example, in his 1969 Presidential Address before the American Psychological. Association, George Miller proposed what became a frequently cited solu- tion.
Stam, H.J. (1990). What distinguishes lay persons' psychological explanations from those of psychologists? In W .J. Baker, M.E. Hyland, R . van Hezewijk & S. Terwee (Eds.), Recent trends in theoretical psychology: Vo lume II (pp. 97106). New York : Springer-Ve rlag.
WHAT DISTINGUISHES LAY PERSONS' PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS FROM THOSE OF PSYCHOLOGISTS? Henderikus J. Stam SUMMARY: An examination of the impact of psychology on culture leads to the not-so-startling conclusion that psychological explanations have fared badly when compared to ordinary language_explanations of psychological events. I review a number of arguments proffered by psychologists that attempt to account for this failure of scientific discourse to change people's self understandings. Then I address the nature of psychological explanations and contrast these to lay explanations of human action and argue that psychology must retain the mental as its elemental data. In doing so, however, we are still faced with the need for constructing a framework within which to couch psychological explanations. Here I argue that psychological explanations for human action cannot be reductive and must acknowledge that mental events are embedded in the discursive practices of a human community that shares linguistic and cultural practices. Despite the quantity of psychological literature produced in recent years, psychology has had little impact on lay persons' explanations of their own actions (Thorngate, 1988; Thorngate & Plouffe, 1987). Ordinary language explanations, or, if you will, common sense explanations are preferred almost exclusively to professional psychological ones. In addition, many people turn to a vast self-help literature when their problems are no longer amenable to explanation via the tools of ordinary language. This literature is deliberately non-scientific and premised on vague·and often meaningless understandings of persons. Nevertheless, one could argue that the majority of the 100,000 (plus) psychologists working in North America alone, are actually professional psycho,logists who see clients in one capacity or another. Through this contact, at least, psychological concepts must seep into public usage. Unfortunately, this vast coterie of professional psychologists is a rather unususal lot. If the research on the psychotherapeutic process has told us anything, it is that in order for the psychologist to be intelligible toner client she must at the very least use constructs and language understandable t(> her clients. Furthermore, most practicing psychologists describe themsetves as 'eclectic', that is, they use whatever they feel is necessary for the situation and problem at hand without allegiance to any particular school or method, scientific or otherwise (Garfield & Kurtz, 1976). Not a reliable way to pass on a science (Slife, 1987). Perhaps the most obvious sign of the difficulty psychology has in addressing human action occurs when psychologists speak amongst themselves. If
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you have ever listened to a group of psychologists discuss the actions of family members, colleagues, or better yet, the performance of a department head or dean, you will rapidly discover how quickly their conceptual tools are left behind in the laboratory. Their accounts are intelligible only as lay explanations and have little in common with the professional pronouncements of the psychologists themselves. But is this argument nothing but a straw pers(')n? After all, at least 99% of the world h'as probably never h.eard of Wittgenstein, yet one would be hard put to declare his work a failure. Acceptance should, therefore, not be a criterion of the utility of a new science, or any academic enterprise for that matter. This holds especially, one might argue, for public acceptance. The public is notoriously fickle and uninterested in the vagar~es of academic debate. A second argument often proffered by psychologists themselves sometimes follows these lines: Of course we have trouble explaining such things as the creation of Hamlet or the Moonlight Sonata, but who wouldn't? Aren't these examples, after all, of the highest achievements of culture? Or alternatively, some pscyhologists argue, we have had an impact on society. Most educated people immediately associate reinforcement with Skinner and the unconscious with Freud. Other less glamorous concepts that have found their way into ordinary language include such notions as identity crisis, extraversion a11d introversion, 1)'pe A behavior, and so on. Allow me to address these points in turn and then move to the major arguments of this paper. In short I don't believe they are sound. The first argument is reasonable in so far as making academic endeavors conditional on acceptance may lead one to ignore new or interesting or original work that is not clearly understood or appreciated in its formative stages. Nevertheless, acceptance is already part of our internal criteria for academic success certainly that is why we have peer review for journals. More telling, however, are the many claims made by psychologists themselves for the applicability of their theories and research. Psychologists claim expertise in solving personal problems, family problems, educational problems, neuropsychological problems. Psychologists claim an ability to assess a wide variety of human problems and dispositions for a wide variety of situations including personnel selection, educational placement, neurological lesions, and so on. Psychologists have tried their hand at treating neuroses, psychoses, schizophrenia, somatoform disorders, child abuse, wife abuse, drug abuse, sexual dysfunction, familial dysfunction, to name but a very few. Thus, it is not for lack of trying that psychological explanations have not fared well with the public. The second argument alternately points to the difficulty of explaining the best that culture has to offer or to the argument that psychological concepts are already well embedded in this culture. I contend that it is not only Hamlet
