroused his curiosity and puzzlement (2). Secondly, his career has enabled him “to understand and adopt different perspectives about, and ways of doing, psychology” to the point of straddling the binary divisions of psychological enquiries such as “quantitative-qualitative” and “experimental-case study” amongst others (3). Finally, he has been motivated by his “story of disenchantment [with] and reconsideration” of psychology as “conventional … science” and as “the study of persons and their lives” respectively (3). It is a story containing an explicit “message” to its readers that psychology, too, “must make such a shift if it is to fulfill its promise to help individuals and communities to flourish” (3).

Had the memoir become “less personal and more professional” (72), perhaps, as passingly implied (86), a professional recounting of his career might have merely exemplified the typical steps taken by those seeking advancement in North American academic institutions of his day. Nor does Martin fully plunge into socio-political polemics about tertiary education as does his British contemporary Stefan Collini (notably in the 2012 What Are Universities For? and the 2017 Speaking of Universities). Nonetheless, his penultimate chapter does bemoan pedagogic trends in primary and secondary education. These trends have “promoted a solipsistic individualism” and “narcissistic … entitlement” such that students, “presented a narrowly reductive and simplified vision of human life as a mostly individual struggle,” begin adopting competitive “corporate, neoliberal values” and regarding “their own emotional reactions as pointing to what was true” (70-71). 

In what follows, the first part of this short review will examine Martin’s shift from Skinner when attempting to apply Verbal Behavior, the latter’s 1957 magnum opus, to actual communicative interactions amongst small groups (18ff.). In the second part, we shall investigate his handling of other past rather than contemporaneous theorists, particularly G.H. Mead and L.S. Vygotsky, who are repeatedly declared to be conducive to Martin’s study of persons. This, in turn, will allow us to conclude by questioning the demands Martin’s largely intellectual memoir makes upon his potential readership.

I

Whilst conceding his doctoral research was “not experimental” in that it was not conducted in a laboratory, Martin took its focus upon small seminar and therapeutic groups to be “the first empirical test” of Skinner’s “taxonomy of, and assertions about, human verbal behavior” (18). In brief, the consistencies and frequencies of different kinds of verbal and gestural interactions in support of Skinner were “considered to indicate antecedent stimuli … and consequential reinforcements … for the occurrence of the target behavior” (18; cf. 8). Yet Martin sensed that he “overstating” what the computed results explained: people’s rich verbal repertoires could not always be “parsed” into “patterns of behavioral stimuli, responses, and reinforcements” (19). Perhaps, as too many of us have, Martin had intuitively stumbled upon Paul Meehl’s methodological challenge (in the June 1967 issue of Philosophy of Science) that “experimental improvement,” whether in “design, instrumentation, or numerical mass of data,” usually “results in a weaker corroboration” of psychological by contrast with physical theories because “it has now been required to survive a more lenient test” (pp. 103-104).

Further re-examination of his data well after Martin’s graduation was affected by regarding only ten antecedent and subsequent communicative acts as significant and by adding non-verbal attentive listening and eye contact to his verbal categories. Both, he realized, biased his findings and left alternatives untouched:

Whether or not contingencies of reinforcement were better explanations of such recurrent patterns of verbal interactivity than rules and conventions of language use and social etiquette was a question … not … entertained. (20)

Furthermore, Martin sensed that what in fact was said was 

not solely the function of what was going on in the immediacy of the small groups I studied. Much … went well beyond, and seemed very unlikely to be entirely controlled by, the immediate and concrete features of seminar or therapeutic situations. (20)

None of these concerns, he regretfully adds, were explicitly raised by his dissertation.

Nowadays, Martin acknowledges that efforts at capturing the “meaningfulness and intentionality” underpinning people’s interactions need to attend to “the historical, socioculturally established normativity of human interaction” that reach beyond “Skinner’s focus on immediately observable here-and-now exchanges” (21). Some readers might wonder whether Martin is unwittingly ambiguous here. Is the meaningful to be captured as being important or valuable (“Titiana’s encounter with Thierry was the most meaningful of her late adolescence”) or as signifying meaning or sense (“Thierry was intrigued that the utterance ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ was grammatical yet not meaningful”)? Is the intentional to be captured as being deliberate or purposeful (“Titiana’s exaggerated wink was intentional”) or as discriminating intransitive from transitive uses of verbal expressions (“Thierry’s fear was palpable” as distinct from “Thierry’s fear of spiders was palpable”)? 

