This train of thought on the long-term purposes that morés serve for human tribes brings us to an implication deeply embedded in our argument. Close analysis of individual human behaviors reveals that some of them can’t be completely explained by their long-term advantages for the tribe. We can’t reason our way to a moral code for all humans until we understand that humans are capable of noticing and labeling large patterns in their thinking. Frequently occurring patterns. These are the ones that we usually call concepts or beliefs. Using and comparing them in our minds is what we do when we think. 

We humans act much of the time in ways that our cultures have programmed us to act, but we also can figure some situations out for ourselves and try new responses to them. We can learn on our own. Sometimes, we even add useful new ideas and mores to our whole culture. 

Behaviourism’s model of how humans think is left behind at this point since it does not take account of how we form concepts. It pictures stimulus and response as being connected in a one-to-one, mechanical way. It then explains some individual behaviors for which stimulus and response can be clearly described in convenient, objective terms. The behaviorist reports that “The organism sees and recognizes these colours, shapes, and sounds, pushes the bar, and gets the food-pellet reward.” For example, a rat sees a light go on in its cage, presses the bar it has learned to press, and gets a food pellet reward. I go to work at the factory, punch my time card at the clock beside the door, put bolts on widgets for nine hours, punch out, collect my pay, and go home. This picture of learning and behaving, for the behaviorists, demonstrates how all learning and doing works for all living things all the time. Or so the behaviorists say.

   

                                       Bull Moose (credit: Ryan Hagerty, Wikimedia Commons)

But a human can confront situations that are not, by sensory evidence, like anything 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 to kill one. Polynesian sailors navigated 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. In each of those situations, they used a set of concepts—ideas based on patterns found in large numbers of experiences. For example, the animal’s heart lies at the bottom of the ribcage, slightly to the left of center, and a heart shot is fatal for every animal on this planet.

Furthermore, a man may react in one way to a new stimulus in his first encounter with it and quite differently in his next encounter, after he has thought about the stimulus situation for a bit longer. He sees a deeper, more general pattern that he 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.