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or Beethoven that are difficult to explain by mainstream psychology but that it is equally difficult to find explanations for the plays produced by amateur theater groups and piano recitals produced by children. Or, to go further, most people would find little use in psychology to help them explain those nagging, ordinary problems of daily life such as the sort one encounters in raising children, living with significant others, developing friendships, working with colleagues, and so on. There is a rich cultural lore to draw on for such occasions and psychology seems remote and abstract by comparison. And a quick perusal of psychological terms that have entered the larger culture indicates that once they leave the professional domain their meanings quickly become altered and fluid . The term 'unconscious', for example, can refer to a variety of actions or experiences, depending on where, when and by whom it is uttered. Psychologists have recognized their lack of impact from time to time. The problem is typically conceptualized as a problem of translation. For example, in his 1969 Presidential Address before the American Psychological Association, George Miller proposed what became a frequently cited solution. He argued that the world was "in serious need of many more psychological technologists who can apply our science to the personal and social problems of the general public". Furthermore, argued Miller, ''when the ideas are made sufficiently concrete and explicit, the scientific foundations of psychology can be grasped by sixth-grade children." But Miller's paper is probably most remembered for its slogan that psychologists should "give psychology away." By this he meant that, Psychological facts should be passed out freely to all who need and can use them. And from successful applications of psychological principles the public may gain a better appreciation for the power of the new conception of [human beings] that is emerging from our science . ... Our responsibility is less to assume the role of experts and try to apply psychology ourselves than . to give it away to the people who really need it - and that includes everyone. The practice of valid psychology by non psychologists will inevitably change people's conception of themselves and what they can do. When we have accomplished that, we will really have caused a psychological revolution (Miller, 19~9).
Miller was hardly alone in his call for radical applications of scientific psychology. Among others, Skinner's (1986, 1987) more recent writings have returned to the persistent theme that his brand of behaviorism could do a great deal for education, child rearing, workers' alienation,. and ~orld peace to name but some applications. The failure of this strategy js relatively obvious if we recall that the psychological literature and the number of psychologists in the world has more than doubled since Miller's pronouncements were made, and the impact of psychologists' explanations remains a ..-ague promise at its best. Tu paraphrase Guthrie's famou s criticism of Tolman's cognitive theory, the psychologist remains buried in thought at the hoice point. Should we ignore the inability to make the science of psycho!-
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ogy relevant, and forge ahead with the oft stated hope that psychology is a young science and maturity is far off, or do we heed the warning signals that are apparent but inconclusive, and reconstruct the discipline? These warning signals, I would argue, have been close at hand for some time. What I will call the contextual critique of psychology, for Jack of a better global term, is informed by recent developments in the philosophy of science, sociology of knowledge as well as other interdisciplinary developments. I will not try to summarize· the implications of these positions for psychology, but instead want to return to the major problem of this paper where elements of the contextual critique will gradually be implicated. What is the nature of psychologists' explanations? Tu attempt an answer to this I will rely on two recent works for my inspiration, one by Margolis (1984) and the other by Robinson (1985), although I must take final responsibility for what follows . (See Thorngate & Plouffe, 1987, for a slightly different treatment of this problem.) The simple answer to the .question of the nature of psychological explanations is that there is no single explanatory convention within the discipline of psychology. Assume a simple 'normal', psychological event: Aunt Sally is writing a letter to Uncle John. Now we can apply a variety of explanations to this event: She is writing because of her personality; because she was motivated; because she is intelligent enough for the task; and so on. But such explanations are circular and add nothing to our understanding of the event. They are prerequisite to letter writing perhaps but do not say much more (cf. Robinson, 1985). A different sort of explanation is created when we say she is writing because of an unconscious desire or because letter writing was a highly valued activity in her childhood. But unconscious motives cannot be incorporated into a conscious action sequence of the sort described here unless we deny Aunt Sally the status of agency. So far we do not want to do this given that we see nothing abnormal about Aunt Sally's act. That letter writing was valued in her childhood might be an interesting comment but does not account for Aunt Sally's writing this Jetter at this time. Thus far, any of these explanations might provide a context, or in Robinson's words, may be taken as permissive rather than d'eterminative. But undaunted, we carry on. Consider the following statements. Aunty Sally is writing_ Uncle John: 1) because of her reinforcement history 2) because she is functionally equivalent to a writing machine 3) because she has a cognitive letter-writing schema 4) because of conditions in Broca's area in the left hemisphere of her brain 5) because Uncle John was two months in arrears in his child support payments.