That said, Martin then expands the efforts needed in terms of the “theoretical grounding … required”:

one that better captures the acquisition and use of human communicative behavior in the relevant historical, sociocultural, and ontogenetic trajectories and contexts associated with the emergence of relevant norms, conventions, rules, and everyday practices of language use (21);

a theoretical grounding missing from Skinner on human verbal behaviour, but explicitly “located” in unidentified theoretical writings of Vygotsky (21). Vygotsky’s direction, at the time, came to be understood as “how and why …  human thought and imagination could distance human actors from the constraints of their immediate situations and allow them partially to self-determine their actions” (23).

Where else does Martin substantively develop the above critique of Skinner? His introductory chapter suggests that his final retrospective one examines what is “at fault” with the bulk of psychology’s empirical research which included ways of “ignoring or reducing the personhood of research participants” (10). There, we find an initial attraction to “the procedural replicability of Skinner’s operant conditioning methods” (95). This, when transferred to behavioural self-control, “could be harnessed in the broader interests of personal development and used eclectically … to understand and help change” oneself and others “in ways we desired” (95). Martin’s penultimate chapter illustrates this approach when summarizing his 2017 comparative essay on Skinner and Carl Rogers:

I linked prototypic and often repeated interpersonal interactions and social position exchanges experienced by each of these individuals to the theoretical frameworks and methodological practices they employed in their psychological inquiries and theories. (77)

Later, Martin knowingly adds, writing his memoir “is part of that ongoing process” (95). Yet what we do not find, despite his awareness of the 1970 Kenneth MacCorquodale defence of Verbal Behavior (21), is the kind of continuing reassessment and re-deployment of Skinner’s magnum opus. An example that comes to mind is the set of contributions in the domain of children’s speech development and the treatment of its disorders published in the January 2010 issue of The Journal of Speech & Language Pathology – Applied Behavior Analysis.

II

Although contemporary theorists ranging from Ian Hacking and Romano Harré to Charles Taylor and Michael Tomasello are repeatedly named as intellectual influences, little detailed attention is given to the actual historical development and scope of positioning theory by Harré and colleagues since the ‘nineties to which Martin finally becomes committed (see, e.g., 75ff.). Nonetheless, Martin does refer to past theorists upon which positioning theory draws. Two notable examples are George Mead and Lev Vygotsky. The influence of both men, as largely filtered through Harré, is presupposed in a “preliminary framing” of Martin’s thinking in the early ‘nineties as it centred upon “human development and personhood,” removing “any vestiges of cognitive mentalism” in the process (61). Subsequently, whilst summarizing his collaborations with former postgraduate students since the end of the ‘nineties, Martin categorizes the influence of Mead as “pragmatic, functionalist psychology and philosophy” and that of Vygotsky as “sociocultural, developmental psychology” (66). That Mead, about whom Martin has written extensively, was also not classed as probing socio-developmental psychology or that Vygotsky was not classed as probing interacting psychological functions might lead some readers to question what exactly is meant by Martin’s two categories.

Later, we find Martin alluding to the importance of Mead in connection with the “social development of persons” (66) which followed, when charting his own work in “positioning analysis,” the distinction in “Mead (1934)” between “particular” and “generalized” others (76; cf. 1934, pp. 154ff.). Before then, as Martin exhausted the usefulness of cognitive psychology “in combating the failures of behaviorism to take human language, agency, and reasoning seriously” (54), Vygotsky is mentioned. Only in passing here do we glean that he had studied “earlier writings by Vygotsky (1986)” (54). These writings are elsewhere described as “a full and well-translated version of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, which had finally become available in a proper English translation (by Alex Kozulin in 1986)” (43)—Vygotsky’s only work figuring but once in Martin’s chapter bibliographies (58).

