Heft (2001): 2.2, Molar Behaviourism and the Recession of the Stimulus

The second half of Chapter 2 goes into further detail about Holt's ideas surrounding cognition, causality, and learning processes. In this post, I'll mainly be covering his ideas of molar behaviourism and the recession of the stimulus, which were subsequently adopted and further refined by Gibson in his ecological psychology. 

Molar behaviourism

To Holt, molar behaviourism highlights the methodological push to study behaviour as whole, integrated actions, instead of breaking it up into smaller bits. Back when this was introduced by Holt, the classical behaviourist approach (championed by the likes of John Watson) tended to take a fairly isolated view of behaviour, frequently studying behaviour in terms of reflexes and muscle movements. The issue with this, however, is that when you break behaviour up into such molecular components, it gets really easy to attribute the wrong cause to behaviour. Here, Holt argues that meaningful features of behaviour (like purpose and intentionality) only appear at the coarser molar level of analysis. While behaviour does depend on lower-level components like muscle movements or nerve reflexes, such behavioural features cannot be explained merely by studying these components.

Heft (2001): 2.1, Holt's New Realist Approach to Perception and Cognition

We're now onto Chapter 2! If Chapter 1 focused on William James, the Chapter 2 spotlight is firmly placed on Edwin B. Holt. Being James' student and James J. Gibson's eventual supervisor, Holt plays an important role in connecting James' philosophies of radical empiricism and pragmatism to Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception. According to Heft, Gibson never directly cited the work of James, making it all the more surprising how closely their works align. Heft hence suggests that this connection was likely mediated by Holt, who served as the historical and intellectual linkage between the two. In this post, I'll explore the first half of Chapter 2, focusing on Holt's defence of realism through the work of the New Realists, before diving into how he conceptualised perception and cognition with a pretty cool searchlight analogy!