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You will no doubt recognize an important difference in these statements, especially in the juxtaposition of the first four to the last. The first four are varieties of explanation common to psychology, the last is one of many possible statements one might .use in a conversation about your Aunt Sally with, say, another relative. l.
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There are several species of arguments that have been mustered for and against the first four explanations. What I should like to argue is that they give an incomplete accounting of our Aunt Sally's act. For example,- we could counter the claim that Aunt Sally is writing because of her reinforcement history by resorting to a Chomsky-like (Chomsky, 1959) proposal that, for any natural language, the processes of sentence formation have no finite limit whereas the reinforcement of operants requires some finite state process. Hence a Skinnerian account of letter writing must fail. Or we might simply agree with Nelson (1969) that internal states are not logically dispensable because dispositions and internal states are not extensionally equivalent. Therefore, this account also fails if only as an explanation for the unique event. We might want to hedge our bets that some characterization of the term reinforcement (even if we only use it synonymously with encouragement) could account for Aunt Sally's writing but not for her writing this precise letter (Robinson, 1985). Our second explanation stated that Aunt Sally was like a writing machine. Assume now that we have some adequate conception of a very sophisticated writing machine that produced letters of the sort Aunt Sally is writing given appropriate inputs. Such a functional account has a long and venerable history in the social sciences and philosophy. Functional accounts, however, are largely incomplete explanations insofar as implicit in most functional accounts is the search for a physical realization of those functions . Fodor (1968) was perhaps most explicit about this in his distinction between 'first phase' and 'second phase' psychological explanations. The first phase refers to finding explanations that determine the functional character of the states and processes involved in the etiology of behavior. The second phase however "ha~ to do with the specification of those biochemical systems that do, in fact, exhibit the functional characteristics enumerated by phase-one theories" (p. 109). The great majority of functional explanations are of the first sort, or "weakly equivalent" in Fodor's terms. There may be many machines that emulate some aspect of human b,ehavior or functional abilities of other systems without ever executing the same manoeuvets in their emulation. We might then say that these machines are not psychologically endowed and provide a partial explanation at best. Functionalism, in psychology at least, points to the possibility of a reductive explanation at the cost of ignoring the cultural setting within which human beings exist. If, as I shall argue later, an adequate human psychology requires social and historical processes for a complete accounting, then any infrapsychological functional explanation is partial at best.
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A similar argument can be mustered against the cognitive letter-writing schema explanation. There are several issues here that I will briefly describe but I will not claim to do justice to them. First, it is not clear how the term schema is to be understood in modern psychology. It frequently passes for no more than a kind of functional explanation of the sort I have just described. On the other hand, one might conceive of a cognitive schema along the lines of one of the varieties of cognitivism currently available. Unfortunately, there are more than a few of these. Some are philosophical in origin, such as Factor's or Dennett's,.others more psychological, such as those of Newell or Piaget, and others are concerned primarily with artificial intelligence (AI). The latter, in particular, have lead· to a great deal of misunderstanding if only because we often fail to separate the many practical and technological achievements of AI with the thesis that artificial intelligence can, in principle, account for human psychological processes. In Robinson's words (1985, p. 103), ''we can agree that the tape recorder is a wonderful device"without regarding it as a contribution to our knowledge of human memory." But whether we espouse, say, a molar, homuncular, or nativist version of cognitivism, I concur with Margolis (1984, p. 85) that "there are no plausible or compelling grounds for postulating .a psychologically internalized system capable of generating all the cognitively pertinent behavior of human agents." Whether functionalist or explicitly physicalist, cognitive or representational theories have failed as accounts of agency and intentionality. I also want to argue against the explanation of Aunt Sally's letter writing as a result of a condition of her brain. Various versions of such attempts at elimination of the mental are possible both within and without psycholo'gy. This is, of course, also reminiscent of John Watson's version of behaviorism, which was to replace all talk of psychological events with concepts built up out of reflexes and stimulus response units (Watson, 1925). Suffice it to say that whatever brain talk we use to replace the mental must take on the original reporting role of the mental if we are to make sense of Aunt Sally's action. '· Eliminating the mental leaves us without the possibility of discussing a range of phenomena which have been characterized as possessing at least some of these properties; immateriality, abstractness, indubitability, privileged access, intentionality, phenomenal properties, agency, introspectability, and privacy (Margolis, 1984). Mental events in one fo~m or another have seemingly » survived the many attempts at elimination apd remain the primary data of psychology. Despite the failure to exhibit uniform properties, mental life cannot be eliminated or replaced in favor of more homogeneous problems in biology or computer science. Robinson (1985, p. 89) makes perhaps the strongest claim in this regard when he argues that ''whether or not psychology can 'get along just as well' without reference to inner life, consciousness, private mental states, etc., is a question of strategy, not ontology, and the force of the claim has little behind it".
