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.
As a side note, I think there are many strong links between Holt's molar behaviourism and complex systems theory. Complex systems theory (or dynamical systems theory) recognises how the properties of large-scale complex systems emerge from the interactions between lower-level elements of the system. In other words, the macro-level properties are emergent, that is, they can't be teased out by looking at the micro-level components in isolation. If you view humans as complex systems, then it becomes obvious how Holt's molar behaviourism is essentially his way of emphasising the emergent nature of behaviour and intentionality!
And for those familiar with ecological psychology, molar behaviourism sounds similar to studying the organism-environment system as the appropriate unit of analysis in psychology, and for good reason! I'm not sure if Heft mentioned this, but my guess is that molar behaviourism likely had strong influences on Gibson's later ecological theorising.
The recession of the stimulus
If complex and integrated action should be taken as the behaviour of interest, what then should be the stimulus of interest? When only studying simple reflexes and actions, behaviourists tended to take a mechanistic approach to establishing cause and effect. Recall that a mechanistic approach (at least in this context) refers to that adopted in 17th century Newtonian physics, where the cause was whatever directly (both physically and temporally) preceded an effect. Such causality is termed antecedent-precedent cause, or efficient cause. In line with this view of causality, behaviourists naturally sought the stimulus in immediate sensory stimuli prior to the action, such as light on the eyes or pressure on the skin.
Holt argued that behaviour is not primarily controlled by these immediate sources of stimuli. In contrast, he called for a recession of the stimulus, that is, as the behaviour studied becomes more complex and integrated, the stimulus it is directed towards actually becomes more distant. To give an example by Holt, imagine a man walking past a window. When this isolated event is all we have access to, the behaviour seems purposeless, and sticking to this level of analysis risks psychologists making up some unobservable goal state that occurs inside the man's mind. In Holt's view, this is the danger of adopting a description that is too narrow; not only does the action itself seem meaningless, but explaining it seems to require the reliance on invisible mental goals.
However, say we expanded our perspective, both spatially and temporally, then we might find out that the man is really walking towards a theatre. Why? Well, to watch a performance, and more fully, so that he might be able to write up a review for it for tomorrow's newspaper. Of course, this situation is entirely made-up and hypothetical, but the point Holt is trying to make is that, once you describe a behaviour at the appropriate level of analysis, things that seemed unexplainable without positing mental representations suddenly become clearly rooted in real, objective events. As I'm writing this, I'm reminded of the first lecture in Turvey's (2018) Lectures in Perception, where he describes a geographical example of how tide behaviour seems completely magical and arbitrary when only considering the earth, but then becomes easily explainable when you expand your view to include the influence of the sun and moon.
The lesson here from Holt, then, is that, to properly explain behaviour, psychologists must first ask "What is the organism doing?", before asking "What goal or object is the behaviour directed towards?" By applying molar behaviourism and the recession of the stimulus to the questions, respectively, we end up with a behaviour that is described at the appropriate level of analysis, and a cause (stimulus) that is lawfully related to the behaviour. The recession of the stimulus becomes crucial later on when we talk about Gibson's ecological psychology, as it plays an undeniable role in how he conceptualised information and the ambient optic array.
References
Heft, H. (2001). Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. Psychology Press.
Turvey, M. T. (2018). Lectures on Perception: An Ecological Perspective. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429443879
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