It seems, however, from the account, that he
first fitted the two together more or less accidentally, and only then
realised that he had found a solution. Nevertheless, his behaviour when
he had once realised that one stick could be made by joining the two
was scarcely Watsonian: there was no longer anything tentative, but a
definite triumph, first in anticipation and then in action. He was so
pleased with his new trick that he drew a number of bananas into his
cage before eating any of them. He behaved, in fact, as capitalists
have behaved with machinery.
[5] Called by Köhler “the objective,” because the word
“banana” is too humble for a learned work. The pictures
disclose the fact that “the objective” was a mere banana.
Köhler says: “We can, from our own experience, distinguish sharply
between the kind of conduct which, from the very beginning, arises out
of a consideration of the characteristics of a situation, and one that
does not. Only in the former case do we speak of insight, and only
that behaviour of animals definitely appears to us intelligent which
takes account from the beginning of the lie of the land, and proceeds
to deal with it in a smooth continuous course. Hence follows this
characteristic: _to set up as the criterion of insight, the appearance
of a complete solution with reference to the whole lay-out of the
field_.”
Genuine solutions of problems, Köhler says, do not improve by
repetition; they are perfect on the first occasion, and, if anything,
grow worse by repetition, when the excitement of discovery has worn
off. The whole account that Köhler gives of the efforts of his
chimpanzees makes a totally different impression from that of the
rats in mazes, and one is forced to conclude that the American work
is somewhat vitiated by confining itself to one type of problem,
and drawing from that one type conclusions which it believes to be
applicable to all problems of animal learning. It seems that there
are two ways of learning, one by experience, and the other by what
Köhler calls “insight”. Learning by experience is possible to most
vertebrates, though rarely, so far as is known, to invertebrates.
Learning by “insight”, on the contrary, is not known to exist in any
animals lower than the anthropoid apes, though it would be extremely
rash to assert that it will not be revealed by further observations on
dogs or rats. Unfortunately, some animals--for instance, elephants--may
be extremely intelligent, but the practical difficulty and expense of
experimentation with them is so great that we are not likely to know
much about them for some time to come. However, the real problem is
already sufficiently definite in Köhler’s book: it is the analysis of
“insight” as opposed to the method of the conditioned reflex.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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