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Having argued that psychology must retain mental life as its elemental m., we have not solved the problem of what a reasonable psychological ~ unt might look like. Perhaps we can work our way back to this issue by 5-'ting first what the distinction is between the explanations we have thus far .:;::;:;nsidered and the explanation proposed as a possible ordinary language ~lanation in our example, the one which stated simply that Aunt Sally wrote r-..cle John because he was two months in arrears in his child support !i! "'~;ments. Letter writing in this instance is immediately intelligible to ~hologist and non-psychologist alike. First, such an explanation charac~es Aunt Sally as an active agent. The action in this case is intelligible t iecause it does not consist merely of discrete responses or behaviors but is .. EID.Ore akin to a performance. Furthermore, the entire sequence implies inten'¥L llfunality, in Brentano's sense of the term. ~
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There is a second distinguishing element to this and most ordinary ·"nguage explanations of motivated action, namely its teleological quality. Al.I nt Sally's action is purposeful or goal-directed. Such a quality is very much missing from our psychological accounts of )ler act. The reason for this is :z:a:ther obvious, perhaps, to the experimental psychologist. Ordinary language ;xplanations are frequently circular. But ~orse, they are incorrigible. We aay determine from the contents of the letter whether it is in fact the case that Aunt Sally is writing Uncle John about support payments. But even in the presen~ of evidence to the contrary, if Aunt Sally claims that the symbols ;;r.Titten on the page are a request for the monies owing then we cannot say she is provably wrong. We may think her claim odd or unusual for any number of .reasons, but we cannot say 'you did not intend this'. But even if 'normal' ronditions do not prevail, and Aunt Sally has just now been given a large dose of phenothiazines (antipsychotics) or is suffering from a slow growing neoplasm that is destroying brain tissue, we Inay still not give the reason for Aunt Sally's letter as being other than what she states. We may argue about the causes in this case, but (contra Davidson) not the reasons. That is, Aunt Sally's action is connected to a reason or an intelligible attempt to write Uncle John. Her ing~stion of drugs or her tumor may be the cause of her psychological state, this much we must allow on most accounts of the biological sciences. Nevertheless, the reasons for which she is writing Uncle John while she is in this state are not the direct result (cause) of her bodily condition. The implications of this account may be ¥iewed .as a, species of the bifurcation thesis which argues that in general, the natural ans! human sciences are systematically different on methodological grounds. Bifurcation is frequently implicit within psychology itself; there are·psychological processes explicable solely in terms that include the biological and exclude or at least minimize cultural variables. For example, infants can discriminate nearly all of the phonetic contrasts of human speech, even if they lose this ability in later life (Eimas, 1975). Thus all biologically normal infants can discriminate between the sounds of r and /, although Japanese adults cannot. Such
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discrimination in infants is purposeful in some sense, but one might argue that it does not require an agent for discrimination to occur. On the other hand, fluent adult native speakers of the Japanese language are intending agents, even if they cannot now discriminate between rand l. The teleological understanding of human action is intimately tied to people's self-understandings of their own actions. Such an approach will not readily lead us to scientific explanations of the sort exemplified by the psychological explanations we have already discussed. Hence we have now arrived at a point of'seemingly major incompatibility between psychologists' explanations and lay psychological explanations of even a relatively simple action. But this incompatibility is perhaps Jess real than we might admit once we examine the nature of some research in social, personality, clinical, and developmental psychology. Tuke a Jong line of hypnosis research, for example, that has argued that hypnosis and hypnotic phenomena are best accounted for by reference to concepts taken from social and cognitive psychology. This research has argued that we do not need to explain hypnotic acts as the result of a trance, a special state of consciousness or some other specialized, esoteric explanation. The concepts used to explain hypnosis in this case are categories of explanation that are explicitly goal-directed and emphasize the relational nature of hypnotic responding (e.g., Sarbin & Coe, 1972). The research results in this case are not causal, only rational. They require that the readers of such results be participants in the culture and that they apply criteria