On Science, Scientists, and Scientific Vocabulary: Commentary on Harrison’s “The Representative Animal”

Abstract

In "The Representative Animal," Mi-chael Harrison (this issue) argues that animal behavior is worthy of study in its own right and that such study will necessarily focus on the differences in the ways different species respond to particular features ofthe environment to which they have been adapted through natural selection. I am confident that no reader ofthisjournal would argue that such study is irrelevant or inadvisable. But in order to be explicit, nothing I say in commenting on Harrison's article should be construed as devaluing the work of scientists whose primary interest is in understanding the ways in which various species differ from one another behav-iorally. Although it is clear that Harrison believes it is possible to examine the behavior ofanimals of one species for what we may learn about the behavior ofother species, readers may come away with a bias against studying nonhuman animal behavior for the purpose of formulating behavioral principles that are generaliz-able across many species, including humans. I do not believe that such a conclusion would be justified, because it confuses a number ofissues pertaining to the nature of scientific activities. One reason that science is interesting is that there are so many different kinds of questions one can ask of nature. The work of particular scientists is usually confined, first, to a particular range of phenomena and, second, to a particular kind of question. Thus, Ivan Pavlov seems to have been attracted to the workings of the central nervous system as the phenomena of primary interest and the questions he asked were designed to de-Address correspondence to Sigrid S. Glenn, Center for Behavior Analysis, University ofNorth Tex-as, Denton, TX 76205. lineate a (nervous system) process that accounted for acquired reflexes. He probably was not particularly interested in dogs per se. Unlike Pavlov, John B. Watson seems to have been attracted to a range of phenomena roughly delineated by the term behavior of organisms. Also unlike Pav-lov, the questions he asked had to do with the ways in which behavior differed from individual to individual and species to species. Watson appears to have been content to accept and refine Pavlov's identification of conditioning as the mo-dus operandi underlying observed differences in human behavior. B. F. Skinner, like Watson and unlike Pavlov, focused his attention on the behavior of organisms; but unlike Watson and like Pavlov, Skinner's scientific focus was not on the particulars of behavior. Rather, he focused on identifying processes that account for similarities and differences in individual behavior that are not directly attributable to the history of an organism's species nor to Pavlovian conditioning. The purpose of the above examples is to illustrate two facts: First, scientists interested in the same general range ofphe-nomena, let us say the behavior of organisms , not only ask different questions of nature; they sometimes ask different kinds of questions as well. Second, scientists interested in different phenomena sometimes ask the same kinds of questions. Like Watson and Skinner, Harri-son's scientific interest centers on behav-ioral phenomena. Like Watson and unlike Skinner and Pavlov, the kinds of questions that interest Harrison are those that concern species-specific similarities in behavior and those that delineate differences in the ways different organisms and different species respond in similar situations. 225