Main Currents in Western Thought: Readings in Western European Intellectual History from the Middle Ages to the Present ed. by Franklin Le Van Baumer (review)

160 Books Elsewhere, surprise is expressed when a combination of what he calls positive and negative reinforcement is more effective in modifying behaviour than is positive reinforcement alone. His examples (p. 47) are the counterpart of the old English custom of Beating the Bounds, wherein pleasurable reinforcement (cakes and ale) was combined with painful reinforcement by banging the boys' heads on boundary posts to implant a lifetime memory of parish limits. The surprise surely arises because 'negative reinforcement ' is usually used where 'inhibition' is meant. If that had been tried here, the contradiction would have been apparent. Both pleasurable and painful reinforcement can be positive. Positive and negative refer to the result, not the means of obtaining it. The clumsy nomenclature was perhaps chosen to reflect the supposed inherent dualism in human thought processes, as propounded on p. 97, where it is assumed the computer circuitequivalents in the central nervous system are flip-flops, not flipflap -flops. This may have been refuted by recent research on the logic of certain peoples, where three-phase logic seems to apply, but a less dogmatic view is presented of the thought processes of Hopi Indians (pp. 14l~143), who do not distinguish between thought and matter-or, at least, Hopi definitions of their respective boundaries differ from those generally accepted. This underlines the difficulty running throughout the book: Thoughts about thoughts can tell only a part about the basic aspects of thought. Those thoughts can be communicated only in language. Language reflects the mode of thought of its users and their culture, and it may be that true thoughts cannot be conveyed in the English language, for example. For this reason, and others, human experience (memory, behaviour, thought, etc.) is cyclical, in that a vicious circle is produced-usually unconsciously and automatically, but not differing in its essential character, even if one tries to understand part of it. This demonstration achieves the aim stated in the Preface, even if it ignores the viewpoint that such a circularity is more like a feedback-amplifying circuit, with offshoots in various directions, rather than the simple circle described, with no end product and no external effect. The concepts discussed raise many questions. In order to understand language, one must understand communication so one must study other forms of communication [F. Davis, Eloquent Animals: A Study in Animal Communication (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghean, 1978)]. To understand the interdependence of language and thought processes, one must study societies with differing thought patterns. To understand the character of scientific thought one must study nonscientific thinking---even 'magical' thinking, where psychic conditions are at least as important as more physical aspects of the experimental conditions (p. 180). The relationship between observed , measurable, detectable correlates and the actual state of the consciousness needs study. Berger asserts (p. 134) that knowledge of other states of consciousness is impossible because 'communication by language is not possible during sleep and certain other states'. This subsumes that memory, for example, is invalid and that in deep sleep one does not talk, and this certainly does not emphasize the essential prerequirement that memory and speech are only (so far as is known) directly connected with received sensations, thought, feedback, etc., in non-drugged wakefulness. Even this is a question of definition. If during withdrawal of heroin from an addict he reports fornication, is this because of misinterpretation of skin sensations, of a central neurochemical effect or ofa strictly psychic state (if such a modality exists)? The answer is not known. Even if a mechano-chemical explanation is forthcoming, does it give any insight into the actual state of the psyche during a 'cold turkey' cure? Berger suggests not, yet such research is not sterile, because any information on behaviour, thought and their interrelation is valuable, even if it is more useful in applied science than in basic science. Main Currents in Western Thought: Readings in Western European InteUectual History from the Middle Ages to the Present. Franklin Le Van Baumer, ed. 4th Ed. Yale Univ. Press, London, 1978.806 pp. £7.20. Reviewed by Robert F. Erickson* *School of Social Sciences, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL 62025, U.S.A. One of the changes...