Papers
The Justification Hypothesis -
Gregg Henriques
The question of what differentiates humans from nonhuman animals has long occupied a central place in human discourse. Three domains frequently proposed to explain the nature of human uniqueness are symbolic language/verbal behavior, self-consciousness, and culture. None of these ideas has obtained full support primarily because some other animals, particularly chimpanzees and bonobos, have shown evidence of basic capacities to acquire language basic elements of self-awareness, and basic elements of cultural transmission. Further, these three elements in isolation have generally failed to answer the “why” questions (e.g., why are humans uniquely capable of self-consciousness, or why do humans have a unique mode of cultural transmission).
The Justification Hypothesis (JH) is a novel proposal that interrelates language, self-consciousness, and human culture into a more coherent picture that clarifies the sequence of events that have propelled Homo sapiens on a trajectory of accelerating change. The key idea that organizes the JH is notion that evolution of language must have created the problem of justification. With language, for the first time others had much more direct access to one’s thought processes. This has the dramatic result of humans becoming the first animal that had to explain why it did what it did. The argument will be presented that the problem of justification must have created intense selection pressures on human cognition. More specifically, it will be argued that the human self-consciousness system exhibits design features strongly suggesting that it functions as a “justification filter”. These features will be reviewed and it will be argued that the JH provides a frame for integrating psychodynamic psychology, personality and social psychology, and perspectives in anthropology and sociology into a more coherent whole.
Download Chapter 1 Excerpt [PDF]
The Gift of Character: Narrativity and the Problem of Self-Justification
Steven W. Quackenbush University of Maine at Farmington
In this presentation, I will consider Henriques’ (2003, 2004) Justification Hypothesis as a potential mediator between two disparate traditions in the human sciences: (a) naturalistic accounts of human behavior that grant a privileged ontological status to empirical facts (e.g., evolutionary psychology) and (b) interpretive visions that are more concerned with the transfactual possibilities implicit in a multiplicity of hermeneutic systems (e.g., the narrative study of lives). More specifically, I will argue that narrativity as a cultural phenomenon is most appropriately interpreted in light of the phylogenic emergence of language and the concomitant demand that individuals provide adequate justifications for their own behavior. For instance, the quest for a coherent personal narrative can be interpreted as a desire to present one’s entire life as a response to the needs of a particular or generalized Other. Implications for our understanding of selves, communities, and generative projects will be discussed.
Download Remythologyzing Culture [PDF]
An Integrated Theory of Learning and Behavior: From Instinct and Conditioning to Emergent Behaviors, Cognition, and Intelligence
–Duane M. Rumbaugh, Great Ape Trust of Iowa and the Language Research Center of Georgia State University
Abstract. Especially apes’ behavior, as well as our own, frequently is far richer and creative than its history of specific and reinforced training should support. To account for these creative behaviors, I and my colleagues have formulated a theory of learning and behavior that is grounded in several constructs: salience of stimuli, amalgams, templates (natural and arbitrary), and emergents. These posited constructs and their attendant processes are enhanced by elaborations of brains via genetics and by rearing. They serve to integrate stimulus events that are reliably contiguous, salient, and relevant to adaptation. The constructive biases of species’ brains form events in real time into amalgams whose characteristics reflect an exchange of the saliences and response-eliciting properties of their component units. Thus, the constituent units of amalgams develop some degree of functional equivalence. Ongoing neural processes then, metaphorically, integrate the amalgams into templates, thereby organizing and relating different kinds of experiences in terms of the resources and risks of one or more ecological niches. Collectively, the templates afford a knowledge base from which the brain can produce emergent behaviors and even new capacities that have no history of specific training. Emergents might enable creative adaptation to both familiar and novel challenges. Sequelae impact behavior, but what is termed reinforcement does so as any other strong stimulus might in that, as a constituent unit in the formation of an amalgam, it both shares and receives salience and response-eliciting properties with all other constituents of that amalgam.
Salience theory circumvents many constraints of other perspectives that are based on stimulus-response-reinforcement-habit models and serves to unify behavior from instincts through cognition and creativity.
References
Rumbaugh, D. M. (2002). Emergents and rational behaviorism. Eye on Psi Chi, 6, 8-14.
Rumbaugh, D. M. & Washburn, D. A. (2003). Intelligence of apes and other rational beings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Rumbaugh, D. M., King, J. E., Beran, M. J., Washburn, D. A., & Gould, J. (2007). A salience theory of learning and behavior. International Journal of Primatology, October.
Apes, Artifacts and Psychotherapy: Towards Building a Model of the Mind
Nancy Link
In 1895, Freud began writing an article entitled “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” His intention for the article was “to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles.” (Standard Edition, Volume I, p. 295) Although he worked on this article from time to time over his life, he never finished it and it was only published after his death (R. Fine (1990), p. 230-231.) Freud understood that power that would accrue to his ideas if he could describe a physical basis for his psychological discoveries. He believed that ultimately such a connection would be made. However, he was unable to do this during his lifetime.
I believe that it is now possible to begin the task of embedding clinical concepts such as the unconscious, transference and countertransference into a structural understanding of the brain and the mind. Enough data across a wide range of disciplines has now been assembled. The puzzle picture is coming into view.
