Kurt Salzinger

THE BEHAVIORAL MECHANISM TO EXPLAIN ABNORMAL BEHAVIOR

In the preface of to his book, Psychudiagnusis, Paul Meehl” relates a story about Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. Although these intellectual giants had collaborated on the much respected tome, Principia Mathemafica, they had not seen much of each other until they found themselves at the same banquet one evening. An alert toastmaster decided to take advantage of the occasion and asked them to comment on each other’s work. Whitehead began by praising Russell and ended by saying “but he is, I fear, somewhat simpleminded.’’ Russell generously admitted to such a tendency in himself and added that Whitehead, far from being simpleminded, inclined toward muddleheadedness. That story inspired Meehl to place his colleagues in psychopathology along a line ranging from extreme simplemindedness to extreme muddleheadness. But that was a few years ago. The line has been reduced to a point. We now have people who have learned to encompass, if not integrate, both ends of the simplemindedto-muddleheaded scale: the simpleminded muddleheads. There are many such people in the field of psychopathology. To take but one unhappy example of this oxymoronic tendency, we can look at those who seek to correlate the blood levels of metabolites of some single neurotransmitter, measured correct to the nearest nanogram, with ratings of such mammoth medleys of interpretations as primary depressive illness, measured correct to the nearest rater. Let us look first at the simpleminded part of this kind of research. As our colleagues, the biochemists, continue to discover new neurotransmitters, it becomes increasingly more unreasonable to expect indirect information about the metabolite of one neurotransmitter to inform us about the biochemical state of the nervous system of the patient. Yet extreme as the simplemindedness of this approach is to the study of psychopathology, it seems moderate next to the muddleheadedness of the phenomenological description of the patient’s psychological state, to which the simpleminded measurement is related. The organization of the complex judgments made in the course of applying rating scales to unobservable events or while applying the vaunted criteria for arriving at a diagnosis surely supplies us with formidable muddles, given that the variables controlling these judgments are largely unknown. There are additional examples from the simpleminded muddleheads. Take for instance the judgment of thought disorder so glibly given by the

ARE THEORIES OF COMPETENCE NECESSARY

Pick up almost any book on language and immediately you are confronted with the term “competence” followed by the injunction: You will make no progress in the study of language without taking competence into account. What is the meaning of this all-important term? According to Chomsky (Ref. 9, p. 4), competence refers to the “speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language,” and performance (the other side of the coin) refers to “the actual use of language in concrete situations.” Furthermore, he tells us: “Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speakerlistener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance” (p. 3). While actual language use may provide some evidence regarding the mental reality underlying language behavior, he continues, it “surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline” (p. 4). A first reading of this enumeration of topics to be avoided, namely, memory, motivation, attention, and assorted social psychological, personality, and other psychological variables, suggests that this pronouncement is the preamble of some kind of nonaggression pact between the fields of linguistics and psychology: Linguistics promises not to infringe on the territory of psychology by studiously avoiding any attempt to explain anything that a psychologist might find of even remote interest, in exchange for which psychology promises to return the favor. However, as everybody knows, this is not true, for Chomsky (Ref. 9, p. 9) declares, “No doubt, a reasonable model of language use will incorporate, as a basic component, the generative grammar that expresses the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of the language.” Then, having stated that he is interested in a mentalistic linguistics, Chomsky (p. 193) explains: “Mentalistic linguistics is simply theoretical linguistics that uses performance as data (along with other data, for example, the data provided by introspection) for the determination of competence, the latter being taken as the primary object of its investigation.” In other words, although he is not interested in actual performance, with all its ugly obtrusive variables, he will use it to investigate competence. Elsewhere (Ref. 8, p. 36), we are warned that we must restrict our sense of performance data to those situations in which we may d o so in “devious and clever ways.” Although admitting behavioral data of some sort into his area of study, he nevertheless disposes of the behaviorists’ opposition to mentalism by saying (Ref. 9, p. 193): “The behaviorist position is not an arguable matter. It is simply an expression of lack of interest in theory and explanation.” It might be well to make clear a t the outset that behaviorists are indeed interested in theory-I shall assume nobody believes that behaviorists lack interest in explaining their data and will therefore not comment on that any further. Perhaps the

EPILOGUE: AN EXALTATION OF CROSS‐CULTURAL RESEARCH‐THE NATURE AND HABITS OF THE HYPHENATED ELEPHANT

When Dr. Adler invited me t o present an epilogue for this conference, the time of reckoning was just far enough away for me t o agree t o d o it. Since that time, I have had some second thoughts. I looked u p the exact meaning of the word “epilogue” in the dictionary and discovered that it is “a speech, usually in verse, delivered by one of the actors after the conclusion of a play.” Right then and there I knew my epilogue couldn’t be verse. I took some solace in discovering, while passing other entries in the dictionary, that I was not going to deliver myself of a n epidemic either, but solace was not enough. I therefore turned t o examine the program of diverse papers that make up this conference and realized that it would be a long time before such a galaxy of stars in this field would be seen together again. I know that while the cross-cult ural research t o be presented here was exalted, the problems of integration of the different approaches are truly formidable. Hence my title. Let us look a t it in some detail. First, exaltation I am using that word as a venereal term. I refer here not t o sexual activity or disease, but rather t o its meaning as a collective, employed by noblemen early in the seventeenth century t o refer t o the game they hunted. These terms of venery are collectives that refer t o groups of animals. For example, a group of larks is called an “exaltation of larks,” which provided the title of a book o n the subject of venereal terms, An Exaltation of Larks, by James Lipton. So, I thought that, just for a lark, I might use that same term to describe a collection of papers o n cross-cultural research. Happily, the term “exaltation” also means an uplifting and so I hope that there will not be too many objections. I am aware that the term “cross-cultural” is perhaps even more in need of definition than the term “exaltation,” but clearly my attempt to mediate in that sea of contradictory statements is more than anyone in the audience would care t o hear. That brings us t o the term “elephant.” Now everybody here is aware of what an elephant is, and many probably much better than I. Nevertheless, I must tell you that my elephant is not t o be taken literally, but figuratively. I am referring to the elephant and the blind people who are examining it in an effort to describe it. As most of you know, one of t h e blind people finds the elephant t o be a snake, one a wall, one a pillar, and so on. My object in portraying the elephant as hyphenated is t o call your attention to the fact that the cross-cultural elephant is still more difficult t o describe than the simple single-word elephant. And, of course, my blind investigators find the elephant t o be a hyphen. So while all of you, accredited experts in the area of cross-cultural research, have discussed t h e elephant as pillar, snake, and wall, I intend t o describe the cross-cultural elephant as connective tissue. What is this connective tissue‘! For