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Conwy Lloyd Morgan, Methodology, and the Origins of Comparative Psychology

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Evan Arnet
Evan Arnet
Evan Arnet
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Abstract

The British biologist, philosopher, and psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan is widely regarded as one of the founders of comparative psychology. He is especially well known for his eponymous canon, which aimed to provide a rule for the interpretation of mind from behavior. Emphasizing the importance of the context in which Morgan was working—one in which casual observations of animal behavior could be found in Nature magazine every week and psychology itself was fighting for scientific legitimacy—I provide an account of Morgan’s vision for the comparative psychologist qua professional psychologist. To this end, I explore the important connection between Morgan and the evolutionary theorist, philosopher, and psychologist Herbert Spencer. It is from Spencer, I contend, that Morgan inherited a number of his key epistemological and methodological concerns about the nascent science of comparative psychology. This extends all the way to the canon, which only works as intended when paired with a Spencerian understanding of mental evolution as a progressive linear sequence. Far from being an incidental residue of a pre-Darwinian time, hierarchy was intentionally built into the very core of Morgan’s scientific comparative psychology.
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of the History of Biology (2019) 52:433–461
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-019-09577-2
1 3
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Conwy Lloyd Morgan, Methodology, andtheOrigins
ofComparative Psychology
EvanArnet1
Published online: 17 July 2019
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract
The British biologist, philosopher, and psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan is widely
regarded as one of the founders of comparative psychology. He is especially well
known for his eponymous canon, which aimed to provide a rule for the interpreta-
tion of mind from behavior. Emphasizing the importance of the context in which
Morgan was working—one in which casual observations of animal behavior could
be found in Nature magazine every week and psychology itself was fighting for sci-
entific legitimacy—I provide an account of Morgan’s vision for the comparative
psychologist qua professional psychologist. To this end, I explore the important con-
nection between Morgan and the evolutionary theorist, philosopher, and psycholo-
gist Herbert Spencer. It is from Spencer, I contend, that Morgan inherited a number
of his key epistemological and methodological concerns about the nascent science
of comparative psychology. This extends all the way to the canon, which only works
as intended when paired with a Spencerian understanding of mental evolution as a
progressive linear sequence. Far from being an incidental residue of a pre-Darwin-
ian time, hierarchy was intentionally built into the very core of Morgan’s scientific
comparative psychology.
Keywords Morgan’s canon· Spencer· Weismann· Comparative psychology
Introduction
Conwy Lloyd Morgan was a British geologist, psychologist, biologist, philoso-
pher, and comparative psychologist who is largely famous for a single sentence:
his “canon” of interpretation. Initially presented in a lecture by Lloyd Morgan in
England in 1892 (see the report by Dixon 1892), the canon achieved wide circula-
tion after its publication in Morgan’s Introduction to Comparative Psychology. As
* Evan Arnet
earnet@indiana.edu
1 Indiana University Bloomington, 308 Morrison Hall, 1165 E 3rd St, Bloomington, IN47405,
USA
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... We begin across the Atlantic in late nineteenth-century Britain. Conwy Lloyd Morgan was a psychologist and philosopher whose 1894 text, Introduction to Comparative Psychology, arguably inaugurated Anglo-American comparative psychology as an experimental discipline (Boakes 1984;Wilson 2002;Arnet 2019a;Dewsbury 1984). Following Herbert Spencer, George Romanes, and others, Morgan had a general theory of learning, not necessarily in the sense that animal behavior was not impacted by the environment, but in the sense that there were a small number of core underlying learning faculties, corresponding to instinct, intelligence, and reason. ...
... Following Herbert Spencer, George Romanes, and others, Morgan had a general theory of learning, not necessarily in the sense that animal behavior was not impacted by the environment, but in the sense that there were a small number of core underlying learning faculties, corresponding to instinct, intelligence, and reason. These he took to be hierarchically arranged in accordance with a progressive theory of mental evolution (Clatterbuck 2016;Arnet 2019a). From this perspective, it is sensible to hypothesize that all non-human animals can learn in fundamentally the same way. ...
... The second is a new laboratory experimentalism (Capshew 1992). The third is a deflationary tendency toward the animal mind (Dewsbury 2000;Arnet 2019a). To be clear, though, comparative psychology was not monolithic. ...
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