The texts of both theorists are not without peculiarities. To begin with “Mead (1934),” Mind, Self, and Society refers directly to a hybrid compilation of student notes of lectures on social psychology given in 1927 and 1930 further “systematized” by the volume’s editor, C.W. Morris (1934, p. v). Moreover, Morris states that, after the “very full” transcribed notes of 1927, although “faithful a record,” were “rearranged, pruned of superfluous repetitions, and stylistically corrected”, he nevertheless inserted “portions” of the 1930 notes along with “material from other courses” given by Mead into the text and its footnotes (1934, p. vi). Curiously, Martin omits any discussion of Morris’ more substantive distortions of the text documented in the 2015 annotated edition of Mind, Self, and Society by Daniel Huebner and Hans Jonas. 

Turning to “Vygotsky (1986),” for a North American generation reared on the heavily redacted 1962 translation of Vygotsky by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar, Kozulin’s 1986 revision of it may have seemed almost intoxicating. At best, it enlarges the 1962 truncated version to approximately seven-tenths of the Russian, be it the posthumously published volume edited by V.N. Kolbanovskii in 1934, Thinking and Speech: A Psychological Investigation (to translate its title more accurately), or its re-editing by A.N. Leont’ev and A.R. Luria in 1956. Both versions retained earlier essays (“chapters”) such as the third and fourth first published in 1929 which might qualify as the “earlier writings” to which Martin refers. Nor, as already implied, is Kozulin’s translation of the 1934 version in Martin’s terms a “full” one. However, the point at issue here is not to assemble an ad hominem commentary, but to question the kind of demands Martin’s largely intellectual memoir makes upon his potential readership.

The absence of a single definitive text by Mead himself that unproblematically reflects Mead’s extemporary lectures—”suggestive, penetrating, incomplete, conversational in tone” according to Morris (1934, p. vii)—seems obvious enough. With that absence also applying mutatis mutandis to Vygotsky’s characteristically spiralling mode of writing and wrestling with ideas, any belief that somehow a neutral reading of Thinking and Speech is attainable seems forlorn if not fanciful. Readers need to be reading from multiple points of view. Take, for example, Kozulin’s noticeably abbreviated second section of the sixth “chapter” exploring “conscious awareness” (1986, pp. 162ff.) as befits Vygotsky’s pursuit of “a new theory of consciousness” (1986, p. lxi). Now, let us ask how practised readers can read it. At a rudimentary level, readers come to the translated text as a piece of organized writing, one conventionally conveyed by content page and index, editor’s and/or translator’s introduction, the paginated chapter and its sections, end- or footnotes and bibliography. Readers can also read the second section by attending to its unfolding content, latching, for instance, onto its emerging argument in relation to “spontaneous” concepts derived ad hoc from experience and its “scientific” concepts of the abstract, hierarchical, and systemic kind. That is, they can read the text as furnishing an overarching argument open to appraisal. Alternatively, readers can read this section by focusing upon its engagement with specific claims previously made, for example, by Édouard Claparède and Jean Piaget, even if Vygotsky rejects them or subsumes them. In other words, readers can shift into reading the text diachronically or in terms of Vygotsky’s relationship to his named intellectual predecessors. Again, readers can read this section by comparing it, for instance, to how Vygotsky in the tenth chapter of his 1931 correspondence course on adolescent paedology dealt with the formation of concepts. That is to say, readers can approach the text not simply historically but also intertextually. 

What appears to be lacking in From Scientific Psychology to the Study of Persons is what is involved when readers are being encouraged to read a text by Vygotsky or by Mead in order to grapple with texts and thinkers of more immediate moment. Certainly, the memoir clearly informs us about the current preoccupations of its author and many of the current texts of value uppermost in his mind. Yet what seems to be missing is a contextually enriched demonstration—a “thick description” to use Gilbert Ryle’s 1968 coinage—of his shaping frame of reference drawn from positioning theory and its precise germination in Thinking and Speech as much as in Mind, Self, and Society. Perhaps, when next reprinted, Martin’s memoir might address this perceived gap for future readers.

—————————————————————-

R.A. Goodrich is affiliated with the A.R.C. Centre for the History of Emotions (University of Melbourne) and the A.D.I. Philosophy & History of Ideas Research Group (Deakin University), co-edited the online refereed arts journal Double Dialogues since 2002, and co-ordinates with Maryrose Hall a longitudinal project investigating linguistic, cognitive, and behavioural development of higher-functioning children within the autistic spectrum and related disorders.