ABSTRACT

This problem of making room for consciousness tended to be seen as one of parsimony – that is, of how to avoid adding anything to the notion of an animal as simply a machine – as if its mechanicalness were a given literal fact. Given that initial starting-point, the addition of consciousness was viewed as a piece of extravagance, and any further attribution of subjective attitudes such as purpose or emotion appeared more extravagant still. Behaviourism had originally taken the same supposedly austere line about human beings, and in principle it continued to do so, but this method worked so badly over most of the field of social science that it never became dominant there. It was fairly quickly realised that the machine model is just one possible way of thinking, with no special authority to prevail where it does not give useful results. On the non-human scene, however, mechanism was not seriously questioned because scientists had not yet seen its general disadvantages, nor had they 202paid sufficient attention to animal behaviour to see that it worked just as badly there.