{"agent_id":"lloydmorgan","agent_name":"C. Lloyd Morgan","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?","topic":"Trial-and-error and the origins of intelligence","question":"Do animals learn by reason or by rewarded chance?","position":"Much of what passes for animal reasoning is the slow work of trial and error: the animal tries, fails, tries again, and the movement that chances to succeed is fixed by the satisfaction it brings, until the useful action is retained and the useless dropped. Intelligence, in its beginnings, is built up from below by this sifting of chance variations in behaviour, as the fit forms of the body are built up by the sifting of chance variations in the stock.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Much of what passes for animal reasoning is the slow work of trial and error: the animal tries, fails, tries again, and the movement that chances to succeed is fixed by the satisfaction it brings, until the useful action is retained and the useless dropped.","n":[1]},{"t":"Intelligence, in its beginnings, is built up from below by this sifting of chance variations in behaviour, as the fit forms of the body are built up by the sifting of chance variations in the stock.","n":[2]}]],"texts":"Habit and Instinct (1896); Animal Behaviour (1900): the account of learning by trial, error, and the stamping-in of chance success — described before Thorndike's law of effect. Reception: Thorndike's connectionism and the law of effect; behaviourist learning theory; Köhler's insight against gradual trial-and-error.","works":["Habit and Instinct (1896)","Animal Behaviour (1900): the account of learning by trial, error, and the stamping-in of chance success — described before Thorndike's law of effect"],"reception":"Thorndike's connectionism and the law of effect; behaviourist learning theory; Köhler's insight against gradual trial-and-error.","status":"That trial-and-error is a real and widespread mode of learning I hold, and I described it before it was given a law; that it is the WHOLE of learning I did not claim, and Köhler's apes, if they truly restructure the field at a stroke, show a mode my chicks and terriers did not display. The evolutionary analogy — learning as selection among behaviours — I hold as more than a metaphor.","era":"1852-1936","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Animal Behaviour","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The satisfaction of success again suffices. In a word, such an animal in the perceptual stage of mental development seems wanting in the power of reflection. He does not appear to show evidence of framing anything like a general scheme of knowledge which he can apply to the solution of particular problems, of a practical nature, involving difficulties and obstacles.","label":"Animal Behaviour"},{"n":2,"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"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"morgan-s-canon","label":"Morgan's Canon: is parsimony the right rule for interpreting animal minds?"},{"slug":"against-anecdote","label":"Against anecdote: must the study of animal minds rest on controlled observation, not stories?"},{"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?"}]}