C. Lloyd Morgan

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C. Lloyd Morgan (Conwy Lloyd Morgan) (February 6, 1852 - March 6, 1936) was a British psychologist. He is best remembered for the experimental approach to animal psychology, now known as "Morgan's canon."

Life

Conwy Lloyd Morgan was born on February 6, 1852 in London. During his childhood years he became interested in philosophy as a result of conversations with the local rector who encouraged him to read the works of Bishop George Berkeley.[1] He attended a local grammar school and then decided to attend the Royal School of Mines in London with the idea of becoming an mining engineer, at the suggestion of his father who was a lawyer with interests in several mining companies.

A chance meeting with Thomas Huxley led to an invitation to study biology with him for a year, which Morgan did after several months of travel abroad. This encouraged him to pursue an academic career and his first position was as a lecturer in Physical Science, English Literature, and Constitutional History at the Diocesan College at Rondebosch near Cape Town, South Africa.

In 1884, he joined the staff of the then University College, Bristol as Professor of Geology and Zoology, and carried out some research of local interest in those fields. However, he soon became interested in the field he called "mental evolution," the borderland between intelligence and instinct. In 1899, he became the first Fellow of the Royal Society in the field of psychology, and in 1901 became the college's first Professor of Psychology and Ethics.[2]

As well as his scientific work, Lloyd Morgan was active in academic administration. He became Principal of the University College, Bristol, in 1891 and consequently played a central role in the campaign to secure it full university status. In 1909, when, with the award of a Royal Charter, the college became the University of Bristol, he was appointed as its first Vice-Chancellor, an office he held for a year.[3]

In 1911, Morgan returned to his teaching position, which he held until his retirement in 1919 when he was made Emeritus Professor of Psychology. Following retirement, Morgan delivered a series of Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews. It was in these lectures that he developed the concept of emergent evolution, laying the foundation for his publications Emergent Evolution in 1923 and Life, Mind and Spirit in 1926.

Morgan served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1926 to 1927. He died in Hastings on March 6, 1936 at the age of 84.

Work

Trial and Error Learning

Morgan's Canon

Coined by 19th-century British psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan, Morgan's Canon (more usually called Lloyd Morgan's Canon, or occasionally Morgan's Canon of Interpretation) remains a fundamental precept of comparative (animal) psychology.

In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one that stands lower in the psychological scale.[4]

In other words we should only consider behavior as, for example, rational, purposive or affectionate if there is no other explanation in terms of the behaviors of more primitive life-forms to which we do not attribute those faculties.


Morgan was reacting to excessively anthropomorphic interpretation of animal behavior, specifically the anecdotal approach of George Romanes. The prestige of Lloyd Morgan's canon partly derives from the fact that Lloyd Morgan was himself an acute observer of behavior, and provided convincing examples of cases where behavior that apparently involved higher mental processes could in fact be explained by simple trial and error learning (what we would now call operant conditioning). A famous example is the skillful way in which his terrier Tony opened the garden gate, easily taken by someone seeing the final behavior as an insightful act; Lloyd Morgan, however, had watched and recorded the series of approximations by which the dog had gradually learned the response, and could demonstrate that no insight was required to explain it.

Morgan did not, however, mean that higher order mental processes could not exist in animals. His view was more complex than merely a statement that parsimony was always the criterion by which to judge an explanation. In the 1903 revised edition of his text, in describing his canon he not only changed the term "higher psychical faculty" to "higher psychological processes" for clarification, he also added a caveat about its application:

In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes, if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development. To this, however, it should be added, lest the range of the principle be misunderstood, that the canon by no means excludes the interpretation of a particular activity in terms of the higher processes if we already have independent evidence of the occurrences of these higher processes in the animal under observation. [5]

Emergent Evolution

Legacy

Dewsbury has called Morgan's Canon "perhaps, the most quoted statement in the history of comparative psychology"[6] a sentiment echoed and expanded by Franz de Waal in The Ape and the Sushi Master as: "perhaps the most quoted statement in all of psychology."[7] It played a critical role in the growth of the prestige of Behaviorism in twentieth century academic psychology. Morgan's Canon has often been regarded as a specialized form of Occam's razor by virtue of its apparent presupposition of simplicity that lower level interpretations are more parsimonious than higher level ones. Thus, the canon appeared to support the view that an entity should be considered conscious only if there is no other explanation for its behavior.

