Chapter 9.                                    Part F 

           This chapter's whole train of thought now brings us to a deeper implication embedded in my argument.

         Close analysis of human behaviors reveals that complete explanation of how and why they occur as they do cannot be built up from a list of individual behaviors and the advantages that practicing them might give to the tribe that does so. What I am trying to say here is that we can't reason our way to a moral code for all humans without first understanding that humans are capable of forming very large patterns of thinking that we usually call "concepts" or "beliefs".

            Behaviorism's model of human thinking is left behind at this point since Behaviorism does not adequately explain conceptual thinking. It connects stimulus to response in a one-to-one, mechanical way. It then explains some individual behaviors where stimulus and response can be clearly described in limited, detailed, objective terms. "The organism sees and recognizes these colors, shapes, and sounds, pushes the bar, and gets the food-pellet reward." I go to work at the big, grey factory, punch my time card at the clock beside the brown door, put bolts on widgets for nine hours, punch out, collect my pay, and go home.

                             

           But a human can confront situations that aren’t exactly like, or by sensory evidence even nearly like, anything that the human has encountered before, and still the human can react effectively. The English hunter who had never seen a moose, kangaroo, or rhinoceros, in muskeg, outback, or veldt, still knew where to shoot in order to kill one. Polynesian sailors navigated quite well by the stars of a new hemisphere when they first came to Hawaii as did European sailors when they first began to explore the lands and seas south of the equator.  What these people had helping them in each of those situations was a set of concepts: terms and ideas underlying them that stand for common patterns found in large numbers of experiences. The heart of the animal lies at the center-bottom of the ribcage, and a heart shot is fatal for every animal on this planet. 

             Even one particular man may react in one way to a new stimulus in his first trial run and quite differently in his next one, after he has contemplated the stimulus situation that is being presented to him for just a bit longer. He sees, hears, or feels a deeper, more general pattern that he now recognizes, and then, based on concepts stored in his memory, he plans and executes a more effective response to it. The lists of concepts and their uses could go on for pages. 

               

         Nearly every human past about eleven or twelve years old is capable of forming generalizations based on what he has learned from his individual experiences and, even more, what he has been taught by the adults of his society. Conceptual thinking is as human as having forty-six chromosomes. It comes to a child at the age when, for example, s/he realizes that the short, wide cup holds more soda than the tall, slim one. Volume is a concept. (I take Piaget as my guide here.) (6.)  

               

            The programmers of society (parents, teachers, shamen, etc.) make use of this faculty in the young subjects that they are programming, and greatly increase these persons’ chances of surviving, by programming them with more than simple, one-to-one responses to sense data patterns that occur in recognizable repetitions in the tribe's territory. The young subject is ready to be programmed with “categories” and then, at higher levels of generality, with "principles", "beliefs", and “values”.

                                

Every tribe has labels (words) for large groups (categories) of similar things or events in the tribe's environment. These category-terms are taught to the young because they are useful in the quest for survival. The Sami (Laplanders) have many words for describing a reindeer because they sometimes need a single word to refer to a dark brown, pregnant doe who is pregnant for the first time in order to find her in a hurry. She is in labor, in distress, and in need of immediate care. And for Cro-Magnon tribes,  it probably was useful to have many terms for rock or stone or boulder or pebble or flint because only certain types of flint could be used to make really effective weapons and tools. On the other hand, most visitors to the Sami speak only of reindeer does, bucks, and fawns, or some visitors may have no words for reindeer at all. 

"Principles" are terms for patterns that are common in even larger groups of events. "Danger" and "edible" are very general in their range of application, but still very useful in real life. The first allows one tribe member to tell another to get away from some object or animal or area immediately. And stay away. The second allows one tribe member to tell another that the substance they are both looking at is worth gathering and keeping because it can be eaten, even if, sometimes, it doesn't taste or smell very nice.

The society or tribe has gradually learned that these very general terms are really widely useful in providing guidelines for the design of patterns of behavior that will be effective in the tribe's struggle to survive. And at last we come to "values" which are the most general of principles, ones that apply to huge patterns in our memories of sense data. We care about defining "good" because, deep down, we believe we need to know what "good" is in order to survive in increasing numbers over the long haul.