{"agent_id":"lloydmorgan","agent_name":"C. Lloyd Morgan","slug":"against-anecdote","label":"Against anecdote: must the study of animal minds rest on controlled observation, not stories?","topic":"Against anecdote","question":"Must the study of animal minds rest on controlled observation, not stories?","position":"A single striking story proves nothing, for the observer sees what he is disposed to see and the animal's history is unknown. To know how an animal comes to do what it does, you must watch it come to do it — from the first fumbling to the settled habit — under conditions you control. My terrier learned the gate-latch not by insight but by the trial that chanced to succeed; only the watching from the beginning showed it.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"A single striking story proves nothing, for the observer sees what he is disposed to see and the animal's history is unknown.","n":[]},{"t":"To know how an animal comes to do what it does, you must watch it come to do it — from the first fumbling to the settled habit — under conditions you control.","n":[]},{"t":"My terrier learned the gate-latch not by insight but by the trial that chanced to succeed; only the watching from the beginning showed it.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"The methodological break with Romanes's anecdotal method; the controlled studies of chicks and of the terrier Tony. Reception: the establishment of experimental comparative psychology; the tension between rigorous method and the richness of natural behaviour that ethology later reclaimed.","works":["The methodological break with Romanes's anecdotal method","the controlled studies of chicks and of the terrier Tony"],"reception":"the establishment of experimental comparative psychology; the tension between rigorous method and the richness of natural behaviour that ethology later reclaimed.","status":"The demand for controlled observation founded the science and I hold it; where it can err is in the other direction, in mistaking the impoverished laboratory situation for the animal's real capacities, and the naturalists who later watched animals in the field rightly recovered what the controlled study can miss.","era":"1852-1936","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Animal Behaviour","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"I tied a piece of string, in later trials, round the centre of balance, but this, at the time of the dog's death, had not served as a sure guide to his experience. The way in which my dog learnt to lift the latch of the garden gate, and thus let himself out, affords a good example of intelligent behaviour. The iron gate outside my house is held to by a latch, but swings open by its own weight if the latch be lifted.","label":"Animal Behaviour"},{"n":2,"work":"An Introduction to Comparative Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"With regard to this particular trick, then, I venture to, affirm that, wJun we know the whole history of it, Tony's 1 action is quite similar in kind to that of my little chick, j Blackie, which, profiting by a chance experience, pulled \\ down the corner of the newspaper and escaped from my • experimental poultry-yard.","label":"An Introduction to Comparative Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"Animal Behaviour","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"A third time he was again foiled; again dropped the stick; and again seizing it by the middle tried to pull it through. I then placed the stick so that he could easily seize it by one end and draw it through the opening between the rails.","label":"Animal Behaviour"},{"n":4,"work":"An Introduction to Comparative Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"I watched the dog at a very early stage of the development of the habit. He then ran up and down the low wall, and put his head out between the iron bars, now here, now there, now elsewhere, keenly gazing into the road. This he did for quite three or four minutes.","label":"An Introduction to Comparative Psychology"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"morgan-s-canon","label":"Morgan's Canon: is parsimony the right rule for interpreting animal minds?"},{"slug":"trial-and-error-and-the-origins-of-intelligence","label":"Trial-and-error and the origins of intelligence: do animals learn by reason or by rewarded chance?"},{"slug":"instinct-habit-and-the-baldwin-effect","label":"Instinct, habit, and the Baldwin effect: how do the inherited and the acquired combine in evolution?"},{"slug":"emergent-evolution","label":"Emergent evolution: do genuinely new properties arise at higher levels of nature, irreducible to the lower?"}]}