From Rachael Padman
Can someone please explain why behavioural scientists are so unwilling to contemplate the possibility that other animals’ thought processes are at root similar to our own – as evidenced by findings on their memory (1 November, p 32)? Surely the simplest assumption must be that they are similar. Yet there appears to be a desperate rearguard action to deny even the possibility.
I assume that this goes back to the “behaviourist” psychology promoted by B. F. Skinner – and this seems to me to take the form of the novelist Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. We should believe only that which animals tell us; and since they cannot talk we should believe nothing – nor, in the case of Alex, the African grey parrot whose exploits feature in one of your reviews (8 November, p 47), even if they can talk.
Following the “Bayesian” approach of estimating the prior probabilities of explanations (10 May, p 44) would lead us instead to assume that other animals are essentially like us, and then require evidence to the contrary. Is it that behaviourists do not accept that we are animals? That must make it very hard to do good science.
Dalham, Suffolk, UK