of plausibility and reasonableness to the results (Robinson, 1985): It is difficult to see how such explanations, which are preminently teleologic, can ever be construed as causal. Unfortunately, in this research area and most others, psychologists themselves continue to couch such explanations in causal terminology. The naive or neophyte reader who approaches such literatures as exist in social or clinical psychology is readily confused by seemingly rational descriptions couched in a scientistic language. It may be then that a lay persons's psychological explanation and a psychologist's explanation are perhaps not always that clearly distinguishable. Each relies on some more or less rational characterization of mental life. If we agree however that it is implausible to postulate a psychologically internalized system that is capable of generating all the psychologi~l events of human agents, we need a better account of what we mean by the mental: Such an account would, at the least, acknowledge that mental events themselves are embedded in the discursive practices of a human community that shares linguistic and cultural practices. On Margolis' account, those practices in turn cannot be accounted for or described solely in terms of the infrapsychological powers of the members of such a community. Hence one reason that psychology is more appropriately a human science derives from the major properties of language, namely, that language
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appears to be wholly unique; "essential to the actual aptitudes of human beings, irreducible to physical processes ... real only as embedded in the practices of a historical society, ... incapable of being formulated as a closed system of rules, subject always to the need for improvisational interpretation" and so on (Margolis, 1984, p. 90). According to Ricoeur (1981), all distinctly human aptitudes can be considered "lingual". Thus aptitudes as diverse as writing a letter to Uncle John, playing cards and building airplanes all presuppose linguistic ability. The notion of 'text' as developed by writers such as Ricoeur, Barthes and others is a direct consequence of this idea. In general it refers to the treatJnent of objects or realities as discourse (cf. Stam, 1987). It is my contention that if psychology were to give up its rigid adherence to falsely placed hopes of reductive explanations for a broader view of itself as
a human, lingual endeavor we could develop psychological explanations that take lay accounts seriously, rather than setting the two in continual opposition (e.g., Shatter, 1984). Or, in other words, if we were even to treat lay explanations as some kind of account of human action, that in itself would be some advance.
References Chomsky, N. (1959). Review of B. F. Skinner, Verbal behavior. Language, 35, 26-58. Eimas, P. D. (1975). Speech perception in early infancy. In L. B. Cohen & P. Salapatek, (Eds.), Infant perception: From sensation to cognition (Vol. 2, pp. 249-267). New York: Academic Press. Fodor, J. A (1968). Psychological explanation. New York: Random House. Garfield, S., & Kurtz, R. (1976). Clinical psychologists in the 1970s. American Psychologist, 31, 1-9. Margolis, J. (1984). Philosophy of Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall. Miller, G. A 1(1969). Psychology as a means of promoting human welfare. American Psychologist, 24, 1063-1075. Nelson, R. J. (1969). Behaviorism is false. Journal ofPhilosophy, 66, 417-452. Ricoeur, P': (1981). Hermeneutics and .the human sciences. cambridge: cambridge University Press. ' . ,. · Robinson, D. N. (1985). Philosophy of psychology. New York: Columbia University Press. Sarbin, T. R., & Coe, W. C. (1972). Hypnosis: A social psychological analysis of influence communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Shatter, J. (1984). Social accountability and seljhood. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
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Skinner, B. F. (1986). What is wrong with daily life in the western world? American Psychologist, 41, 568-574. Skinner, B. F. (1987). Whatever happened to psychology as the science of behavior? American Psychologist, 42, 780-786. Slife, B. (1987). The perils of eclecticism as therapeutic orientation. Theoretical an_d Philosophical Psychology, 7, 94-103. Stam, H.J. (1987).'The,psychology of control: A textual critique. In H.J. Stam, T. B. Rogers, & K. J. Gergen, (Eds.), The analysis ofpsychologi.cal theory: Metapsychologi.cal perspectives (pp. 131-156). Washington: Hemisphere. Thorngate, W. (1988). On paying attention. In W. Baker,, L. Mos, H. Rappard, & H. Stam (Eds.), Recent trends in theoretical [Jsychology (pp. 247-263). New York: Springer-Verlag. Thorngate, W., & Plouffe, L. (1987). The consumption of psychological knowledge. In H.J. Stam, T. B. Rogers, & K. J. Gergen, (Eds.), The
analysis of psychologi.cal theory: Metapsychological perspectives (pp. 61-91). Washington: Hemisphere. Watson, J.B. (1925). Behaviorism. London: Kegan Paul,. Trench & Trubner.
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