However, this understanding is perhaps "the most misrepresented statement in the history of comparative psychology."[8] Morgan's argument was that one should attribute a lower process to account for a particular behavior unless there was separate evidence suggesting that the animal was capable of using a higher process and that this higher process better explained the behavior under observation. Thus, in fact, Morgan's Canon does not support Behaviorism in an absolute sense. Neither is it absolutely anti-anthropomorphic and anti-anecdotal, as many have claimed it to be. Rather, Morgan cautioned against the assumption that complex psychological processes are necessarily the explanation for all behavior; on many occasions simpler processes may suffice, while on others higher level processes provide a more accurate explanation. Such an approach allows for complex processes in animal cognition while at the same time demanding rigorous proof of their existence.

When Behaviorism was gaining popularity as the way to establish psychology as an experimental science, the view of Morgan's Canon as anti-anthropomorphic and promoting parsimony provided support for this approach and thus persisted. In the latter part of the twentieth century, cognitive psychology became dominant and animal cognition was a topic of interest. This different "spirit of the times" no longer resonated with the misrepresentation of Morgan's Canon, and now "Morgan’s original intentions regarding the canon fit very well with the contemporary Zeitgeist."[9]

Major Works

  • Morgan, C. Lloyd. An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. Adamant Media Corporation, 2000 (original 1894). ISBN 978-1421227757
  • Morgan, C. Lloyd. Animal Behaviour. BiblioLife, 2009 (original 1900). ISBN 978-1117406879
  • Morgan, C. Lloyd. The Interpretation Of Nature. Nabu Press, 2010 (original 1906). ISBN 978-1172140787
  • Morgan, C. Lloyd. Eugenics and Environment. University of Michigan Library, 1919.
  • Morgan, C. Lloyd. Emergent Evolution. Chandra Chakravarti Press, 2008 (original 1923). ISBN 1443720674 online version Retrieved March 8, 2011.
  • Morgan, C. Lloyd. Life, Mind and Spirit. Williams & Norgate, 1926
  • Morgan, C. Lloyd. Mind at the Crossways. Maclachan Bell Press, 2007 (original 1929). ISBN 978-1406737578
  • Morgan, C. Lloyd. The Animal Mind. Edward Arnold, 1930.
  • Morgan, C. Lloyd. Autobiography of Lloyd Morgan Retrieved March 8, 2011. First published in History of Psychology in Autobiography, Volume II edited by Carl Murchison, 237-264. Clark University Press, 1932.
  • Morgan, C. Lloyd. The Emergence of Novelty. Henry Holt and Company, 1933.

Notes

  1. C. Lloyd Morgan, "Autobiography of C. Lloyd Morgan" in History of Psychology in Autobiography Volume II ed. Carl Murchison, 237-264 (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1932).
  2. University of Bristol History of Experimental Psychology. Retrieved April 14, 2011.
  3. University of Bristol, First Vice-Chancellor appointed Timeline. Retrieved April 14, 2011.
  4. C. Lloyd Morgan, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1894), 53.
  5. C. Lloyd Morgan, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1903), 59.
  6. Donald A. Dewsbury, Comparative Psychology in the Twentieth Century (Stroudsburg, PA: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1984), 187.
  7. Franz de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master (Basic Books, 2001, ISBN 978-0465041763).
  8. Roger K. Thomas, "Lloyd Morgan’s Canon" in Comparative Psychology: A Handbook edited by Gary Greenberg and Maury M. Haraway (Routledge, 1998, ISBN 978-0815312819), 156.
  9. Roger K. Thomas, "Lloyd Morgan’s Canon: A History of Misrepresentation." History & Theory of Psychology Eprint Archive (2001). Retrieved April 25, 2011.

References
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External links

All links retrieved May 4, 2011.

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