In my Visions talk last April, I described how the ability to learn was built up in stages in the evolutionary process, starting with the chordate invertebrates and ending with Homo sapiens. In this talk, I focus in more detail on the evolutionary changes in learning ability that took place within the mammal-primate-hominid lineage. Once mammals evolved, a new kind of general learning ability appeared; however, it appeared – not at the time of birth – but rather during the period of maturation. It was a characteristic of the class of primates that they began to evolve more sophisticated learning abilities. They did so by extending the period of dependency. Because of this method of adding additional learning abilities within the primate lineage, the sequence of learning abilities found in the development of human children reflects the sequence of learning abilities that evolved within the primate-hominid lineage itself.
In this talk, I draw parallels between the changes in learning ability that appear in the stages of the development of the human child (Case, 1985, 1988, Nelson, 1996) and, the probable changes in learning ability that appeared within the primate-hominid lineage (i.e. cognitive changes that appeared with the apes, with the mid-grade hominids (Homo habilis and Homo sapiens) and with the late-grade hominids (Homo sapiens). Once done, I consider a third set of parallels. These are the parallels that appear in the psychotherapeutic process.
Consideration of the convergences across these three data sets begins to yield a picture of the structure of the mine. The mind consists of four distinct types of mental ability. Each type of mental ability evolved at a different point of speciation. Within each of these mental abilities, information about our social and object world is organized according to the survival requirements that were present at the time when these minds evolved. These different mental abilities exist as layers within our conscious experience. Within each layer, pieces of personal biography are organized and experienced differently.
Embodied Transcendence: Bonobos and Humans in Community
Nancy Howell
My proposal is that multiple dimensions and textures of transcendence are evoked not just by reflection on humans in their relationship with God and community, but by encounter with bonobos, primates who are very close genetic kin with humans. The promise for theological reflection is rooted in bonobo social adaptation as a highly cooperative species, and bonobo sexual behavior accompanies and expresses a high level of social intelligence. The point of my project is not a scientific one intended to argue persuasively for individual self-awareness or self-transcendence in bonobos. Instead, the focus of the current project emphasizes connectedness, interdependence, and sociality as windows on transcendence. Such a view does not require consciousness or intellectual recognition of self-in-relation, but certainly presumes embodiment of self-in-relation. Various textures of transcendence, then, reflect multidirectional relationships among Pan paniscus (bonobos), Homo sapiens, and the Sacred.
Audiovisual Microanalysis of Social Process: A Tool for Interdisciplinary Unified Science
Jeffrey J. Magnavita
Understanding primate-human nature as it is expressed in consciousness, language acquisition/development, and social process is an ongoing challenge for clinical scientists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, biologists, economists, legal experts, politicians, ecologists, sociologists, and various other related disciplines. The implications for survival of our and other species rest upon succeeding at this quest. Only by understanding ourselves and the rest of life that inhabit earth, from an interdisciplinary perspective, can we begin to address and resolve the fundamental challenges of survival and adaptation facing our planet and life on it.
Over the past 30 years the technological advances in videotape recording have provided an inexpensive tool for research in multiple scientific disciplines such as primate research, early maternal-infant research, psychotherapy, anthropology, and applied clinical science. During the 19th century photography was used to study facial expression (Darwin, 1872/1998) and to document puzzling clinical conditions such as hysteria. Audiovisual technology is a significant advance over photography for studying a variety of interactive social phenomena. Not only can scientists observe the congruence-incongruence in facial affect and language, but with split screen technology it is possible to study the interpersonal communication patterns which are mutual and synchronistic. For example, the discovery of mirror neurons has added to our understanding of the neurobiological basis of empathy. Processes such as this can be closely studied using split screen technology, where patterns of interaction unfold moment-by-moment.
Maternal-infant researchers have shed light on the organization and structure of attachment styles showing a robust relationship between some forms of childhood attachment styles and adult psychopathology. The nature of trauma has been explored in classic primate studies carried out by Harry Harlow (1962) and his research team. Videotapes of these experiments illustrate the long-term effects of disrupted attachment on psychopathology. The acquisition of language can be observed in the audiovisual tapes of primatologists (Savage-Rumbaugh, et al., 2001). These convergent lines of research are beginning to demonstrate the foundation of primate communication, and consciousness, and are contributing to our understanding of the architecture of the mind.
Microanalysis of audiovisual interactions offers many possibilities for researchers. Specific markers such as vocalizations, body movements, facial expressions, affective experience, proximity, and prosody can be catalogued and analyzed using non-linear statistical models and other methods. Social process can be minutely examined by viewing each frame or longer sequences can be used to watch the process unfold. This presentation will introduce the participants to the process of audiovisual microanalysis by discussing the elements in play from multiple scientific and theoretical perspectives. Eight segments of a 45 minute initial psychotherapy session will be viewed and the group will participate in discussion of the process. Multiple levels of interrelated domains and processes will be observed from the micro- to the macrosystem, containing elements of individual, family, and culture which will be explored along with the multigenerational transmission process which occurs in all cultures (Magnavita, 2006). Unified theoretical perspectives to broaden our understanding will be used as a framework for discussion (Henriques, 2003).
References
Darwin, C. (1872/1998). The expression of the emotions in man and animal (3rd Ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Harlow, H. F., & Harlow, M. K. (1962). Social deprivation in monkeys. Scientific American, 203, 136-146.
Henriques, G. (2003). The tree of knowledge system and the theoretical unification of psychology, Review of General Psychology, 7(2), 150-182.
Magnavita, J. J. (2006). In search of the unifying principles of psychotherapy, conceptual, empirical, and clinical convergence. American Psychologist, 61(8), 882-892.
Savage-Rumbaugh, E. S., Shanker, S. G., & Taylor, T. J. (2001). Apes, language, and human mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
